Femtech: The “Smart” Business of Menstruation, Hormone Tracking, and the Corporate Construction of Risk

Abstract

Abstract:In 2021, startup companies raised $1.9 billion for what entrepreneur Ida Tin calls FemTech, or digital tools designed to promote women’s health including medical wearables, diagnostic kits, and self-tracking apps. Not only is FemTech a booming industry, but it is touted as an innovative, feminist corrective for how biomedical devices have traditionally been designed with a male body in mind. Two such FemTech products are LOONCUP, the world’s first “smart” menstrual cup, and EverlyWell’s line of home-health tests. Rooted in the neoliberal logic of personal responsibility and individual self-mastery, these products purport to empower women by giving them tools to manage their health but, in fact, work by enlisting them to place their bodies under corporate surveillance. By drawing parallels to the 20th century FemCare industry, I show how today’s FemTech companies entice customers by offering new, technological solutions to female body management that promise greater convenience and entry into elusive, upper-middle class lifestyles. Through their marketing they co-opt feminist slogans to sell women’s health products, replacing intersectional feminist critique with neoliberal commodity feminism. Then, when customers use these products, their subjective evaluation of their health is replaced with numerical data (despite questionable accuracy) which is subsequently entered into for-profit databank. This misuse of medical technology is not, however, inevitable. In the final section, I offer a feminist framework for reimagining the FemTech industry by allowing product development to emerge from the daily needs of women, prioritizing outward-facing technologies that conceive of health as environmental and collective, replacing built-in goals with open-ended modeling, and engaging in feminist data practices which emphasize user privacy and the democratization of knowledge.