Abstract
Femtech, the corporate term that describes a marketplace for women's health populated by start-up companies and venture capital investors, is receiving attention based on a logic of profit linked to the size of the potential market and a logic of care addressing women's unmet medical needs. This commentary looks at how corporate actors in femtech, founders and investors, narrate the market during industry events. It highlights the need for data (medical data, personal data, and business data) as a key theme and identifies four types of narratives that shed light on attempts to develop this market by morally justifying it, engaging participants, personalizing it, and financing it.
This article is a part of special theme on Commodifying Compassion in the Digital Age. To see a full list of all articles in this special theme, please click here: https://journals.sagepub.com/page/bds/collections/commodifying_compassion
Women's health has been having its moment in the spotlight. In 2024, business leaders in Davos, the Biden White House and philanthropists all brought attention to the existence of a gender ‘health equity gap’. 1 As shown by consultancy firm McKinsey in its report for the World Economic Forum (2024), only 1% of research and development funds in healthcare address women's health; the global economy, it is claimed, could expect a boost of 1 trillion dollars of gross domestic product by 2040 if women suffered less during their most productive years. The settings discussing women's health may be diverse, but they all link the health equity gap to a gap in knowledge and, specifically, veracious data. Only since 1993 have women been included in clinical research and trials in the United States, resulting in a paucity of data for women-only conditions but also reliance on diagnosis and treatment knowledge for universal conditions developed without consideration for biological sex differences. 2 The male body has long been accepted as the standard body (Almeling, 2020). Addressing this data gap, for those holding the public microphone on those issues, requires harnessing technology (Kearney and FemTechnology, 2024).
‘Femtech’ is the loudest part of this story. The term ‘femtech’ was coined in 2016 by Ida Tin, founder of one of the early period-tracking apps, Clue, to ‘define the group of technologies that are designed to support and advance women's healthcare’ (Clue, n.d.). It is an all-encompassing term: it refers to start-ups developing consumer digital products, platforms for women's health, and the venture capitalism ecosystem in which investment is raised, creating sufficient affinities with other investor-driven ‘techs’ (Dodgson, 2020). Here I define femtech as a corporate term: a marketplace for companies that pitch in relation to women's health and their venture capital investors. Femtech both harnesses technology and makes claims to fill the data gap through user engagement and data. Most founder and investor activity occurs in the Global North, but the market has global aspirations, both in its reach and normative goals (see also Balfour, 2023).
As a new market, femtech is developing against a background of strong investment narratives on both economic potential and redressing health inequities. These narratives are the public-facing stories of the funding ecosystem, told, in conversation, by its participants to its participants. They privilege coherence and promote broad agendas, glossing over nuance that may challenge unity on the overall cause. Recounted in industry events, they create a common story and define the market's boundaries (Andreu et al., 2025). I identify four narratives that shed light on attempts to produce this emerging market by morally justifying it through a logic of inclusion, engaging participants by evoking win–win scenarios, appealing to personal experiences, and financing women entrepreneurs.
A new market for an old problem
In investment narratives, women's health is presented as both a niche and a (very) big new market. Investors and start-ups showcase the market potential in meeting the neglected but substantial needs of half of the world's population, all the while expecting innovation and returns akin to those experienced in other ‘techs’ (Birch, 2017). Femtech is thus guided by a logic of profit and future revenue streams, and expectations about the future (Beckert, 2016; Birch, 2023). Big health innovations typically develop through successive rounds of funding and long timelines. But there are also faster ‘low-hanging fruit’ offerings that follow a customer acquisition strategy that relies on the user paying for products and services. Femtech establishes a market (women who are willing to pay for products and services and are thus worth investing in) and a pattern where the user not only pays but often inputs and shares relevant data. The narratives preempt concerns about the commodification of health by also invoking a logic of care. This is consistent with what we know from the literature on new markets (cf. Zelizer, 2017), including claims to morality (Fourcade and Healy, 2007). In conversation with each other, founders and investors present this developing market as a catalyst for redressing structural health inequalities by improving access to care and affordability, and by addressing systemic gender bias both in advanced economies and globally. This dialogue is important as the sector seeks legitimacy (cf. Shestakofsky, 2024). Industry events are arenas of prizing women's health as a sector, rather than engaging in pricing exercises (see also Stark, 2017).
