Collecting Data From Women Is Not The Same as Building For Them
By Roswitha Verwer, Founder and CEO of YON E
When I started building YON E, one of the first questions I had to answer for myself was: if a woman trusts us with information about her body, what exactly are we promising her in return? Women are asked to share incredibly sensitive information about their bodies. Cycle dates, fertility goals, pregnancy loss, sexual health, hormonal changes, pain levels, infections, and intimate concerns. Yet the systems that collect this data are rarely built with the same care that women are expected to give when sharing it.
This is why our recent publication in Frontiers in Global Women's Health felt so important to me. We introduced a four-pillar framework for building a more equitable FemTech ecosystem, with one pillar focused on ethical, interoperable, and privacy-preserving data infrastructure. It may sound technical at first, but the meaning is very simple: women should not have to choose between understanding their bodies and protecting their privacy.
For years, women's health has been held back by missing research, incomplete datasets, and a lack of continuous biological insight. We often talk about the gender health gap. But the answer cannot simply be to collect more information from women. That would be too easy, and honestly too dangerous, if the systems around that information are not built properly.
The real question is not only how much information we collect, but how carefully we handle it. Who has access to it? How is consent explained? Where does the data go? And, most importantly, does it give something meaningful back to the woman who shares it?
Reproductive health data is deeply personal. It can say something about fertility, infections, pregnancy, miscarriage, sexual health, and moments of real medical vulnerability. That kind of information should never be hidden inside unclear systems or vague sharing agreements where women are not fully aware of what they have agreed to. That is not innovation. It is an extraction.
Trust is not something you add later because it looks good on a website. It has to be built into the foundation. If a woman uses technology to understand her vaginal health, fertility, or cycle, she should know her information is handled with respect. Not only because the law requires it, but because ethically it is the only right way to build in this space. A product can look beautiful, the app can be elegant, and the algorithm can sound impressive. But if the woman behind the information does not feel safe, the system has already failed.
Fragmentation is another major problem that receives too little attention. A woman may track symptoms in one app, receive blood results from one clinic, have ultrasound reports from elsewhere, and then sit in front of a doctor, trying to explain everything from memory. The body is connected, but the information surrounding it is not. Clinicians are often asked to make important decisions based on isolated measurements and incomplete context, even though reproductive physiology changes across hours, days, and cycles, not just in a single moment.
Interoperability matters. It means reproductive health information should be structured to safely connect with clinical systems, research environments, and care pathways when the woman gives permission. Not locked away. Not scattered across platforms. Connected in a way that can actually support better care.
There is a real difference between collecting data from women and building systems for them. One takes. The other gives something back: insight, context, earlier understanding, and a better chance of identifying patterns that a single appointment would never catch. Women should know what is measured, why it is measured, how it is used, and what they get in return. They deserve real control, not just a long consent form that nobody has time to read.
The future of FemTech will depend on longitudinal data, diverse datasets, and clinically validated insights. But that future is only acceptable if women remain at its center. Not as users to be tracked, but as people whose trust has to be earned, and whose health deserves to be genuinely understood.
Read the full publication in Frontiers in Global Women's Health here.
Roswitha Verwer
Founder & CEO YON E