Photography via DTS
Rethinking Self-Care: How Femtech Is Filling the Healthcare Gap
Summary
Over 10 years ago, Danish entrepreneur Ida Tin coined the term Femtech to define a new category of emerging technology being used to help improve women’s health.
The exciting potential of this Femtech market is rooted in the overwhelming desire of women to take more control of their reproductive health journey. A foundational aspect of this is their ability to collect, track, understand, and act on their own experiences, using this data to inform their actions. Over the past decade, numerous products have entered the market, driven by both the profound lack of solutions available to women for their health needs and by rapid advances in software and hardware. Now, Femtech is no longer an emerging category but a recognized industry that is still rapidly evolving.
However, as a sector, Femtech has yet to fully realize the potential of its consumer experience and the economic opportunity it represents. The barrier to realizing this promise lies in the tension between the continuous lived experience of individual women and the two structurally discontinuous markets: consumer-first Femtech and traditional healthcare. Women are forced to contend with this tension as they plan, navigate, and manage their health and fertility.
The key question facing Femtech today, and indeed women’s health more generally, is how to bridge these two structurally distinct markets. If this gap is bridged, it will finally enable women to effectively pursue their health and reproductive priorities. The continuous experience and shifting needs of the consumer-turned-patient-turned-consumer will only be met when women are both fully informed of their individual lifestyle levers and self-pay treatment options, and empowered to access the best reimbursed healthcare that is available to them. Widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo is leading to early experiments that bridge these two structurally discontinuous markets. As these experiments gain traction and deliver value, they will increasingly bridge the gap between self-care and healthcare, leading to the next evolution in Femtech and women’s health.
Femtech: a tech stack born from women’s profound dissatisfaction with the status quo
Femtech is a consumer-driven category; women often have to ‘DIY’ their own health solutions. Not because they want to, but because they have to, due to chronic under-investment and under-service in female health¹. This includes the definitional exclusion of many specifically female health symptoms from conditions that receive reimbursed treatment. As the category has matured and new products and services have emerged, women are essentially building their own private Femtech stack. The first and most developed layer is the “diagnostic” layer, which consists of tools that help them figure out what is happening.
The development of such tools has exploded in recent years, due to consumer technology that enables people to collect and analyze data that previously was the preserve of healthcare providers—if it could be generated and interrogated at all. The “therapeutic” layer of the Femtech stack is more diverse and fragmented, consisting of self-care measures (often lifestyle changes or speculative treatments such as supplements with little clinical data behind them). Often, self-diagnosis is used to help women advocate for themselves with healthcare providers, with the goal being to tap into whatever conventional, reimbursed solutions are available through a woman’s local healthcare system. Sometimes, data-driven insights point directly to the “solution”—as with fertility awareness, which women use as part of their family planning strategy, both to conceive and to avoid pregnancy. We can therefore distinguish four distinct steps, serviced by an increased breadth of technologies, in the Femtech stack.
Step 1: Self-observation through data-driven apps, anchored in period tracking
The first place women often turn is to the powerful computer in their pocket. For the vast majority of women, tracking and understanding their menstrual cycle is a key indicator of their overall health. Many of the key cyclical health observations women are interested in understanding are inherently subjective, i.e., cannot be measured with hardware: pain, mood, energy, and sex drive. So this step is never obsolete and almost always the first place women start. Over 100 million² women use smartphone apps to track their period and other health symptoms every month. These products are highly accessible with the availability of free versions alongside paid versions. They do not need additional equipment and feature easy-to-use and engaging user experiences. The integration of AI capabilities into these apps enables increasingly personalized insights, potentially making them women’s first port of call to understand their reproductive health experiences, problems, and treatment options.
Step 2: Integrating biometric data from wearable devices
For women who want to further understand and manage their health with deeper insights—usually, because they have a common reproductive health condition or fertility issues—many then purchase a wearable device.
