Abstract
Emerging as a commercial category in 2016, ‘femtech’ has been publicly celebrated as a category of consumer-based digital health technologies designed to support the unmet and systemically marginalized health needs of women in areas such as menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause, through data-driven apps, wearables, and self-diagnostic tools. Since its emergence, the term femtech has become culturally significant and has taken on a life of its own across commercial, public, and healthcare discourses. Despite the growth of femtech scholarship, clarity is lacking on how different disciplines have challenged the assumptions about sex, gender, health, technology, and innovation that shape dominant understandings of ‘who’ femtech is for (i.e. fem) and ‘what’ it constitutes (i.e. tech). Motivated by this research gap, a critical conceptual review was conducted to provide new entry points into critical debates. This article novelly adapts ‘diffractive reading’ as a methodological approach to bring disciplinary perspectives on femtech into conversation with one another across anthropology, computer science, cultural studies, gender studies, information studies, law, media studies, medicine, and science and technology studies. This article focuses on insights drawn between critiques of femtech which trouble the ideologies, discourses, and practices that shape dominant understandings of ‘fem’ and ‘tech’. In thinking through and with the conceptual boundaries of femtech, this review underscores the ongoing need to examine femtech’s role in shaping global dynamics of reproductive, labor, and environmental justice, in addition to neoliberal approaches to healthcare more broadly.
Introduction
In the past decade, the rise of femtech, defined within and by actors in the commercial sector as a category of consumer-based digital health technologies designed to meet women’s health needs in areas such as menstruation, fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and menopause (Cambridge Dictionary, 2025; Wiederhold, 2021), has been publicly celebrated as a new wave of digital health technology and feminist progress. The term femtech was coined in 2016 by Ida Tin, the co-founder of Clue (i.e. one of the world’s first menstrual tracking apps), to encompass this burgeoning area of technology development (Weiss, 2018). Yet, since its introduction, the term femtech has taken on a life of its own across commercial, healthcare, and public discourses. As femtech has grown in visibility and cultural significance, it has evolved to encompass a set of assumptions about sex, gender, health, technology, and innovation that shape dominant understandings of ‘who’ it is for (i.e. fem) and ‘what’ it constitutes (i.e. tech).
Current femtech encompasses a wide range of products, including but not limited to apps and software (e.g. menstrual, fertility, pregnancy tracking apps), sensor-laden monitors and wearables (e.g. ‘smart’ menstrual cups, breastfeeding pumps), and self-diagnostic tools (e.g. ‘smart’ tampons to diagnose endometriosis and cervical cancer). Whether through self-tracking inputs, biometric monitoring, or algorithmic predictions, femtech operates as a data-driven industry and sociotechnical system consisting of products that generate intimate health data, such as menstrual cycle length, ovulation patterns, fetal movement, hormone levels, and sexual activity. This data, which flows from users to corporate entities that determine how it is stored, shared, and monetized, significantly contributes to femtech’s burgeoning global market value, which is currently estimated at 68 billion USD and projected to reach 117 billion USD by 2029 (Statista, 2025).
Since its emergence, femtech has been specifically marketed toward women as an empowering and destigmatizing sector of digital health solutions for them to take charge of, manage, and make informed decisions about their health (Mishra and Suresh, 2021). Arguably, the importance of femtech has only grown within the last 5 years as it has become shaped by the dual fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and the regression of reproductive rights within the United States amid the post-Dobbs era (Goodday et al., 2022). The accelerated adoption of digital health technologies throughout the pandemic highlighted their utility in enhancing healthcare access in times of crises and public health system overload. This, alongside intensifying ongoing debates around reproductive justice and the role of digital health technologies as a means of health support, continues to amplify femtech’s significance across the globe as both a site of resistance and surveillance. It is no surprise then the commercial establishment of the femtech industry has increasingly drawn academic attention across disciplines which continue to explore its framing as ‘a long-overdue response to medicine and tech’s sexism’ against women’s health that has been under-researched and systemically marginalized for centuries (Hendl and Jansky, 2022: 29).
Femtech’s global expansion and unexamined conceptual terrain make it a necessary and timely area of critical inquiry. Given the interdisciplinary relevancy of femtech, there is a need to engage with conceptual concerns across disciplines to examine how it is understood as a term and sociotechnical system that is shaped by both social dimensions (e.g. gender norms, economic systems, political ideologies, healthcare policies, regulatory frameworks) and technical infrastructures (e.g. algorithms, platforms, data flows, hardware; Shaw and Donia, 2021). This article shares insights from a critical conceptual review that explores disciplinary critiques of femtech, which unsettle the ideologies, discourses, and practices that shape dominant understandings of ‘who’ it is for and ‘what’ it constitutes. In doing so, we aim to provide new entry points into critical debates and prompt discussions among researchers across disciplines about what is at stake when assumptions about sex, gender, health, technology, and innovation within femtech are taken at face value, or only considered from a single disciplinary perspective. Notably, in this article, we intentionally (re)present the gendered language used (e.g. ‘women’) across the scholarship and sources we engaged with to highlight how such terminology is often employed to define and limit conceptualizations of femtech, while also interrogating the harm such terms impose on gender-expansive people.
