Inside FemTech 
with Ida Tin

Worldwide, women’s health is still not treated as a priority. Even behind major milestones such as rising life expectancy – up from 30 to 73 years over the past two centuries – lie deep, persistent gender inequalities that continue to disadvantage women. In an effort to bridge the gender health gap, the first period-tracking apps were created in 2016, including Clue, derveloped by Danish entrepreneur Ida Tin and now used by more than 10 million people worldwide.

A pioneer in women’s health innovation, Ida Tin coined the term FemTech (short for female technologies), now widely recognised as an umbrella for the technologies, innovations, and services dedicated to women’s health and wellbeing. Her work has helped pave the way for a new approach grounded in data, innovation and awareness, and continues to inspire entrepreneurs, startups and stakeholders around the world.

On the occasion of her participation in the Tech4Fem Future Health event at the Rome Future Week 2025, we asked Ida Tin a few questions to explore the potential and the future of FemTech and women’s health.

You are recognised as a pioneer of FemTech, as you coined the term a decade ago, in 2016. How would you define it today? Has the meaning evolved as FemTech has grown globally?

I'd say it has. FemTech is still about the technology that addresses the needs that are specific to women because of biology. But our understanding of what that actually encompasses has grown. In the beginning, we were mostly thinking about reproductive health. Now we know it also includes areas like cardiovascular disease, brain health, bone health, mental health, and conditions in which women are disproportionately or differently affected than men – such as autoimmune diseases and neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's.

The WEF and McKinsey Health Institute 2024 report indicates that women are affected by poor health throughout their lives, particularly during their productive working years, with considerable repercussions also for their emancipation, employment, career, and social dimensions. Why do you think the experience of being assigned female at birth is still not mainstream in science, culture, or tech – despite data from the cited report indicate that closing the gender health gap could unlock $1 trillion in annual global GDP growth?

That's a really good question. I think it is partly because women's health is still understood as something that is only relevant to women. Instead, we'd need to understand women's health as societal infrastructure. It is essential to how women are able to channel their good energy – life energy – into society. And when that infrastructure – our bodies, our healthcare systems, our medicines, our culture – is not really working for us, then the energy does not flow. And if you think of human energy as participation – another way of saying it would be our participation in the workforce, our ability to fulfil our own potential and participate fully in building the world – then you can see how expensive it is when women can’t do that. There is a huge loss. And it is also very expensive that we then have to take care of women with a whole range of conditions. So I think we need to shift that idea that it is only "for women", and make the world, our mainstream culture, understand that it's highly relevant at a societal level – at a global, planetary level – and for men as well. And I think that shift would change some of these numbers.

How can we shift that?

It is really difficult to do, but raise awareness and keep telling our stories. I think a lot of what it has felt like, or feels like, to be in a woman's body is still invisible in our culture. Women need to courageously help men understand what it means to have a female body that goes through this really "wild health journey" because of biology. And men need to be curious and ask questions.

With more health data being collected than ever, ethical use and protection of data is a growing concern. What principles should guide how FemTech companies handle user data, and how do we avoid repeating the mistakes of traditional tech?

I agree that how we use data, how we share data, how we handle data, how we protect it, is extremely important. Actually, I am working on a set of ethical guidelines for people or companies building FemTech. I don't think we have a really clear, shared idea in our culture about what it is to be a good ethical data company, or a company that handles sensitive data, and this is different from regulation. We definitely need regulation, we need rules. We also need people who make decisions every day to have some sort of awareness and understanding, a kind of inner ethical compass of what is the right thing to do. And then users should be able to somehow navigate and find companies and services that agree on what it means to be a good company, and find signs that a certain company can be trusted. That might have to do with transparency or business models and other things. Where these companies are based, which then defines what regulations are under, also counts. So things like these, so we can help users navigate after. It is, of course, a big educational project. But I do think that we need to first start by defining what we think is good practice.

