FemTech: “Smart” Innovation or the Commodification of Women’s Health?

• In Event: Speculation and Innovation in Digital Health - I

Abstract

Between 2015 and 2018, startup companies raised more than $1 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 $200 billion industry, but it is touted as an innovative, feminist corrective for how clinical research and 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 women’s home-health tests. Rooted in the neoliberal logic of personal responsibility and individual self-mastery, these products purport to empower women by giving them the tools to manage their health but, in fact, enlist women to place their bodies under corporate surveillance and discipline themselves by modifying their diet, behavior, and hormone levels to achieve socially-instituted norms. FemTech uses the machinery of capital to reinforce patriarchal values by interrupting women’s ability for self-definition, undermining their privacy, and exploiting their consent. First, women’s subjective evaluation of their health is replaced with numerical data that is presented as objective despite questionable accuracy and imprecise methods for determining ‘normal’ values. Second, women’s privacy is undercut as their data is used by the companies to conduct their own research, such as LOONCUP’s analysis of menstrual flow, color, cycle and temperature as dubious new risk factors for disease. These actionable insights further allow FemTech companies to solve the problems they have created with additional products: OTC medications, nutrition plans, and follow-up tests.

Author

• Jessica Lee Mathiason, University of Maryland