A further barrier to investment in women’s health has been the ‘taboo’ around issues such as menstruation and menopause, making it more difficult to get products in these areas to market.

It’s not just in the health sector that the differences between male and female bodies have been overlooked. Technology around car safety has long been based on male crash test dummies, with the result that women are more likely to sustain injuries in car accidents.

Mahn believes these discrepancies present an opportunity for women inventors. She has heard inspiring personal stories which have led women to create incredible femtech products to help other women.

“If you put women together in a group, they will find solutions for women’s health issues,” she says.

“Women react differently to drugs, women present differently for different diseases than men. If you put women together, they will invent for women.”

However, Tio cautions that a lack of knowledge of IP rights could be holding some female inventors back.

“Even with the continued rise of femtech, we still don’t see a lot of focus on getting patents,” she says.

“We see a lot of potential, a lot of untapped space, for women inventors to obtain intellectual property rights in these areas that we haven’t seen historically.”

Mahn says she has encountered an inherent lack of knowledge of patents and their value among women, particularly women of colour, which she attributes to a predominately white male leadership in the IP industry and lack of mentorships forming.

Tio concurs: “You need that extra push and exposure from both government and private companies to make an effort to equalise the playing field when it comes to obtaining IP rights.”

High-tech trend

The potential for IP rights in femtech is significant as there are so many products being developed, spanning multiple areas of women’s health.

Mears, a lead author of Mewburn Ellis’s report into femtech, says the most interesting finding of the research was the diversity, and variety of innovation in the sector. This includes a large number of companies incorporating smartphone capabilities into their products, such as Bristol startup Emm which has developed a smart menstrual cup that has sensors to detect volume and flow, and syncs with a user’s phone app.

This kind of innovation “has a great capability to give women insights into their own personal health that they can compare to the general population, in ways that weren’t previously available”, explains Mears.

His colleague and co-lead author, Rachel Oxley, partner and patent attorney at Mewburn Ellis, agrees that the sector is becoming more high-tech.

“In the past, a lot of the innovation was in fairly low-tech products, such as sanitary products. Increasingly we’re seeing developments in more high-tech areas,” she says.

Naturally some of these high-tech areas involve artificial intelligence (AI), which is changing the shape of so many industries. In femtech, its uses include enabling more accurate diagnosis of breast cancer, and powering women’s health platforms such as Flo Health.

As well as becoming more high-tech, women’s healthcare products are becoming more sustainable, with the development of plastic-free menstrual products and ‘eco’ pregnancy tests on the market such as Hoopsy, which is 99% paper and more than 99% accurate.

Global phenomenon

Femtech innovations are providing women with not only more choice, but the option to manage their health remotely. UK-based femtech firm Elvie developed a device for pelvic floor health that women can use at home, and secured a deal to make the product available through the NHS in 2018.

Swiss medtech firm Ava created the first FDA-cleared fertility tracker for ovulation prediction, which it said in 2021 had helped around 40,000 women to become pregnant. In France, the Omena app is designed to help women going through menopause to manage their symptoms.