FemTech: But which?
Find out how to separate the real from the not, with an invitation to support other women and ourselves. Explore what we've long been told we shouldn't expect that we can and should. Here's the tea.
For many of us, the whole femtech1 thing is a bright yellow caution flag. We Boomers in particular are wary even though we’ve grown cynical about traditional medicine. We were burned by over-zealous cesareans and no attention to our terrible maternal mortality rates; by monstrous, nasty, expensive mammography machines when men get a simple blood or urine test for a genetically-related cancer; in midlife on heart health and hormones; and now by daily tech scams from all corners of the universe.
And that’s in addition to the multiple times we got excited about some gorgeous multimillion dollar new ‘women’s center’ whose planners decided to opt out of also paying for great providers who actually listen and understand comprehensive woman-specific issues at a fraction of the cost of the building.
Gen X women have more faith in digital and tech approaches, but Millennials and Gen Z think the rest of us are sound asleep at the healthtech wheel. Which is why we’ve added a special femtech news section to our weekly women’s health news update, Sunday Snippets. Because, no matter how wary we are after decades of neglect from medical research and the resulting lack of innovation, femtech is suddenly a wide-open door to both. RFK-not doesn’t get it, but femtech does.
Maryann Selfe, PhD, of FemmeHealth Ventures and other a few other Substackers2 are terrific at demystifying not only what femtech is, but at providing great tips on sorting and supporting. Because if women don’t support femtech, we’re right back where we’ve been before, with male investors who don’t ‘get it’ and, worse, too-often don’t even understand basic female physiology.3
Note to my beloved Boomer generation: As the first generation to crack the glass ceiling and, because of that, now the first generation of women to actually have some money of our own … please think hard about how you help pull other women up.
Here are three great posts by Maryann to help sort it all out:
How to start angel investing in women’s health with just $1K.
Fake science in femtech: 3 ways to spot red flags before you buy.
Support women’s health—and catch up on how investing is supporting our own health, too. Do not wait for RFK-not’s NIH to suddenly become enlightened and decide that half the population—women—should be included in health research: Just try finding historically underfunded and -researched ‘women’s health’ in his new list of 27 NIH specialty centers. In under six months, the Trump administration has already permanently halted billions of dollars in research before it could reach fruition—a life’s worth of work cancelled. NIH-funded women’s health research has been decimated, and now the funding for 50% of US births and 50% of kids’ healthcare just took a massive hit, and there’s no U turn ahead for years. That makes our support of private investment and innovation even more important than when it was just benign neglecting holding us back. This time, the neglect is intentional.
Femtech refers to diagnostic tools, products, services, wearables and software that use technology to address women's health issues, including menstrual health, reproductive health, sexual health, maternal health and menopause. Femtech companies also provide products that encompass general health conditions that affect more women than men or affect them differently than they affect men, such as osteoporosis.
Here are some other passionate Substackers focused on femtech: Future FemHealth, FemTechnology Summit, WomenofWearables, Sustainable FemTech Network, and FemTech Brief. Apologies if my search missed someone; let me know who else is out there!
Remember how secret and shielded sex ed was in high school? That’s paying off with ignorance about women’s bodies. My most recent favorite was a guy asking, online, in public, whether women couldn’t just swallow an IUD and skip the often needlessly painful insertion—just like, as he said, you can swallow a pill instead of having to undergo a colonoscopy. He had no clue the digestive system doesn’t empty directly into a woman’s uterus, too. And please don’t assume legislators or investor know more, even if well-meaning.