You have identified continuous hormone monitoring as a key challenge and opportunity for the future of FemTech. What could this unlock for women’s health?

We have good data on many different functions of our body – our sleep, our heart, our blood sugar levels, our movement, etc. – but we don't have good data on what our hormones are doing, and we have even less deep understanding of how that influences our body and conditions like endometriosis or many other things. The assumption is that, if we had more data, we would start to learn more about how the body actually works. We could conduct more research, and start overlaying this data set on hormones on the other data sets that we have – whether that's genetic or disease patterns. We could maybe start finding phenotypes for conditions like PCOS. But we could also do much more precise healthcare – so that we could give, for instance, hormonal replacement therapy that wasn't in the blind, but actually based on people's precise personal, hormonal signature. And the same goes for contraception. Hormonal data could also help us pick up early signs of preeclampsia or postnatal depression. We could help people even navigate their own mental health – something many women find is tied to hormonal fluctuations – and probably many more things. I think this is why it is such a potential revolutionary technology to develop, which would have a systemic application. What I mean with that, is that it could be applied kind of everywhere in the system, which is quite fascinating.

What barriers still stand in the way?

It is very challenging to develop the technology, and it is difficult for teams to raise capital for the long research timelines needed to build biosensors. And there is very little collaboration in the field either, partly because the VC model doesn’t really encourage companies to work together.

During your keynote speech at the Tech4Fem event in Rome, you have described women’s health as “crucial societal infrastructure”, and said that we’re currently not building an infrastructure that makes women thrive.

I think this understanding, that we are biological systems and part of a planet, is a really profound shift in mindset. The way we live as a species on the planet right now harms our natural environment, but it also harms our own bodies. In a way, we are not respecting what it is means have a body: we don't create our workplaces to fit our bodies; we don't fit our culture around our experiences; we don't have a social design that is really optimised for what it feels like to have a family, in my opinion. And when we fail to acknowledge how much pain – mental, emotional, physical – women carry because the world doesn't fit our bodily experience, we lose something. If we built a world that fit better, we would unleash a lot of energy, and start redesigning many things.

What might change if societies truly prioritised women's bodies in policy, design, and innovation?

Women would be more part of shaping the world – which I think would be healthy, because we know that one of the principles for life is diversity. We need diversity to have healthy systems. And when women are lacking – in the workplaces or in leadership positions, in the political systems, etc. – then we don't have that diversity of thinking which is needed to create solutions that actually make a whole system, a whole society, a whole planet, work well. I think it would change the gender balances: women would have a more equal standing to men. We would have a world where the feminine is brought more in, and I think men would benefit from that too. And I don't mean women only. By "feminine", I mean a more embodied approach to life – one that men can carry, too.

What would that infrastructure look like to you?

It would be like a whole array of technologies to address the needs that we have. It would be a healthcare system that doesn't neglect, or gaslight, or ignore women's experiences. It would be medicines and procedures based on women's data, as well as men's. It would be policies that doesn't disadvantage women, and many more things.

Can you tell us more about the FemTech Assembly project?

I wanted to create a think tank that could help the world recognise the connection between investing into women's health and women's health technology to making money and driving the economy. It is a huge business opportunity, and at the same time it could help us build a healthier planet in the way that I have described earlier. It is a very simple, yet powerful interconnectedness that is not part of our mainstream culture: women's health is not per default considered one of the most lucrative places to invest. Yet we know that, as a society, for every euro invested in women's health, the return is 26 euros. That can become an investment thesis for everyone, from angel investors to investment banks, and even at the level of national budgets, how we choose to invest as a society. 

What role do you hope it will play in shaping the next generation of feminist tech innovation?

I would like the think tank to be an open system that could be used by either women or men who want to develop a project in FemTech as a sort of container, as a platform for their ideas. I don't have this fully shaped yet, but I don't necessarily want a very traditional think tank that produces a report every year. I want something that is more participatory, more like a social movement. But it's still in formation.

Read the Italian version of this article