What If the Problem With Femtech Was Never the Technology?

By Roswitha Verwer, Founder and CEO of YON E

There is a pattern in health innovation I have watched repeat itself for years. A team of brilliant people develops a product for women. They run the technical validation. They clear regulatory hurdles. They launch. And then the product sits unused, or worse, it reaches the wrong women in the wrong way and quietly erodes the trust it was supposed to build.

Not always incompetence. Something more structural: we build first, then ask women what they think. Sometimes we don't ask at all.

At YON E, we recently published a framework in Frontiers in Global Women's Health that addresses exactly this. One of its four pillars covers something that sounds obvious but is rarely applied rigorously in femtech: human-centered, culturally responsive co-design. Let me explain what that actually means and why I think it is the most underestimated challenge in this space.

Design is not neutral

When you build a wearable, a diagnostic tool, or a health app, every decision reflects assumptions about who will use it, where they live, how comfortable they are discussing their body, and what they already understand about their reproductive health. Those assumptions are rarely made explicit. They get baked into interfaces, language choices, the physical form of a device, which languages it supports, and whether it requires a smartphone that costs several hundred euros.

A woman in Amsterdam navigating her fertility journey has different literacy, infrastructure, and cultural context than a woman in rural Kenya or a 52-year-old managing perimenopause in a system that barely acknowledges that stage of life exists. A tool that serves one of them well will fail the others, not because the science is wrong, but because no one asked.

Stigma is not a soft problem

The femtech industry often dances around this, so I will say it directly: cultural barriers are not secondary to technical ones. 

Stigma around menstruation, pelvic pain, and vaginal health does not disappear because a product is scientifically valid. It shapes whether a woman will use the product at all, whether she feels safe entering her data, and whether she trusts that her information will not be judged or used against her.

I grew up understanding what it means to carry silence. The women I knew early in life taught me that the gap between what a service promises and what it actually delivers to people in difficult circumstances is enormous. That gap is often cultural. It is about whether the people who built something actually imagined you when they built it. When we talk about co-design, we are talking about closing that gap on purpose.

What co-design actually requires

Our paper cites evidence from tools such as My Healthy Pregnancy and My Decision, which used participatory design methods with diverse user groups and demonstrated measurable improvements in trust, engagement, and clinical relevance. It works.

Real co-design means involving women from different geographies, with diverse health histories, languages, and relationships with healthcare, from the very beginning. It means building community partnerships in lower-resource settings rather than treating those settings as afterthoughts. It means measuring cultural acceptability alongside clinical accuracy.

What we are doing differently

At YON E, we are building an infrastructure around vaginal pH and basal body temperature to give women earlier, more personalized insight into their reproductive health. Research, including work we contributed to, shows these metrics vary across ethnic groups, which matters enormously for clinical accuracy. Comfort with intravaginal devices differs. The framing of "monitoring your body" lands differently depending on someone's history with healthcare, whether they have been heard, dismissed, or harmed by it before.

Those realities inform how we build. We don't have all the answers yet. But we are committed to asking the right questions with the right people before assuming we know what women need. That is what it means to build femtech that actually fulfills its promise.

We are at an early and critical stage of building something that I believe the women's health space genuinely needs. If that resonates with you as an investor, let's talk.

Roswitha Verwer 

Founder & CEO YON E 

This post is part of a series based on our publication "Aligning Femtech Innovation With Equity: A Strategic Framework for Real World Impact," published in Frontiers in Global Women's Health (2026).

Read the full publication in Frontiers in Global Women's Health here.