‘Femtech’ takes on the women’s healthcare marketplace

Could you use some discreet help with birth control from a $14.99-a-month period-tracking app?

How about a hands-free, wearable breast pump, for $549; a $299 wristband to soothe hot flashes; or an extra-slim, temperature-neutral, LED-lit speculum to bring to gynecologists’ appointments — part of a $125 kit including “comfy socks”?

These products and more are part of a fast-growing industry known as “femtech” — high-tech solutions for women’s health needs — whose many female founders say they’re tackling age-old inequities.

Investors have jumped in, growing the market from $40.2 billion in 2020 to a projected $75 billion this year. And that’s just for starters: A “ghost market” of strategies to address “profoundly underserved women’s health needs” could reap up to $360 billion, a venture capital firm reported in March.

“Many areas of women’s health — like menstrual pain, endometriosis, polycystic ovarian syndrome, preeclampsia, and menopause — have been overlooked for so long by traditional medicine that women have had to take these problems into their own hands and innovate,” said Elizabeth Gazda, CEO of Embr Labs, which makes the wristband to treat hot flashes. “And because these innovations are occurring at a time of expanding technological ability, with cloud computing and ubiquitous smartphone adoption, women’s health is now leapfrogging men’s health.”

Still, the surge of products has raised concerns about quality control, pricing, and privacy. And some experts doubt that femtech has made true progress in correcting historic inequities.

“Why is it that we as women need to close the gender health gap by buying all kinds of expensive commercial-health applications?” asked Naomi Jacobs, an assistant professor in bioethics at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and co-author of a 2023 critique. “Even if they’re not that expensive, because they’re apps, we’re paying with our most intimate data.”

Historically, researchers, entrepreneurs, and many doctors have paid less attention to female health concerns than male ones.

As of 2015, women still accounted for less than 35% of participants in early-stage clinical trials, researchers at the University of North Carolina wrote in a 2023 paper. Even by 2020, only 5% of global research and development funds went to women’s health, according to a 2024 editorial in the journal Nature Reviews Bioengineering.

In contrast, femtech websites express missionary zeal about disrupting birth control, pregnancy, reproductive-organ illnesses, and menopause.

“We want to live in a world where women are empowered by knowledge about their bodies,” says the website for Kegg, which makes a ($299) device that tracks fertility by analyzing cervical fluid.

The site for Elvie, which sells the wearable breast pump, plus a $199 pelvic-floor “trainer” to assist with Kegel exercises, says society “gaslights the transformative effects of motherhood on women’s lives — known as matrescence.”

Ida Tin, the Danish founder of Clue, a period-tracking app, is widely credited with coining the term “femtech” in 2016, to refer to, as she said, “any technology geared toward improving women’s lives.” It was a way to help women entrepreneurs find each other and also put some pizzazz in their pitches, she added. Investors, Tin has said, can now say: “’I have four femtech companies in my portfolio’ instead of ‘I have a company for women peeing in their pants.’”

To appreciate the femtech marketing bonanza, check out the Oprah Daily 2025 Menopause O Awards. Amid a dizzying assortment of face-smoothing serums, hair-growth systems, and supplements for brain fog and mood swings — endorsed by six ob-gyn docs who have also written books — you will find a $248 sonic-wave vibrator, a $239 wristband to track your sleep, and a $900 “Rolls-Royce of room fans.”

Can commerce succeed where scientists, governments, and health insurance plans have failed? Beyond that abstract question lie more pragmatic concerns.

“New apps keep coming,” said Valerie Lynn Baker, director of the division of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. “Patients often ask about particular ones, but it’s hard to know how valid each one is.”

In other words, many femtech innovations have not yet advanced to the point where a woman should trust the app above a doctor or nurse-practitioner, Baker said.

That means buyers should beware of products lacking external validation — and maybe even some that have it.

In 2018, the Food and Drug Administration approved a smartphone app made by the Swedish firm Natural Cycles as the “first direct-to-consumer app for contraceptive use.” At the time, the company was being investigated in Sweden after reports that 37 women who had used the app had aborted unwanted pregnancies.

A British regulator banned an ad claiming the app was “highly accurate.” But the Swedish agency later closed its investigation after finding the app’s failure rate was roughly 7%, in line with the company’s findings for “typical use.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has described “fertility awareness-based methods” such as Natural Cycles as having a 2-23% failure rate.

Women also have reason to fear loss of privacy when they submit health-related data to for-profit businesses that may then sell them to advertisers or others. An oft-cited case is that of Flo Health, which makes a period-tracking app that has been used by tens of millions of women. In 2021, Flo settled a case with the Federal Trade Commission, which had charged it with sharing sensitive user data with third parties, including Facebook and Google, without proper disclosure.

“I am worried — both by unethical leaders in tech, by a greedy investment system, and by inhuman political leadership,” Tin said. She said tech produced in Europe, which has stricter laws, is “the better option right now” for women concerned about privacy.

The greatest promise of femtech may be realized in years to come, as demonstrated by a list of recent federal-grant awardees who are dramatically expanding the concept of high-tech answers to female health concerns.

Last fall, the Sprint for Women’s Health at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health awarded $113 million to 23 projects aimed at breakthrough advances in women’s health. The projects address both specifically female complaints, such as reproductive-system illnesses, and disorders of the brain and heart that affect women differently than men. They include:

To be sure, all the nanoparticles and gizmos in the world don’t directly address root causes of gender-based inequities, including evidence that doctors more frequently dismiss women’s complaints than men’s.

There is also a danger that scientific quests for better responses to serious health threats will lose funding in the current political turmoil. In April the Trump administration slashed, but then restored, support for the National Institutes of Health’s landmark Women’s Health Initiative.

At the University of Twente, Jacobs is working on a study of how digital health technologies might be designed to meaningfully contribute to gender equity in health care.

“How can we take charge of these technologies and create and design and produce them in ways that aren’t overly predatory but are actually facilitating our needs and wants?” she asked.

The answer could change the world — or at least more than half of it.