Methodological approach
We followed Grant and Booth’s (2009) model of a critical conceptual review to engage with disciplinary critiques of femtech. However, our (re)view builds on Grant and Booth’s (2009) model by integrating diffractive reading as an additional methodological orientation ‘to foster constructive engagements across (and a reworking of) disciplinary boundaries’ (Barad, 2007: 25). Grounded in Haraway’s (1992, 2018) feminist technoscience and Barad’s (2007) feminist new materialist scholarship, diffractive reading invokes the principle of diffraction from physics which describes how various waves like light, sound, and water, create interference patterns of constructive overlap or destructive cancellation when encountering obstacles or passing through openings. Rather than focusing on oppositional or hierarchical distinctions among knowledge frameworks and disciplinary perspectives, Haraway (1992) drew on diffraction as an epistemological metaphor to advocate for analyzing interference patterns between texts and the relational differences they generate through overlap, disruption, or transformation of ideas. In doing so, Haraway’s (1992) diffractive reading highlights the context-dependent and relational nature of knowledge production and necessitates that researchers take accountability for ‘understanding which differences matter, how they matter, and for whom’ (Barad, 2007: 90). It involves tracing patterns of power dynamics, exclusions, and possibilities between texts to foster a critical consciousness among researchers that they are fundamentally implicated in shaping what is known about the world and the phenomena under study (Haraway, 1992). In this way, ‘diffraction. . .moves away from the notion of critique [where] the reviewer operates from a position of exteriority and superiority. . .viewing the work of others from a distance, knowing better and being entitled to scrutinize and interrogate the work of others’ (Murris and Bozalek, 2019a: 879).
Building on Haraway, Barad (2007) expanded diffraction from metaphor into a material-discursive practice to emphasize that ‘practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world’ (p. 91). Like Haraway, Barad’s (2007, 2014) approach to diffractive reading contains an inherent ethical dimension and positions researchers as ‘diffractive apparatuses’ to highlight their active role in knowledge production. Central to this affirmative ethics is her notion of ‘response-ability’ which emphasizes the interconnectedness of all matter, human and non-human, and the importance of cultivating responsive relationships within the world, as we are ‘always already integral to [its] ongoing intra-active becoming and not-becoming’ (Barad, 2014: 183). From this perspective, Barad (2007, 2014) reinforces that researchers are ‘always already’ accountable to the worldly configurations their knowledge-making practices produce: the systems they may reinforce, the exclusions they may perpetuate, and the possibilities they may enable. Because of this, diffractive readings ‘are affirmative, not critical’ as researchers ‘are of the diffraction pattern’ (Murris and Bozalek, 2019b: 1513).
For our purposes, the strength of diffractive reading lies in its emphasis on transcending disciplinary silos to generate insights that cannot be reduced to any single discipline or text ‘by bringing different research and theoretical perspectives from various disciplines together [and] reading insights through each other to find new ways of looking and thinking about more-than-human worlds’ (Lupton, 2019: 2). In this (re)view, transdisciplinarity is understood and undertaken in the Baradian sense as an entangled process of reading across and through disciplinary boundaries, not as the fusion of disciplines into a unifying framework (Thorpe et al., 2022). As such, we position critiques of femtech as intra-acting waves to trace their interference patterns and the insights they generate about femtech when particular conceptual concerns amplify, disrupt, and/or transform one another. We have (re)presented our readings of these texts as a series of ‘agential cuts’ (Barad, 2007, 2014) to temporarily carve out partial, non-exhaustive, and focused explorations between critiques (Lupton, 2019). As Barad (2007, 2014) maintains, agential cuts are political acts of power-laden selection and (re)presentation as they shape what comes to matter, what is made intelligible, and what relations are foregrounded. In this way, our agential cuts act as situated points of entry that mark our focused explorations of certain assumptions about sex, gender, health, technology, and innovation within femtech among shifting constellations of texts. In doing so, we emphasize the partial, situated nature of our (re)view and reiterate that our research questions, selection of texts, interpretations, and insights are all forms of agential cuts which actively shape what is and can be known about femtech herein. The following critical questions guided our (re)view:
How is the concept of femtech currently situated, understood, and critiqued across relevant disciplinary perspectives?
What tacit assumptions of femtech do these critiques challenge and/or further perpetuate?
When these critiques are read through one another, what differences in concerns and/or alternative understandings of femtech emerge?
To meaningfully engage with the breadth and depth of the texts explored, we have intentionally divided our readings across two interrelated articles. In this article, we engage with a particular group of texts that trouble assumptions about sex, gender, health, technology, and innovation that shape dominant understandings of ‘who’ femtech is imagined and produced for and ‘what’ constitutes its technology. In a forthcoming second article, we engage with a different group of texts from this selected literature that challenge assumptions of empowerment related to femtech and the tensions it creates for femtech consumers/users and scholars alike. As we practice and (re)present it in this (re)view, diffractive reading remains open to multiple readings that are always partial, non-exhaustive, and context-dependent, and does not claim to produce a distanced, authoritative account or totalizing synthesis of selected literature. In this (re)view, we draw on specific aspects of each text’s critique as they become relevant in conversation with other works. Moreover, we selectively identify disciplinary backgrounds and methodological orientations when they illuminate how critiques are situated or when they shape key tensions; this approach offers us routes to read texts in relation to one another in partial and shifting constellations.