Most want to integrate their menstrual tracking data with their wearable data, overlaying cycle data and self-observed experiences of pain, energy, and mood onto their biometric data. Wearable device adoption has accelerated in recent years with new form factors such as smart rings, smart bands, and smartwatches. While adoption is increasing, wearables remain significantly less accessible than apps, due to higher price points. In every case, some additional software functionality is needed to help users make sense of this data. Generally, it is an app, and generally, women want to see this data in relation to their menstrual cycle.
Step 3: Experimenting with at-home hormone testing
Over the past two years, at-home hormone testing (beyond ovulation detection) has started to become mainstream, with many new, minimally invasive methods coming to market constantly³. This is a critical data source for many women, and it stacks on top of their self-observed & biometrically tracked data. It remains a sufficiently specialized area, so it is further down the stack in terms of volumes of consumers. However, this is changing rapidly, as more options, covering more hormones, enter the market. Because the aim is repeat testing to generate time-series data—which is particularly important in female biology, as one-off readings tend to be less valuable than information on fluctuations relating to an individual’s baseline—these measurements need to be presented and made sense of in the context of the menstrual cycle.
Step 4: Addressing the issue with self-care, or self-advocacy for healthcare
Most women make adjustments to their lifestyle and consumption habits to accommodate their reproductive health needs. For example, they may seek out or avoid certain foods or supplements to counter PMS, PMDD, or period pain. Or they may look into targeted over-the-counter pain alleviation, like CBD tampons or emerging tech like Nettle ⁴. Women who know or suspect they have PCOS or endometriosis may also explore how different foods, supplements, or weight-loss drugs affect their symptoms. They will also need to take any diagnosis (or more likely, suspected diagnosis, since clarity typically takes many years and can involve invasive procedures) into account in their family planning. Ultimately, women often take their data and the insights generated by their Femtech stack to their healthcare provider to self-advocate for treatment. Women know that timely treatment may depend on them doing this.
A plethora of research consistently finds that women are underdiagnosed and misdiagnosed at higher rates than men, with longer wait times for accurate diagnoses⁵.
Self-care, self-pay
At the time of writing, a defining characteristic of each woman’s Femtech stack is that it is funded entirely out of pocket⁶. In order to access the data, insights, and health support these products offer, each woman must pay for each component of her Femtech stack herself.
Women are forced to navigate two structurally discontinuous markets
Regardless of how deep their Femtech stack is, women are using the data generated by these products in their interactions with their local healthcare providers.
Every woman encounters moments throughout her life when she needs to access care and treatment related to her reproductive health. These needs go well beyond ‘classic’ reproductive health moments such as contraception, fertility treatment, pregnancy, post-partum, and (peri)menopause.
Given the profound connection between reproductive hormones and overall female health, every woman will eventually need to know her diagnosis and treatment options for issues beyond classic reproductive health concerns, often involving multiple issues⁷.
At this point, the profound structural differences between these two markets become apparent, causing friction for women. While women experience a continuous consumer/patient journey, the two ‘markets’ of self-care and healthcare are completely discontinuous.
This tension between the continuous user/patient journey and the discontinuous markets of Femtech and healthcare can be visualized in the following way.
The woman is the through-line; the boundary between the two markets is becoming increasingly porous
Women are using their Femtech stack to help them navigate the often opaque and confusing healthcare sector, and to advocate for the diagnoses and treatment they need.
As they bring their data to their interactions with the healthcare sector, they shape and influence their interactions with the traditional gatekeepers in healthcare.
In addition, insurers and employers, who carry much of the financial burden of treatment, have strong incentives to support women in planning and managing their health, so they have fewer and faster interactions with the healthcare system. For payers struggling with rising costs, facilitating self-help/self-care is an economically prudent health investment.
Payers are increasingly experimenting with partnerships that enable women access to bundled Femtech products and services, bridging this gap between the healthcare and Femtech markets. These experiments, usually offered through employee benefits or insurance plans, are explicitly designed to reduce the number and duration of interactions with the healthcare system, lowering downstream costs for payers.
Some early examples of these partnerships include:
Twenty eight Health partners with Aetna Better Health of Illinois
Oura partners with a range of perimenopause-focused care providers
These emerging offerings are already showing strong uptake among women. Women will increasingly ‘pull’ these types of partnerships and bundles, and for payers, these partnerships can make managing costs more effective.
