What Is the Gender Health Gap?
The gender health gap describes the unfair differences in the quality of healthcare people receive based on their gender. There are lots of issues that have led to this inequality, but many people think that this is partly due to the lack of research into women’s health. In the UK alone, millions of women suffer from reproductive health issues making this health gap important to close. However, the growth of the femtech movement is providing hope as companies try to use knowledge from across many STEM fields to help. After all, finding creative solutions for real-world problems is what STEM does best!
What Is Femtech?
After co-founding ‘Clue’, a period tracking and education app for people with periods, Ida Tin invented the word ‘femtech’ in 2016. The word describes medical technologies that seek to improve women’s health specifically. They might be focused on issues faced during pregnancy or hormonal imbalances, for example.
Since then, the Femtech movement has grown a lot as companies have emerged with new ideas and more money has been invested into it. We have seen innovations emerge ranging from apps that track health and wellbeing to wearable devices that relieve pain.
What Can We Expect for the Future of Femtech?
Like many industries, Femtech is looking ahead to how it can use new technologies for good. Perhaps the biggest of these is Artificial Intelligence. Lots of us will be familiar with the use of AI to answer everyday questions. However, the growing role of AI in healthcare is less known. Already, AI is being used to discover and develop new drugs in pharmaceuticals. Meanwhile, in Femtech, research is being done into the use of AI to help screen scans for breast cancer. It has also been suggested that the data generated by the Femtech industry could help to bridge the gap in data about women’s health too.
Clearly, the future of Femtech is really exciting and will provide lots of opportunities to improve healthcare and help close the gender health gap. However, it will also be important to make sure that these products are affordable and accessible so that as many people as possible benefit from it.
This article was written by Abbey, A Stemette Society member.