We also wish to note this (re)view was conducted in 2024, amidst escalating restrictions on reproductive rights in North America and growing concerns about digital surveillance and the criminalization of reproductive health-related procedures and data, such as abortion and geo-location data trails. As the political landscape continues to shift, the regulation of reproductive health and related technologies, and the risks posed by corporate and state surveillance remain urgent and unresolved. It is within and from this evolving context our work is situated and further influenced by our intersectional identities and positions in institutions across Canada and the United States, with expertise in digital health, public health, nursing, information science, media studies, gender studies, and disability studies.
Methods
In March 2024, an electronic search strategy was developed and implemented to locate theoretical, empirical, and gray literature across relevant disciplines to identify texts which offered conceptual critiques of femtech. By ‘conceptual critiques’ we mean texts that focus specifically on unsettling the term ‘femtech’ by challenging assumptions about sex, gender, health, technology, and/or innovation that shape dominant understandings of ‘who’ femtech is for (i.e. fem) and ‘what’ it constitutes (i.e. tech). A research librarian was iteratively consulted to assist with refining the scope of disciplinary and interdisciplinary databases and search parameters. The search parameters used to identify title-abstracts used the following Boolean operators: ‘femtech’ OR ‘fem-tech’ OR ‘female-oriented technology’. We limited our search to English-language texts and further refined the results by selecting relevant academic and gray literature source types as categorized within each database. No restrictions were placed on publication date or geographical location. Databases were searched between April and May 2024, including ACM Digital Library, Business Source Complete, CINAHL, Gender Watch, Google Scholar, HeinOnline, IEEE, Library Literature & Information Science, Nursing & Allied Health, PubMed, PsychINFO, Scopus, and Web of Science. A reference managing tool (i.e. Zotero) was used to automatically remove duplicates, alongside manual removal. The search strategy yielded 179 sources. All abstracts were reviewed to identify key texts. Texts that clearly defined femtech and focused on unsettling the term by challenging taken-for-granted assumptions that shape dominant understandings of ‘who’ it is for and ‘what’ it constitutes through theoretical and/or empirical methods were included. Texts which mentioned femtech but took the term at face value and/or did not focus on challenging taken-for-granted assumptions that shape how it is understood were excluded. Overall, 33 texts, including 26 peer-reviewed articles and 7 book chapters, were selected for inclusion. All bibliographies were checked for additional texts. The first author used NVivo 14 to read, track, and extract conceptualizations and critiques of femtech from the selected literature. She then paraphrased, summarized, and charted the texts into an MS Word table to inform iterative team discussions of interpretations and insights. A concept management software (i.e. Mind Meister) was used to organize ideas.
Findings
Overview and mapping of included sources
Table 1 provides an overview of the selected texts included in this article. To better understand the international breadth of the texts, we identified the listed authors’ locations of their institutional affiliations; authors of more than one text were only counted once (see Column 2). Of the selected texts included in this article, contributions from authors in Europe were most prominent, including Denmark (n = 6), England (n = 5), Germany (n = 2), Scotland (n = 1), and Switzerland (n = 1). Followed by contributions from authors in South Asia, namely India (n = 5), and lastly, Australia (n = 1). The disciplinary origins of texts were identified based on author affiliation and/or publication venue (see Column 3). The table further summarizes each text’s definition of femtech (see Column 4), assumptions of femtech challenged (see Column 5), and concerns about femtech raised through conceptual critique (see Column 6). Selected texts were all published between 2020 and 2024.
Summary of selected texts and critiques of Femtech.
Critiques across the selected texts raised conceptual tensions regarding how femtech’s commercial etiology prioritizes profit over health equity and promotes an ideal user that reinforces legacies of oppression entrenched within Western medicine and women’s healthcare. Moreover, tensions revealed how the femtech industry profits through proximity by collecting vast amounts of data on users and those around them. Finally, critiques within Western contexts highlighted how femtech reinforces gendered and economic hierarchies of the 20th-century femcare industry through status quo succession, while Eastern perspectives challenged the femtech industry’s claims of tech innovation by disrupting disruption using collective care cultural philosophies.
Cut/Commercial etiology
Burt-D’Agnillo (2022) and Corbin (2020) highlight how femtech conceptually emerged as a commercial category within Western tech start-up culture and digital health markets. Both note how Ida Tin, in recognizing the structural barriers faced by cisgender women entrepreneurs in accessing venture capital, strategically crafted the term to appeal to investors, notably white cisgender men, within the patriarchal tech industry to align women’s health technologies within the language of tech innovation, profitability, and scalability (Burt-D’Agnillo, 2022; Corbin, 2020). While this framing successfully attracted start-up funding for products like menstrual and fertility tracking apps, it simultaneously entrenched femtech within a commercial logic and culture shaped by heteropatriarchy and capitalism (Burt-D’Agnillo, 2022). The necessity of coining a term like femtech to appeal to cisgender men underscores how heteropatriarchal norms and capitalist logic shape what counts as tech innovation and whose health matters enough to the extent that profitability and marketability are highly guaranteed and worth betting on (Corbin, 2020). For Burt-D’Agnillo (2022) and Corbin (2020), femtech conceptually emerged as a strategic response to the gendered gatekeeping of capital and remains predominantly shaped by cultural values which prioritize competition, hierarchy, and profit maximization.
