The Future of FemTech (And Why Who Designs It Matters)

FemTech gets talked about a lot now.

Usually in the language of growth and opportunity. New platforms, new tools, new solutions designed to support women. It’s framed as progress, and in many ways it is. More attention, more funding, more acknowledgement that women’s health and lives deserve better systems.

But underneath all of that sits a quieter question that doesn’t get asked often enough.

Who is actually designing these tools?

And what do they believe a woman’s life looks like?

Because design is never neutral. Every product carries assumptions about time, attention, emotional capacity, and what’s reasonable to ask of someone. Those assumptions shape how a tool feels to use, not just what it does. When they don’t match real life, the result isn’t just inconvenience. It’s friction. Fatigue. Another small demand placed on women to adapt themselves to something that was never built with them fully in mind.

A lot of technology aimed at women still assumes an ideal user. Someone with uninterrupted time. Someone who can show up consistently, stay regulated, and engage on cue. Someone whose life already has space built into it.

That version of a woman exists mostly in pitch decks.

Real life is fragmented. It happens in between responsibilities, interruptions, and internal negotiations that don’t make it into product briefs. Support, if it’s going to mean anything, has to work inside that reality rather than asking women to rise above it.

This is where who designs FemTech really matters.

Lived experience changes the questions you ask at the beginning. It changes what you notice, what feels heavy, what feels unnecessary, and what actually helps. You start thinking less about features and more about how something lands. About whether it reduces load or quietly adds to it. About whether it leaves someone feeling clearer afterwards, or more behind than when they started.

Empathy alone isn’t enough. You can understand women conceptually and still design systems that expect them to override themselves. Proximity matters. So does humility. So does being willing to accept that not everything needs to be optimised, gamified, or turned into a habit.

The future of FemTech, at least the kind that will last, isn’t about layering more onto women’s lives. It’s about restraint. It’s about knowing when a tool should step back rather than demand attention. It’s about creating things that don’t require perfect conditions to be useful.

Support doesn’t always look like answers. Sometimes it looks like somewhere to think. Somewhere that doesn’t rush you. Somewhere that allows uncertainty without trying to tidy it up too quickly.

When women design for women, these nuances tend to appear more naturally. Not because women are inherently better designers, but because lived reality sharpens your sense of what matters. You start designing for sustainability rather than novelty. For real days rather than ideal ones. You care about what happens after the interaction is over, when someone goes back to the rest of their life.

FemTech doesn’t need to be louder. It needs to be more honest.

Honest about how lives are actually lived, about how much women are already carrying, and about the fact that support should make life easier to inhabit, not harder to manage.

If the future of FemTech is going to mean anything, it has to start there.

And maybe that’s the reflection worth sitting with.

When you look at the tools designed for you, do they ask you to stretch to meet them, or do they meet you where you already are?

That answer usually tells you more than any feature list ever could.