Today Femtech is completely transforming female health, not only by fostering the development of a wide range of products and services worldwide, but also by becoming a vehicle to raise awareness about the lack of representation that women had suffered in the healthcare field. Period tracking apps, fertility wearables, menopause guidance… the Femtech wave started a few years ago and hasn’t stopped growing since.

Nevertheless, in this dynamic landscape where innovation and inclusivity intersect, not all companies have managed to carve a niche and provide substantial value. Despite the introduction of new technologies and all the recently created companies covering untapped areas, many of the market leaders remain those that started offering female-oriented products before the Femtech term was even coined.

Femtech: A technological revolution for women’s health

Despite accounting for half of the world’s population, women remain significantly underrepresented in the healthcare industry. Conditions that primarily affect women have been overlooked, companies targeting female-specific needs represent a very small share of the global technology market, and topics such as menstruation or sexual life remain a social taboo. Recognizing this gender gap within the industry is what led to the creation and development of the Femtech (short for Female Technology) sector, which seeks to address unmet needs and raise awareness about these issues.

The start of the movement for increased representation of female health issues is not recent, there’s evidence that women have been advocating for this cause since at least the 1970s. It was around this time that some of the pioneering companies in the sector started introducing products. However, it wasn’t until the rise of the digital era, in the 2010s, that the Femtech movement started to gain momentum¹. In 2013, two of the first period tracking apps, Glow and Clue, launched; and in 2016 one of Clue’s co-founders, Ida Tin, coined the term “Femtech” in one of her pitches to investors.

Nowadays Femtech is understood as the group of products and services that have been designed to support and address women’s specific health needs. These can be classified according to two different criteria, the product/service type or the subsector of the female health issues that they address²:

• Femtech subsectors: fertility and reproductive health, maternity, menstruation, sexual health, menopause, pelvic health, general care
• Product types: devices, consumer products, pharmaceuticals, software/apps, services

Leading the Way: Femtech’s pioneers in Women’s Wellbeing