Cut/The ideal user
Critiques which question ‘who’ is femtech for simultaneously expose assumptions about ‘who’ and ‘what’ are included within the current scope of women’s healthcare more broadly. For McMillan (2022), the ‘fem’ in femtech works as a unifying one-size-fits-all signifier and marketing strategy to appeal to women as a categorical group at the level of biology (i.e. female) and gender (e.g. feminine) which impacts how these technologies are taken up. From a medical perspective, Hendl and Jansky (2022) argue the ideologies underpinning the most popular femtech designs and functionalities maintain the Western constructed ideal of ‘normative femininity’ which situates white, cis-hetero, non-disabled, middle-class women as the cultural standard by which ‘womanhood’ is measured against, and ‘who’ women’s healthcare has historically been built around. Like Hendl and Jansky (2022), other critiques which challenge assumptions of ‘who’ is included within the ‘fem’ of femtech, draw attention to how designs of femtech, by in large, sustain normative femininity as they are functionality optimal for a particular and privileged subjectivity only: a young, white, healthy, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender woman, who is digitally health literate, middle-class, fluent in the English language, housed in an urban area, and has a desire to (eventually) procreate (Balfour, 2023a; Brown, 2021; Corbin, 2020; Dahlman et al., 2023; Hendl and Jansky, 2022; Mishra and Suresh, 2021; Roetman, 2020). As Balfour (2023a) contends, from a cultural studies lens, these privileges illustrate a contradictory tension resting at the heart of ‘who’ femtech is for: a supposed universal category of women’s health solutions embedded within sociocultural logics that prioritize a particular ideal user.
Burt-D’Agnillo (2022), Corbin (2020), and Faubion’s (2021) critiques examine how the ‘fem’ in femtech is strategically used to appeal to women as a categorical group at the level of biology (i.e. female-technology). For Burt-D’Agnillo (2022), Corbin (2020), and Faubion (2021), the use of ‘fem’ to appeal to ‘females’ as a consumer group reductively equates ‘female’ identity with specific biological functions like menstruation and fertility. Because of this, they maintain femtech prioritizes reproductive health and perpetuates repronormativity (i.e. normalized heterosexual reproduction and the belief that reproduction is a necessary feature of a fulfilled life) by sidelining other critical health domains related to non-reproductive health concerns like chronic conditions (e.g. endometriosis, diabetes) and hormonal health (e.g. menopause). Writing from a media studies perspective, Dahlman et al. (2023) assert repronormativity reinforces cis-hetero reproduction and patriarchal family structures that reproduce heterosexist notions of female sexuality which excludes queer users and delegitimatizes diverse family structures within femtech designs and functionalities. Even when heterosexual reproduction is fulfilled, Mishra and Suresh’s (2021) examination of menstrual and fertility app functionalities, from a science and technology lens, emphasizes the omission of tracking mechanisms for miscarriages and/or abortions within mainstream femtech design. By way of these exclusions, they argue reproduction becomes narrowly depicted as a positive linear journey which disregards the complexities and realities of reproductive health and further reinscribes reproductive hierarchies alongside gendered ones (Mishra and Suresh, 2021). In this way, femtech perpetuates reproductive norms by reinscribing stigma and societal taboos around reproductive journeys that fall outside of these norms, whether through loss, choice, or unexpected life circumstances. For example, alongside omissions of miscarriages and abortions, other forms of reproduction like in vitro fertilization are less accounted for against the foil of ‘traditional’ heterosexual intercourse.
Alongside conceptual concerns of reproductive norms, Corbin (2020) maintains the ‘fem’ in femtech further foregrounds biological norms which naturalize and reinscribe a binary model of sex that obscures the complexity of biological sex characteristics (i.e. chromosomes, hormones, hormone expression, internal and external genitalia) and, from a user standpoint, excludes the experiences of intersex people within the realm of femtech altogether. Balfour (2023a, 2023b) amplifies similar conceptual concerns regarding gender norms, particularly when ‘fem’ is used to appeal to women as a categorical group at the level of gender (i.e. feminine-technology). For Balfour (2023a, 2023b), this conceptualization of femtech is problematic in that it reproduces a gender binary and essentialist framing that systematically excludes trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people. These critiques raise interrelated conceptual concerns as they question the categorical assumptions of ‘fem’ and underscore how these norms continue to shape ‘who’ is accounted for in femtech design and women’s healthcare.
Cut/Legacies of oppression
While Balfour (2023a), Burt-D’Agnillo (2022), Corbin (2020), and Faubion’s (2021) critiques stress patterns of biological reductionism and gender essentialism at work in femtech as a central source of exclusion, Jules’s (2023) critique embedded within a historical analysis of ‘hysterical medicalization’ amplifies and shifts these perspectives by tracing such ideologies through the Eurocentric origins of Western medicine and emergence of women’s healthcare. From a gender studies lens, Jules (2023) analyzes menstrual tracking app rhetoric against the historical backdrop of hysteria within Western biopsychology discourse, arguing that contemporary femtech tools are ‘benefactors of unreckoned histories of reproductive surveillance. . .and neoliberal mechanism[s] that retool older interventions upon bodily autonomy’ (p. 26). From this perspective, Western medicine’s development of hysteria discourse and reproductive pathology (re)produced heteronormative beliefs that were used ‘to maintain race, class, gender, and sexual hierarchies’ (Jules, 2023: 28). Jules (2023) highlights how the medicalization of women as ‘pathological’ aligned with rationales for reproductive surveillance and state control by perpetuating narratives of biological essentialism which maintained the ‘innate inferiority among any person who was not white and male’ (p. 29). In analyzing the history of these social hierarchies at the intersection of sex, gender, and race, Jules (2023) raises how ‘enslaved Black women [within] the mid-1800s felt the effects of contemporary gender and reproductive surveillance especially as it related to capitalism’ (p. 29). Notably, while this reproductive control and surveillance ‘did not entail maintenance of normative feminine values [it] served to [strategically] perpetuate wealth for. . .white slaveholders’ (Jules, 2023: 29).