Companies selling products & services within the traditional healthcare market also want to increase their share of the funnel via a direct relationship to the consumer-turned-patient. They recognize that a direct line to patients is a competitive edge they can't afford to ignore. This further blurs the boundary between Femtech and healthcare, or self-care and healthcare, making it more porous.
Conclusion
Women are increasingly expecting to be treated as healthcare consumers, not dismissible patients. Whoever delivers an outstanding consumer experience will win the race.
For all the advances Femtech has offered women in managing their health, it has yet to fully realize the consumer experience and economic promise long anticipated in this market. The main barrier to realizing this is the tension between the continuous, lived experience and fluctuating needs of each individual woman, and the two structurally discontinuous markets of Femtech/self-care and healthcare.
In their desire to take control of their health, women spend significant amounts of time, energy, and money building their individual Femtech stack. This experience as consumers of increasingly personalized tech products has led to a growing dissatisfaction with the lack of personalization in healthcare in an area with widely differing baselines and priorities. Women are becoming more vocal with payers and with healthcare providers on the health services and treatments they want. In turn, companies operating in traditional healthcare know that the direct line to patients is a competitive edge they can't afford to overlook.
Early experiments in the market aim to bridge the gap between the two. The signals from these experiments are clear; as soon as women are offered better solutions, they enthusiastically adopt them.
Women’s dissatisfaction with a slow, one-size- fits-all healthcare model created the entirely new category of Femtech. This same dissatisfaction is what will force the bridging of the two structurally discontinuous markets women are forced to navigate to manage their health.
The companies that successfully bridge these two markets to create a continuous experience will win. They will win because, in doing so, they will combine the volume and retention of consumer engagement with the higher, more defensible margins in the healthcare system. And women will be the better for it.
About Clue
Clue is the #1 women-led period and cycle tracking app, loved and trusted by over 100 million users around the world.
With a science-driven approach, Clue enables members to create a powerful personal health record that uses each cycle as a tool to uncover insight into their overall health.
From general cycle health education to fertility, pregnancy, menopausal stages, and all changes and choices in between, the Clue app is CE-marked as a Class 1 medical-grade device. Clue regularly partners with researchers from top institutions and universities to help close the data gap and move female health forward.
Based in Berlin, Germany, Clue data is protected by the world's strictest data laws (the EU's GDPR) and by Clue's absolute commitment to standing up for the privacy of its users, no matter where they are.
¹A recent Global study by BCG found that fewer than half of women respondents (41%) agree that there are sufficient services to address their specific health concerns. Ratings of medical treatment or interactions with health insurers are similarly low - 44% and 37% respectively. This is despite women worldwide reporting responsibility for the majority of household healthcare decisions. BCG, The $32 Trillion Opportunity in Women Focused Products & Services, 2025.
² SensorTower data, October 2024
³ Driven by strong consumer-led product experiences like HelloInside, Proov, Hertility.
⁴ A neurotech headband for PMS pain relief developed by the startup Samphire Neuroscience
⁵ Large-scale characterization of gender differences in diagnosis prevalence and time to diagnosis, PubMed, October 2023, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10592987/
⁶ And these out-of-pocket expenses can be significant; a recent Deloitte report estimates that out-of-pocket cost for healthcare is estimated to be $15B more per year for US-based employed women than it is for US-based employed men. Hiding in Plain Sight: The Health Care Gender Toll, Deloitte, 2023.
⁷ Many health conditions can impact the menstrual cycle, or be impacted by the menstrual cycle. Some of the most common (but by no means an exhaustive list of all conditions) include; Endometriosis, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), Perimenopause or menopause, Hypothyroidism, Hyperthyroidism, Uterine fibroids, Anemia, Bleeding disorders (such as von Willebrand disease), Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) /Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), Diabetes, High blood pressure, Recurrent urinary tract infections (UTI) or bacterial vaginosis (BV), Myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME)/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, Premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD), Depression, Anxiety disorder, Attention deficit hyperactivity (ADHD), Autism, Eating disorder.
