FemTech, short for “female technology,” refers to technology-driven products and services designed to improve health outcomes for people with female biology. The term was coined in 2016 by Ida Tin, the founder of the period-tracking app Clue, and the sector has since grown into a global market valued at roughly $39 billion in 2024. It spans everything from fertility wearables and menopause platforms to at-home cervical cancer screening devices.
What FemTech Actually Covers
The category is broader than most people expect. FemTech includes products addressing menstrual health, fertility, pregnancy and postpartum care, pelvic and sexual health, menopause, and contraception. It also includes tools focused on conditions that affect women disproportionately or differently, like osteoporosis and cardiovascular disease. The common thread is a consumer-facing technology component: an app, a wearable sensor, a connected device, or a digital platform that puts health data and decision-making closer to the user.
Products range from simple period-tracking apps to medical-grade devices with regulatory approval. In 2025, the FDA approved the Teal Wand, an at-home self-collection device for cervical cancer screening available by prescription for people aged 25 to 65. That approval was backed by the largest U.S. comparative study of its kind, and it signals where the industry is heading: regulated, clinically validated tools that replace or supplement traditional clinic visits.
Fertility and Cycle Tracking
Fertility wearables are one of the most visible corners of FemTech. Many work by monitoring body temperature to detect ovulation. Traditional basal body temperature (BBT) measurement, where you take your temperature orally the moment you wake up, catches a temperature shift in only about 23% of ovulatory cycles. Wrist-worn sensors that track skin temperature continuously during sleep detect that shift in roughly 62% of cycles, nearly three times as often.
When either method does detect a temperature shift, both are similarly reliable: the probability that ovulation actually occurred is about 85-86%. The difference is that wearables catch the signal far more frequently, which makes them more practical for people trying to identify their fertile window. Neither method is perfect, though. Wrist sensors also produce more false positives, flagging a shift when ovulation hasn’t happened about 9% of the time compared to about 4% for traditional thermometers.
Symptom Checkers for Chronic Conditions
Conditions like endometriosis, PCOS, and uterine fibroids affect a large proportion of people who menstruate, yet diagnosis often takes years. FemTech apps are trying to shorten that gap. Flo, a period-tracking app with over 58 million monthly active users, has built symptom-checker chatbots for endometriosis, fibroids, and PCOS. These tools ask conversational questions about your symptoms and cross-reference that information with data you’ve already logged, like cycle length, cramp severity, and mood patterns.
The chatbot then tells you whether your symptoms strongly match a particular condition or not, and generates a summary you can download and bring to a doctor’s appointment. The goal isn’t to replace a diagnosis. It’s to give you a clearer picture of your own patterns so that conversations with a provider start further along. Apps like these can track cycle details over months or years, building a health report that captures trends no single office visit could reveal.
Menopause and Digital Health Programs
Menopause care has historically been underserved, and digital platforms are filling some of that gap. Current programs typically bundle educational content, virtual classes, peer support groups, and telehealth access to gynecologists, mental health providers, nutritionists, and physical therapists into a single app. Some include cognitive behavioral therapy lessons, mindfulness exercises, and AI chatbots for on-demand guidance. Providers within these platforms can prescribe hormonal or nonhormonal treatments when appropriate.
One such program measured user symptoms at enrollment and again three months later using a standardized menopause rating scale, and found meaningful reductions in symptom burden. The appeal of these platforms is consolidation: instead of cobbling together separate appointments with different specialists, users get coordinated care through one interface.
Pelvic Floor Devices
Pelvic floor dysfunction, including urinary incontinence and pelvic organ prolapse, is common and frequently undertreated. FemTech devices in this space typically use biofeedback, meaning they measure your muscle activity during pelvic floor exercises and give you real-time guidance through a connected app. In clinical trials, women using biofeedback-assisted training showed significant improvements over those who received only basic lifestyle and behavioral instructions. Improvements appeared in urgency symptoms, daily pad use, and quality-of-life scores. Some devices also showed that users built pelvic muscle strength faster, with measurable differences within four weeks of starting therapy.
Market Growth and Investment
The FemTech market is projected to reach $97 billion by 2030, growing at about 16% annually. Global investment hit $2.2 billion in 2024. That sounds like a lot, but it represents only 8.5% of total digital health funding, a gap that reflects how recently this sector has been taken seriously by investors. The growth trajectory is steep, though, and the expansion from wellness apps into clinically validated, FDA-cleared devices is drawing more institutional money.
Data Privacy Risks
FemTech apps collect some of the most sensitive health data imaginable: menstrual cycles, sexual activity, pregnancy history, fertility treatments, and emotional health. That data carries real legal risk. Reproductive health information could theoretically be used in prosecutions in jurisdictions that restrict certain types of reproductive care, including abortion.
In the U.S., there is no comprehensive federal privacy law governing FemTech data. HIPAA, the main health privacy law, applies only to covered entities like hospitals and insurers. Most FemTech companies don’t qualify. That means your period-tracking data may have fewer legal protections than your hospital records. Making matters more complicated, the servers storing your data may be located in a different country than you are, subject to entirely different privacy laws.
The EU offers stronger protections under GDPR, which treats health data and data about a person’s sex life as special categories requiring explicit consent. But even under GDPR, FemTech isn’t specifically regulated. Before using any reproductive health app, it’s worth reading the privacy policy to understand where your data is stored, who can access it, and whether you can delete it permanently.