The systemic ideologies of cis-heteronormativity and repronormativity are entangled and reinforced by colonialism and white supremacy, which underwrite femtech’s ‘ontological exclusions, normative femininity, epistemic injustice, and heterosexist notions of female sexuality’ (Hendl and Jansky, 2022: 40). As Jules (2023) maintains, ‘contemporary tracking practices wrought through [femtech] remain tethered to latent discourses of slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy under which low-income women of color have always been disproportionately scrutinized’ (p. 28) and are inseparable from the oppressive legacies of Western healthcare femtech claims to be an alternative route for. By reading these patterns of exclusion through one another, femtech users’ health outcomes are systematically predictable, as they are intertwined with and inseparable from the oppressive logics of Western healthcare. Jules’s (2023) work deepens the tension between broadening inclusivity within femtech design while also reckoning with the histories of social hierarchy and structural oppression that already underlie and make these technologies and medical systems, which they complement, possible in the first place.
Cut/Profiting through proximity
Although implementing inclusive design principles to account for diverse health experiences and historically marginalized identities may seem like a way forward for Hendl and Jansky (2022), and Faubion (2021), critiques like Jules’s (2023) and Roetman’s (2020) disrupt and complicate these solutions by examining the neoliberal implications of ‘fem’. Whereas femtech’s marketing positions it as a solution for women’s health needs and an alternative to traditional healthcare, Roetman (2020) argues it perpetuates neoliberal subjugation by placing the burden and responsibility of health onto the user (i.e. the ‘fem’), particularly through self-tracking modalities. For Roetman (2020), writing from a media studies perspective, ‘self-tracking femtech presents novel body projects concerned with disciplining the hormonal, sexual, and fertile female body according to normative configurations of embodied heterosexual femininity’ (p. 2) by subjecting users to laborious forms of self-management. In this regard, ‘fem’ operates as a vehicle for neoliberal ideology that reinforces assumptions that health is an individual responsibility. Mishra and Suresh (2021) amplify this concern of ‘datafied body projects’ by stressing the need to address ‘the structural embeddedness of exploitation of the female body for profit’ (p. 597) at the center of the femtech industry’s for-profit model. For Mishra and Suresh (2021), femtech positions users as ‘prosumers’ within a neoliberal framework who simultaneously consume commercial goods (i.e. femtech) and produce commercial goods (i.e. femtech data) as a form of unpaid labor that is exploited by others (e.g. corporations) for capital gain. In this way, critiques (Burt-D’Agnillo, 2022; Corbin, 2020; Dahlman et al., 2023; Faubion, 2021; Hendl and Jansky, 2022) arguing for design and functionality improvements in the name of intersectionality become recast and held in contention as such inclusive efforts can be seen to merely reinscribe consumer choice as the greatest form of autonomy under neoliberal capitalism. This tension aligns with capitalist narratives of ‘empowerment through consumption’, which redirects attention away from the structural exploitative nature of femtech and health data by supplanting it with siloed conversations on how to improve design features in service of widening a consumer base—the ‘fem’.
Even so, the reading of ‘fem’ as an exclusionary and individualizing category within a neoliberal framework can too be recast through data capitalism-focused critiques like Mehrnezhad et al. (2024) who, from a computer science perspective, highlight how femtech’s data-driven insights always already implicate others well beyond the user and target ‘fem’. Through their analysis of femtech privacy policies and the permissions they necessitate, Mehrnezhad et al. (2024) demonstrate how devices collect ‘data about others’ closely related to the user (e.g. access to baby/child photos and sleep patterns, partner’s sexual health information), others in their family and social circle (e.g. access to phone contact lists and calls), and even strangers who they are in physical proximity to when using their devices throughout daily life (e.g. access to camera and microphones, Wi-Fi networks). From their perspective then, ‘fem’ always already implicates a broader network of actors alongside the user through interconnected sociotechnical systems and their broader environments. These policies and permissions illustrate the capitalist logic of extraction and profit generation at work within femtech, which aims to collect as much data as possible on as many individuals as possible for advertising, insurance, and surveillance purposes.
