A one-off rant about femtech

The "nuggets" newsletters were semi-retired last year after finding week-by-week that little seemed to change, and that time and investments seemed to be going into the same things week-in, week-out. If it didn't feature AI it wasn't worth reporting.

Chatbots for all the things. Party like it's (a long, long time ago).

But today I was kicked out of the doldrums by the brilliant (and slightly but unapologetically sweary) Linda Barclay Isles exposing a few facts on Instagram today about the prevailing attitude towards menopause support, and underlying that, female-specific health issues more generally.

The gist of Linda's point was rebutting lifestyle advice that cold water swimming might be of benefit to menopausal women. Not the advice in itself (Linda is a keen cold water swimmer and has indeed written about it in the past) - but in truth this type of advice is not much better than a pat on the head in the grand scheme of things.

In a world where one female member of the royal family has surgery but keeps the details rightly private, and a male's fairly routine prostate issue gets so much coverage the NHS can't cope with men asking for a check, you get a sniff something isn't quite right.

And having been through the same condition as the King, albeit about 25 years earlier, you could start to see some disparities. In hindsight I was treated within days, with a clear pathway and several consultations, but mostly along the lines of "you're getting on a bit, here's an interim remedy".

Side-effects such as lowered testosterone were not as straightforward and largely ignored by the NHS, but a quick Google search revealed test-at-home kits from the likes of Manual, Numan, Medichecks, LetsGetChecked and even Superdrug?- most of which will try to remedy the problem straight away if it's there. It's basically a commodity. If you trust the suppliers it's fixable.

What of hormone replacement for those women clearly in need? Not so good. While the kits exist, they have already been flagged up as unreliable at best, probably misguided, and potentially limited. They might detect the menopausal stage (like ClearBlue's test) but ultimately they lead to information for the GP or general lifestyle education.

Dr Annice Mukherjee, a leading menopause and hormone doctor from the Society of Endocrinology, told the BBC the FSH urine tests were “another example of exploitation of midlife women by the commercial menopause industry, who have financial conflicts of interest”.

And it feels like this is just the tip of a huge iceberg.

From running a routine Feedly search specific to femtech advances and investments, since pausing Nuggets last year there has been one single story reported, worthy enough in its own right but a rare 'nugget', so to speak. And yet still an AI story rather than a femtech one at heart.

According to a very recent article in Digital Health , it's clearly a systemic problem.

Gender biases can be found across the healthcare ecosystem, from funding – where just three percent of overall digital health funding goes to women’s health digital start-ups – through to education, with 41% of UK medical schools not having mandatory menopause education on the curriculum.

As the article says, there are some green shoots with companies like Peppy and Maven Clinic offering workplace menopause and other support, but they seem to be a rarity.

With a market opportunity of slightly more than half the population, why isn't there more investment and traction yet?

Femtech offers a diverse array of solutions aimed at enhancing healthcare for women, addressing various female-specific conditions such as maternal health, menstrual health, pelvic and sexual health, fertility, menopause, and contraception. Additionally, it targets general health conditions that affect women disparately or uniquely, such as osteoporosis or cardiovascular disease. Although it is in the early stages, the factors driving FemTech, including public awareness and technological advancements, are gaining momentum.

Considering the scope, estimates for the current market size of femtech vary between $500 million to $1 billion, with forecasts indicating potential for double-digit revenue growth. Presently, femtech companies receive approximately 3 percent of the total digital health funding. By early December 2021, funding in the femtech sector reached $2.5 billion. Femtech companies are filling gaps that have not yet been addressed by biopharma and device incumbents in the realm of maternal health.

$1 billion sounds light and completely underestimates the potential and scale involved. As for $2.5 billion funding in total; in the EU alone health tech startups received $6 billion in 2023 alone. (And as an aside, how can the investment be smaller than the potential market? Feels like even the current analysis is lazy and lacking).

Are investors shying away from female-focused tech because the tech industry is dominated by men? Are male investors looking after their own? Women make the majority of consumer decisions so you'd think the spending side of this would be a no-brainer for the cold-hearted investor.

Are investors - and founders - scared to dive into anything female-focused for fear of being drawn into culture wars? Is it not enough that half the population have biologically-driven health issues needing addressed, regardless of their identification?

I've come across many female founders, and indeed a series of new ones last week, specifically working on health products. All very good companies and with great ideas, but none of them specifically for women. Conversely, there have been male-focused health companies saying in the past year they are so well-invested and highly-staffed they need help organising it all.

Something's clearly rotten here and deserving of attention so from now on, "Nuggets" will continue as an irregular update on progress in this area, as it seems like the biggest yawning gap in health tech.

As Linda said in closing (and thanks for allowing me to share her Instagram swearies here!)

We need to do something about all this shit, don’t we?!!

Thankfully (and I thought twice about mentioning this at all, as it feels like the whole article is self-promotion, but I do have a day job) there are some brilliant women trying their hardest to make changes, and we aim to feature some of those at Waracle's next meetup in Edinburgh in March. I'll spare further details but if you're interested in diverse perspectives on health and other tech, have a look.

Small print: This newsletter goes out to subscribers and across LinkedIn on an irregular basis after a weekly run of articles in 2023. Feel free to contact me if you've seen or are creating something interesting in digital health and more specifically femtech issues. I work for Waracle, but all opinions and content selections are my own. Anything in which I have a work or personal interest will be declared.

Cover image by ChatGPT. Prompt: "Can you create a picture of a female patient being treated by a robotic female doctor, please". Remember your manners with AI...