How do actors reconcile the commercial and the moral in this market? I outline four key narratives by drawing on in-person participant observation at industry events aimed at start-up founders and venture capital investors in 2022–2023 (Kremers and Rethel, 2024; Leivestad and Nyqvist, 2017). I attended four events organized by Kisaco Research on Women's Health and Reproductive Health Innovation in 2022 and 2023, and one organized by RESI Life Science Nation that included dedicated panels on women's health. 3 All events were fee-paying and amounted to nine days of observation. Having identified myself as a social science researcher at registration, on-site, and prior to all interactions, I observed plenary panels and smaller roundtables, investment pitches and informal networking (Fog Olwig, 2021). I compiled an archive of field notes, formal presentations, and promotional documentation. All phrasings and quotes come from formal presentations that were on the record (including with references in several social media channels) but I have chosen to anonymize them given that they cover sensitive topics for many participants. Following a grounded theory analytical strategy (Charmaz, 2014), the data was analyzed based on inductively developed coding, starting with descriptive coding, reviewing and refining codes to synthesize and begin conceptualization, before engaging in theoretical sampling and settling on the themes below.
Inclusion
What technology can do is democratize the wellbeing of women. If you are developing a solution, you need to be actively seeking to redress these inequities. There is no middle ground. Otherwise you are contributing to inequity. Don’t be a health equity tourist. It's not just nice to do, it is good business.
4
Combining inclusion and profitability implies considering all women as potential users of femtech products. Digital access is prolific (percentages of cell phone users are useful statistics in making this point) and femtech can reach those underserved and marginal. Despite concerns about structural biases that cannot be undone (cf. Browne et al., 2024) and a lack of fit for those with ‘atypical’ experiences (Jacobs and Evers, 2023), narratives stress inclusive designs and understanding the needs of different groups and how they can be represented in the data. Investors express strong concern for diversity of input in the development process and call for actively redressing inequities. They warn about the risk of aggravating data imbalances with incomplete data or breaking trust in communities already suspicious of medical interventions. 5
Reciprocity
An opportunity for everyone involved to get what they need. Measuring the unmeasured from the comfort of your home. When we frame the conversation about data, women are just people.
6
The advantages of ‘give to give’ are two-fold. Femtech engages users with appeals to the importance of lay expertise for enacting changed medical practices for those most marginalized by the medical profession (Klawiter, 2008; Maguire et al., 2004). The focus on the data being provided, in turn, can help broaden the community of founders and investors. Femtech users are gifting relevant medical data but also business data that can spur further funding for their cause.
Personalization
Powerful women experience health issues and don’t find a lot of answers. A lot of femtech companies start from personal problems and personal taboos. Fintech founders probably didn’t get started because of the problems with their credit card. We can’t blame men for not investing when we don’t tell them.
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This narrative of personalization is also used to reach out to males for allyship; founders are encouraged to routinely engage in conversations about the importance of women's health, emotional appeals to family, and reminders to (mostly male) investors for why it matters to their everyday lives. This narrative tokenizes personal experiences and fails to challenge stigma. Founders are encouraged to nudge male investors to consider that ‘the woman experiencing heavy bleeding is driving [their] child's bus’, 8 but not about their wives’ menopause, let alone non-heteronormative personal experiences (cf. Hendl and Jansky, 2021).
Investment
Women make the majority of health purchasing decisions–satisfying the client is important too. Women are becoming CEOs of their own bodies. You can’t fix what you can’t measure.
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For all the talk of the value of data sharing (Beauvisage and Mellet, 2020), however, this narrative is quiet on data being the source of profit rather than a means to an end (cf. Jeanningros and McFall, 2020). Few companies in the digital economy have committed users over time to base their revenue stream potentials on their databases and data (Birch et al., 2021). For femtech investors, distinctions persist between traditional companies relying on tangible assets and proven intellectual property, and platform companies looking to leverage user engagement. Data is considered valuable, but the arguments bypass the ambiguities about the commercial value of data to assert its administrative value as a driver of further market development (Mennicken and Espeland, 2019).
Conclusions
Femtech investors and founders narrate a developing femtech market which reconciles the logics of profit and care. The stories they tell about this market in industry events put data front and centre, defining the market as one of data gaps and data needs, highlighting women as data providers and data beneficiaries, and offering tips on how to talk about data to make this market bigger. The narratives present femtech, the funding model for women's health, as a market where the commercial and moral dimensions are not in conflict. Existing narratives, however, fail to provide answers to users who may worry about who has access to their data, see public actors defunding women's health, and question femtech's empowerment potential for large segments of the population for whom ‘all women’ solutions fall short of addressing challenges to equality. As an exercise in coherent storytelling by the ecosystem, the narratives gloss over what constitutes ‘good’ outcomes and are unconcerned with the consequences of bad ones.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the special issue editors for their guidance and enthusiasm for this work and the three reviewers for their constructive comments and engagement. An earlier version of this paper received meticulous feedback from my wonderful colleagues at the Organizations, Markets and Governance group at Copenhagen Business School.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Velux Fonden (grant number 00021820-NICHE).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.