Cut/Status quo succession
Alongside assumptions of ‘who’ femtech is for are critiques (Corbin, 2020; Jules, 2023; Mathiason, 2023; McMillan, 2022; Mishra et al., 2023a, 2023b; Seddig, 2023; Westwood, 2023) which trouble what its ‘tech’ encompasses and whether it lives up to its marketed claims of being a ‘disruptive’ category of health technology and market force. Taking this claim to task, Mathiason (2023) argues femtech’s reinforcement of gendered and economic hierarchies aligns it with and positions it as ‘a high-tech reimagining [and extension] of [the] twentieth-century femcare [industry]’ in the West (p. 122). Using a gender studies lens, Mathiason (2023) draws on critical menstruation studies to argue that today’s femtech market exists because of the femcare industry and corporations like Kimberly-Clark and Johnson & Johnson who created the business of feminine hygiene by selling products (i.e. pads and tampons) ‘as “technologies of passing” that let users conceal their monthly bleeding and present themselves as efficient workers [reinforcing] the idea that menstruation was a messy problem in need of. . .technological solution’ (p. 122). In doing so, femcare giants exploited ‘women’s ingenuity by selling back to them the very kinds of menstrual products they were already making at home’ (Mathiason, 2023: 122) and paved the way for femtech entrepreneurs to come decades later. Mathiason (2023) thus situates contemporary femtech (i.e. apps, smart devices) within a succession line of femcare ‘technologies’ (i.e. pads, tampons) that were already augmenting women’s bodies in a similar way as an entry point into middle-class life and the modern workforce. Through a case study analysis of Looncup’s (i.e. the world’s first smart menstrual cup) promotional material, Mathiason (2023) maintains 21st century femtech provides a capitalist ‘solution to the ongoing “problem” of modern body management’ (p. 125) by examining how Looncup’s marketing promises users the ability to strategically time bathroom breaks without the worry of a leaky cup, thereby avoiding any interruption of their work schedule on company time. As Mathiason (2023) argues, Loon Lab ‘like Kotex before it, positions its products as an indicator and instrument of class mobility [since] low-wage, industrial workers. . .would benefit most from timing bathroom breaks’ (p. 130). From this class-based perspective, femtech continues its instrumental role in socially stratifying the labor force by maintaining capitalist working conditions that are in service of ‘productivity and efficiency [and] designed around the needs of [an] able, [white] cisgender male body’ (Mathiason, 2023: 130). As a technological category, femtech can be seen to accommodate rather than challenge structural health inequities insofar as it continues to render female biological health needs inconvenient and counter-productive to the labor conditions necessary for capital growth.
Like Mathiason (2023), McMillan’s (2022) and Corbin’s (2020) critiques grounded within legal studies stress a central tension within femtech’s consumerist histories that continues today in digitized form: what should otherwise be classified as a ‘medical necessity’ under regulatory frameworks has and continues to be sold as a ‘luxury good’. As Corbin (2020) notes, this classification is significant because if all femcare products (i.e. tampons and pads) and femtech were classified as a ‘medical necessity’, then they would be tax-exempt and publicly supported through assistance programs, not commercially sold for profit and gatekept by the private sector. Because of this, Corbin (2020) maintains that ‘product developers [and the tech industry are encouraged] to view women as. . .consumers [and] a way to make profit’ (p. 347) Given femtech’s entangled cultural and consumerist history with the femcare industry, Westwood’s (2023) critique examines femtech against a different, yet related, 20th-century business model predicated on selling oppressive standards to socially emancipated women in the West: the beauty industrial complex (i.e. cosmetic industry, diet industry).
Using a cultural studies approach, Westwood (2023) draws on Wolf’s (1991) theory of the beauty myth and its concerns of advertising, economic marginalization, and self-surveillance to situate the femtech industry as a ‘reinvented [iteration of the myth anchored] within the general health and wellness ecosystem’ (p. 48). As Westwood (2023) explains, Wolf ‘theorizes that as women gained social emancipation, they have. . .become increasingly oppressed by stringent beauty standards that dictate how a liberated, responsible, and successful woman should look’ (p. 49). From this, Westwood (2023) argues that the femtech industry relies on similar consumer messaging to that of the beauty industrial complex, which oppresses women into adhering to ‘standards of how liberated women should look and act’, through specific forms of consumption (e.g. makeup, diet programs). Like the femcare industry, which packages and sells medical necessities back to women, and the beauty industrial complex, which packages and sells standards of modernity and progress through cosmetics and personal care, femtech too relies on a consumerist model that further compounds the economic marginalization of women’s disposable income by necessitating a product or subscription purchase to stay on top of their health (Westwood, 2023). In further drawing on Wolf’s (1991) beauty myth, Westwood (2023) situates this economic marginalization in relation to the gender pay gap, explaining how the disposable income women earn has historically been, and continues to be—within the face of femtech—instrumentalized to be spent on consumer (beauty) products out of lack and necessity, rather than being put toward other investments and/or socially progressive opportunities to better their societal positioning.
Like Corbin (2020), Westwood (2023) highlights how the privatized, commercial sector has increasingly supplanted the need for better access and improvements to women’s healthcare by positioning products like femtech as a viable option for ongoing unmet healthcare needs. Because of this, users are strongly incentivized to turn to femtech and ‘participate in self-surveillance, despite any data privacy concerns such as the sharing of information with. . .external bodies’ (Westwood, 2023: 64). For Westwood (2023), ‘the sharing of self-surveillance data. . .is the price that users must pay [to] access necessary health solutions [and] thus, the “cost” of accessing FemTech goes far beyond. . .literal economic[s]’ (p. 65). Through these critiques anchored within the context of 20th-century consumerism, the ‘tech’ of femtech is not as ‘disruptive’ or original as it claims to be within a Western context. Rather, it is a complementary digitized form and successor of the femcare industry within established markets and consumer bases. That said, Mishra et al.’s (2023a, 2023b) work, which analyzes the growth of the femtech industry within India over the last decade, globally expands the scope of critique regarding the gendered economic marginalization brought upon by capitalist expansions of femtech within broader geographical contexts.
