Does the Term “FemTech” Unintentionally Marginalize Women’s Healthcare?
By Roswitha Verwer, Founder and CEO of YON E
I think this is one of those questions we have to be honest enough to ask, even if the answer is not simple. FemTech has created enormous value for women’s health. I do not think we can deny that. But we also need to ask what happens when women’s healthcare remains separated from the rest of healthcare for too long.
FemTech was needed because, for many years, women’s health did not have the visibility, funding or recognition it deserved. Before the term existed, the space was scattered. Fertility was discussed in one room, menstrual health in another, menopause somewhere else, and vaginal health was often not discussed openly at all. Too much of women’s health was treated as fragmented, uncomfortable, or secondary.
Naming the sector helped change that. It gave investors a category they could understand, founders a language they could use, and the media a way to finally point to the problem. It helped turn scattered conversations into something that looked and felt like a real sector. And when a market has been overlooked for decades, that matters. Sometimes, naming something is the first step toward getting people to take it seriously.
I have seen this myself while building in vaginal and reproductive health. You quickly realize how much silence still exists around the female body. I have been in rooms where the technology was understood, but the words around the female body still made people uncomfortable. Vaginal health, discharge, infections, pH, miscarriage, cycle changes, and hormonal patterns should not be difficult words in healthcare. They are healthcare words.
That is why I understand why FemTech became necessary. It forced attention onto a space that mainstream healthcare and medtech had not made enough room for. It helped women’s health enter investor rooms, media conversations, and innovation programs with greater weight. It also gave founders and researchers a stronger collective voice, and I think that was important. When you are building in a space that has been underfunded and under-researched for so long, you need language that creates movement.
But I do not believe the long-term goal should be permanent separation. The goal should not be that women’s health stays forever in a separate category while the rest of healthcare continues to be treated as the default. FemTech is powerful when it creates visibility, but it can become limiting if it keeps women’s healthcare inside a smaller box in the long run.
Women are not a niche population. Reproductive health is not a side category. Vaginal health, hormonal health, fertility, cycle health, and menopause are not soft topics or lifestyle extras. They affect diagnosis, treatment, prevention, mental well-being, relationships, fertility journeys, chronic disease pathways, and healthcare costs. These topics belong at the center of healthcare, not beside it.
The future of women’s health should be much more integrated. It should be part of clinical workflows, medical device development, diagnostics, reimbursement conversations, research, and investment decisions. Not as an add-on. Not as a pink version of healthcare. And not as something that needs to be made more comfortable before it can be taken seriously.
At YON E, we think about this a lot. We are building because reproductive health still works with too much uncertainty. The body changes continuously, but care often relies on isolated measurements, symptom reporting, and retrospective understanding. That creates a gap between what is happening biologically and what can actually be measured or understood at the right moment.
That uncertainty has consequences. Women can spend years dealing with irregular cycles, recurring infections, pain, failed attempts to conceive, or symptoms that are treated without being properly understood. Many women receive attention only after the problem has escalated. By then, they have already spent years waiting, guessing, repeating tests, and adapting their lives around unanswered questions.
This is why I believe it has to be about changing the care infrastructure. We need earlier insight, better data, more research around female physiology, stronger clinical integration and more transparency for women and clinicians. We need systems that do not wait until symptoms become urgent before they start listening.
So does the term FemTech unintentionally marginalize women’s healthcare? I think it can, if we allow it to become the final box that women’s health stays inside. But I also believe the term helped create the visibility we needed to even have this conversation. Without it, many companies, researchers, and founders may have continued working in isolation, fighting for attention without a shared language.
For me, the answer is not to reject the term. I still think it has value. But we need to be very aware of what we are building with it, and where we eventually want to go. FemTech was necessary to make women’s health visible. The future is to make women’s health unavoidable.
Instead of ending the conversation at FemTech, we need to use it as a bridge. The real work is building healthcare systems in which women’s health is no longer treated as separate from healthcare itself. That is the conversation we need to keep pushing forward.
If we want women’s health to move from visibility to true integration, we need to keep challenging its place in healthcare.
To explore more of our research on women’s health, equity, and innovation, read our latest publication in Frontiers in Global Women’s Health here:
Link: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/global-womens-health/articles/10.3389/fgwh.2026.1762741/full
Roswitha Verwer
Founder & CEO YON E