Quick! The Male Gaze is Failing Femtech: Navigating Design, Profit, and Function

Global demand for Femtech results in the rapid growth of the industry

A typical interaction with today’s most popular period tracking apps often begins with a notification. Once clicked in, the software is characterized by pastels or cutesy iconography, prompting you to rate your current emotional state on a scale from 1 to 10. For many women, these digital prompts, ranging from lifestyle tips or symptom predictions, represent a broader misalignment between the realities of female physiology and the design of female health software. While Femtech — best defined as the burgeoning tech sector covering period, menopause, and fertility tracking — expands, it is not always moving in the right direction. 

In 2024, Flo Health, an AI-powered women’s health app with over 420 million users, secured a $200 million investment from General Atlantic. This investment made Flo the first purely digital Femtech app to achieve unicorn status: a title only given to private startup companies with a value of over $1 billion. At the time, this seemed like a revolutionary achievement for Femtech, which was starting to gain the awareness that it had previously lacked. However, this soon proved to be a main point of contention: Flo is not run by women, so what gives men the right to be at the forefront of Femtech? 

Although Flo is only one of many tracking apps for menstrual cycles and women’s fertility, its rapid growth has made it the most popular female tracking app in November, 2025. Yet, the London-based app is co-founded by Dmitry and Yuri Gurski — two men at the helm of a women’s health company. According to Forbes, the company is also “largely funded by male-dominated venture capital” and has “historically been questioned for failing to have enough women in leadership roles and therefore female representation at decision-making levels.” This is not to say that the Flo business is devoid of female involvement; Natalia Vodianova, for example, is a Russian model who has been an early proponent of Flo and worked closely with Flo initiatives. However, the main contention is not the staffing of Flo as a company, but the app’s occasional inability to accurately cater to female needs. 

For instance, “Flo for Partners” is a feature that allows users to share information on their menstrual cycles and symptoms with their partners. While the feature intends to lessen the mental burden on women and improve their love lives, and is one of the first of its kind in tracking apps, female users have expressed their displeasure with the feature through social media, sharing that the feature is often too directed towards improving the sex life of partners rather than prioritizing a woman’s well-being. A 2018 scientific study of over 1,000 women also showed that most period apps only correctly identified when women were ovulating 21% of the time, which is not just limited to Flo Health. 

The BBC reports that women are continuously let down by multiple period tracking apps

Historically, healthcare systems have been designed based on the white male; clinical trials in health research often lack diversity in their samples, and many medical researchers even avoid experimenting on female mice due to higher costs. 

In 1977, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) implemented a policy recommending the exclusion of women of childbearing potential from Phase I and early Phase II clinical trials. The recommendation attempted to address the aftermath of the thalidomide tragedy that had resulted in severe birth defects in thousands of newborns. Although well-intended, the policy became a fundamental setback to female representation in clinical processes, excluding nearly all premenopausal women. The recommendation was reversed in 1993, but left undeniable systematic challenges that make it difficult to recruit women in clinical trials, severely limiting the understanding of how women (particularly women of color) experience diseases and pharmaceuticals. Such phenomena, often referred to as information deficits, can lead to consequences like the reluctance of providers to give treatment due to the lack of evidence that it’s effective on women, or, on average, a higher chance of experiencing adverse side effects. 

Modern algorithms are now attempting to navigate systematic exclusion. When AI is majorly trained by male-centric data, the resulting insights can fail to account for the complexities of female biology or female needs. For example, Zinnya del Villar, a leading expert in responsible AI, noted that “in critical areas like healthcare, AI may focus more on male symptoms, leading to misdiagnoses or inadequate treatment for women.” Furthermore, if the foundation of a health app is built on a standardized 28-day cycle, it effectively invalidates the millions of women who experience Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), endometriosis, or perimenopause. 

Bloomberg reports that Generative AI can amplify human stereotypes and misrepresent social groups

However, a counter-movement is emerging, led by founders who view Femtech not as an opportunity to profit, but as a genuine step towards building representation in tech. Ida Tin, the founder of Clue and the first to coin the term “Femtech,” founded Clue in 2013. Tin designed Clue to be a tracking app that prioritized a neutral, scientific interface rather than one that relied heavily on cutesy-pink aesthetics and generalizations. While Flo Health faced a 2021 Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settlement regarding the unauthorized sharing of users’ health data to third-party advertisers, women-led startups like Stardust prioritize “privacy first” architectures in their platforms. By implementing end-to-end encryption and incognito modes, female founders demonstrate a unique awareness of the vulnerabilities women face in a post-Roe v. Wade landscape that male-led boards would not have otherwise noticed or cared deeply about. 

In addition, modern femtech innovations like Modern Fertility’s hormone testing kits, co-founded by Afton Vechery, or smart breast pumps from Elvie by Tania Boler, have transformed Femtech by providing more personalized care catered towards women. 

The rise of the $1 billion “femtech unicorn” proves that women’s health is not a risky investment, but one that has the potential to become the next big technological powerhouse. Nevertheless, the industry must move beyond generalized aesthetics and profit-focused initiatives favored by male-led boards and prioritize clinical functionality and privacy, as accentuated by female engineers. If Femtech continues to be dominated by those who never had to navigate the physical realities of the female body, Femtech would never truly be progressive. After all, if you’re going to disrupt a cycle, it helps to have actually experienced one!