Within an Eastern context, Mishra et al.’s (2023a) examinations of femtech user motivations underscore how current femtech within India predominantly serves economically privileged women who have the disposable income to purchase such products and is not as disruptive as it could be to remedy gendered inequities in healthcare access. From a science and technology studies perspective, they point toward similarities among legal gray areas and data privacy policies within Indian governance and commerce spaces like those in North America by noting how they also promote the commercialization of users’ personal data and bodies (Mishra et al., 2023a). Through their critique, the femtech industry in India also goes beyond the ‘literal economic cost’ as Westwood (2023) describes, by ‘functioning as an extractive data regime that renders intimate bodily data with surplus, commercial and managerial value’ (Mishra et al., 2023b: 14–15). Although India’s investment landscape for femtech is not as robust as it is within North America, its national push toward increased digital health services and infrastructure continues to move the femtech sub-sector toward the billion-dollar range (Mishra et al., 2023b). Emerging trends in India’s femtech industry indicate the opportunities such technologies can create in advancing healthcare access for women throughout the country, particularly focusing on regional dialects and offline modes in rural areas with low-resource settings (Mishra et al., 2023a). While Mishra et al.’s (2023a, 2023b) critiques which attend to localized differences within market structures and regional access in the East, Seddig’s (2023) ethnographic work, which examines the digital health start-up culture in Nairobi, specifically troubles the rhetoric of ‘disruption’ as a discursive strategy to justify the capitalist expansion of femtech in Africa. Seddig’s (2023) work, alongside Mishra et al. (2023a, 2023b), resituates critical conversations of ‘tech’ in femtech from predominantly Western perspectives onto a global stage, which necessitates attention to how local contexts and cultural values shape digital health markets.
Cut/Disrupting disruption
For Seddig (2023), femtech’s expansion within the Kenyan healthcare landscape pushes promissory claims of it being a disruptive technological force for women in low-resource settings. Seddig (2023) notes how the COVID-19 pandemic spurred local innovation and market opportunity for femtech as it was a two-fold accelerant for the digital health industry within Africa more broadly, in addition to the adoption of telehealth and mobile health practices within Kenya specifically to deliver healthcare from a distance. Within the Kenyan context, ‘femtech as disruption’ is seen in a more positive light as it is emerging within a market space that is not confined by industrial or technological precursors like Mathiason (2023) and Westwood (2023) note within their Western-centric critiques of femtech markets and consumerist histories. When examining the rhetoric of disruptive innovation within Western tech-ecosystems, Seddig (2023) notes how it rests on the idea of ‘creative destruction’ which ‘valorizes certain forms of innovation, such as those that generate rapid growth and high returns for investors, while neglecting other forms of innovation that may be more incremental, sustainable, and socially beneficial’ (p. 221). In doing so, Seddig (2023) draws attention to how notions of tech ‘disruption’ recreate value-laden commercial hierarchies shaped by the cultural context in which it occurs.
Moreover, Seddig (2023) explores the rise of terms like ‘Silicon Savannah’ used to describe Kenya’s emerging tech industry and digital health market around the globe. Through ethnographic interviews, Seddig (2023) highlights how it is regarded by Kenyan femtech entrepreneurs and investors as ‘a western-centric view of the African technology industry [which disregards] the unique context and dynamics of technology development in Africa [and] reflects a neoliberal ideology that prioritizes entrepreneurship and innovation as the only solutions to development’ (p. 223). From this perspective, notions of tech disruption insofar as they relate to femtech innovation are culturally context-dependent. With respect to femtech, a Western-centric view of disruption within the tech sector becomes yet another vehicle which sustains neoliberal capitalism and the belief that hyper-individualized entrepreneurship and private ownership are the only way to combat gendered health inequities and erect social change.
When speaking with one femtech investor, Seddig (2023) remarks how she challenged Western influences within Kenya’s tech landscape by encouraging innovation rooted in local culture. Counter to the individualized pursuits of health management and innovation normalized under neoliberal capitalism within the West, local cultural philosophies like Ubuntu within Africa encourage a ‘way of life that emphasizes interconnectedness, community, and compassion for others’ (Seddig, 2023: 224) rooted within social justice, reconciliation, and sustainable development. From this lens, embracing a relational and collective care cultural philosophy that is already embedded within localized contexts becomes the starting point at which femtech innovation can burgeon, rather than retrofitting social justice frameworks onto models and practices whose foundations are inherently antithetical to such values. Disruption then, which has been used as a discursive strategy for capitalist expansion of femtech within Western markets, can be disrupted itself by turning to localized cultural contexts and value systems which center community care and long-term, sustainable relationship building.
Discussion
Insights between texts highlight how femtech’s commercial origins and tacit assumptions about gender, sex, health, technology, and innovation rooted within Western culture can be seen to perpetuate systemic injustices and exploitative practices at a global scale (Jules, 2023; Seddig, 2023). Far from operating as a ‘new’ wave of health technology development, femtech serves as a vehicle for neoliberal health ideology and perpetuates the assumption that health is an individual responsibility rather than a broader societal and communal one (Roetman, 2020). This individualization works to fracture relationships that might otherwise lead to broader health movements demanding structural reform (Mathiason, 2023). Instead, users are siloed into fragmented health ecosystems, where each app or product addresses isolated biological aspects of ‘feminine’ and/or ‘female’ health (e.g. fertility, menstruation, pregnancy), which frames them as individual concerns to be managed through consumer tools and reduces health inequities to matters of personal failure or poor management rather than systemic oppression (Corbin, 2020; Faubion, 2021; McMillan, 2022). Femtech’s role in (re)producing these inequities demonstrates how it is shaped by the systems it claims to challenge and separate itself from, and consequently, invites new ways of thinking about its potential for justice-oriented transformation (Balfour, 2023b).
