Pushing forward design for women and femtech devices
Published: March 2025
Zoe Hill, Marketing Lead
Last year for International Women’s Day, I shared a piece on ‘designing for women: exploring femtech solutions to close the gender health gap’. Researching that piece uncovered some alarming insights about the challenges women face in healthcare, insights that not only strengthened my resolve to back change but also reinforced our internal commitment to designing for women.
I encourage you to revisit that article to understand the scope of these challenges.
This year, I want to shift the conversation toward action: how do we design for women and push femtech forward?
Femtech market
Looking at femtech companies over the past decade, that there were just nine UK femtech companies in 2013, growing to 58 in 2023, a staggering 544% increase in companies (source: Beauhurst).
The pandemic led to a surge in femtech innovations, with access to healthcare a key reason behind this. The nation was locked down and hospitals were overrun with patients. Women’s healthcare conditions became an even lower priority for hospitals, leading to a higher demand for women-focused healthcare tools.
Despite this momentum, large medtech companies seem to be slow to engage in this rapidly expanding sector. Many have only a few products targeting conditions primarily affecting women.
Instead, market growth is driven by small, emerging players meeting the demand (source: ZS).
As a medical device design consultancy, we’re passionate about user-centric design and are uniquely positioned to bridge this gap. With half the global population spending an average of nine years in poor health (!), we see an urgent opportunity to design for women. Here’s how we can work with small to large players to co-design devices in this space:
Types of femtech devices
While our capabilities extend beyond these areas, the following are some of the most common types of femtech products and devices (sources: Femtech Insider and Beauhurst) where we can provide our expertise:
- Wearable medical devices
- Diagnostics and AI-driven health solutions
- App connectivity and digital health platforms
Femtech areas to disrupt
Many well-known femtech solutions focus on fertility, pregnancy, and period tracking. We should also be looking to disrupt areas that are ‘under-the-radar’ such as:
- Pelvic organ prolapse
- Miscarriage and preterm birth
- Incontinence
- Osteoporosis
- Urinary tract infections (UTIs)
- End-of-life care
How do we achieve this together?
Bringing a femtech product or solution to market is a complex process that requires specialised expertise at multiple stages. That’s where we step in, whether you need end-to-end development or a flexible extension of your team. Our support ranges across:
- Co-designing a full medical device project tailored to women’s health needs.
- Providing user experience and design expertise for seamless app connectivity.
- Offering regulatory expertise to navigate compliance challenges.
- Supporting training, packaging, and IFU (Instructions for Use) development.
How do we design for women and push femtech forward?
For a femtech development to be effective, it must be laser-focused on the unique needs of the specific user. There must be an avoidance of unconscious bias in the process, and a design understanding for all women, including those from different cultural, socioeconomic and generational groups.
A user-centric design perspective is crucial. Empathy and sensitivity are key to the nature of femtech products with privacy, comfort and discretion at the forefront. Validating this through research and user studies, we can guarantee that the correct level of representation reflects the unique and underserved needs of women. We can bridge the gap to move femtech forward.
If you would like to discuss any of these points further, please contact our Business Development Manager, Holly Milston.
Or I’ll be attending FemHealth Integrates on Tuesday 18 March where I’ll be there to chat and to hear and learn about the latest developments in FemHealth.