Rethinking femtech involves reconceptualizing it as a boundary object that remains open to ongoing redefinition and transformation. Diverse methodological approaches to health, beyond Western epistemologies and ontologies, will be essential in reconceptualizing femtech as a tool for intersectional collective care, mutual aid, and structural change, not as a vehicle for profit. As Lupton (2020) reminds us, Western thinking and its belief system are still a ‘relevantly recent and localized worldview [preceded by] Indigenous and premodern. . .cultures [guided by] relational connections [and] an ethics of engagement with more-than-human-worlds’ (p. 24). By working the limits of its conceptual boundaries to (re)unite systemically fractured connections, femtech can perhaps be reclaimed as a marker of feminist and justice-oriented approaches to community-driven care and connection that are responsive to local contexts and health needs.
While the selected texts raise questions about ‘who’ femtech is for, they primarily focus on consumers in established or emerging digital health markets. These consumers and their health needs, despite being socially and economically marginalized in various and context-specific ways, remain separated from and prioritized over those whose health and labor are integral to the global supply chains that sustain femtech operations. That is, the people and resources involved in the production and distribution processes (Cortinois and Birn, 2021; Kitch, 2023) that bring femtech into consumers’ hands and start-up tech spaces in the first place. Examples include people in low-wage manufacturing and supply chain distribution roles, gig economy tech workers, and those who work in resource extraction, such as mining for nickel, cobalt, and other critical materials used for smart devices, batteries, and technological infrastructures (Crawford, 2021). These patterns of exclusion prompt attention to aspects of labor justice, resource distribution, and the paradox of critique itself within femtech critical debates. These critiques stem from privileged academic positions, including our own, that are still situated within the very neoliberal ideology and capitalist systems they question and rely on (i.e. neoliberal academic institutions similarly depend on corporate digitized hierarchies of knowledge production and access to research).
Forward-looking critical conversations about femtech, therefore, remain fundamentally (re)united by ecological concerns predicated on finite material resources. Some digital health scholars have begun to reckon with such concerns in the face of our mounting climate crises and the fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic (Alami et al., 2023; Thompson, 2021). On a global front, data-driven sociotechnical systems and industries within a for-profit model, like femtech, depend on the continuation of extractive practices to fuel the incessant pursuit of infinitely scalable solutions and accumulation of user data for profit maximization (Cortinois and Birn, 2021; LeFevre et al., 2021). These extractive logics continue to justify the expansion and scale of ecological harm implicated within the construction of energy-intensive data centers and server farms to power internet connectivity and cloud-based systems to sustain usage, storage, and analytics (Crawford, 2021). The ‘who’ femtech is for then must also grapple with broader questions of its humanist framing, wherein environmental ecosystems remain deprioritized. In this way, femtech, as it is currently understood and conceptually examined, normalizes ecological harm and reinforces global and local social hierarchies of access by promoting a market-based view of justice where solutions are envisioned through stronger regulations and protections against systemic exploitation, rather than through dismantling and reimagining more sustainable systems and approaches altogether. Consequently, the primary beneficiaries of femtech continue to be the developers, investors, and corporations who profit from data monetization, subscription-based models, and venture capital funding.
Conclusion: (Re)connecting the femtech research agenda
Theoretical examinations of femtech are perhaps more important now than ever as global politics around reproductive rights face increasing levels of uncertainty. In the wake of regressive legislative moves within the United States, which criminalize abortion and pregnancy outcomes, femtech occupies a precarious position between offering alternative means for health support amid sweeping governmental austerity measures that continue to erode public healthcare while subjecting users to heightened risks of corporate exploitation and multisector surveillance. As conservative-led governments and anti-choice organizations seek to regulate, restrict, or weaponize reproductive health data (Goodday et al., 2022; Kelly and Habib, 2023), it remains crucial to critically interrogate femtech’s role in shaping timely reproductive health politics. For example, in states where abortion is now banned and fetal personhood rights are reinforced, data stored in menstrual-tracking apps that show cycle irregularities could be mischaracterized as abortion and used by state law enforcement to prosecute an individual (Clark, 2024; Kelly and Habib, 2023). Our intention with this work is to offer new entry points into critical debates about femtech by thinking through and with its conceptual boundaries that are always already embedded within local and global relations across discursive, social, material, and systemic fronts. Inspired by Haraway’s (1992) and Barad’s (2007) affirmative ethics, we encourage further explorations and theorizations of femtech across disciplines where ‘understanding which differences matter, how they matter, and for whom’ (Barad, 2007: 90) are embraced as points of response-ability, (re)connection, and resistance in the pursuit of just health futures.
Footnotes
Author contributions
DF contributed to the conception, design, and analysis and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. JH, GT, JR, and LD supported the analysis and contributed to the manuscript’s revision. They read and approved the submitted version. All authors approved the submitted version.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.