The Dark Side of Femtech: Why Your App Isn’t Helping Your Health
Many apps are optimized more for engagement than for genuine clinical value.
Femtech apps promise empowerment. Track your cycle, optimize your health, and finally close the gender data gap. But beneath glossy dashboards and trend graphs, many of these apps prioritize headlines, prestige, and data collection over clinically meaningful insights.
Promises vs. Reality
The femtech industry has exploded over the past decade, touting the ability to close the gender data gap and deliver personalized healthcare solutions for women. Marketing often frames these apps as revolutionary tools that transform your data into actionable health insights.
The reality?
Many apps are optimized more for engagement than for genuine clinical value. Features like mood tracking, fertility predictions, or environmental correlations are compelling, but they often don’t translate into real improvements in health outcomes.
Femtech apps often collect vast quantities of data but prioritize research questions that are publishable or marketable rather than those that directly improve patient care.
Case Study: Clue
Take Clue, one of the most well-known period-tracking apps. Its research highlights correlations between environmental factors, like air pollution or lunar cycles, and menstruation. While fascinating from a data perspective, these insights rarely address urgent health needs like hormonal disorders, endometriosis, or reproductive health conditions that require clinical intervention.
In other words, the app is asking: “Can we predict when your period will align with the moon?” instead of “Can we help detect a serious condition early?”
Clinical Relevance Analysis
The gap between data collection and clinical relevance is significant. Femtech apps often collect vast quantities of data but prioritize research questions that are publishable or marketable rather than those that directly improve patient care.
Women’s health research historically suffers from underfunding and bias. Femtech promised to correct that, but if apps continue to focus on “interesting correlations” over actionable diagnostics, the gender data gap remains a gap in meaningful health insights.
The Emotional Angle
It’s not just a matter of science, it’s personal. Women are logging intimate details about their cycles, symptoms, and moods, trusting apps with highly sensitive health information. Yet, much of that data is either siloed for research marketing or used to improve app features rather than health outcomes. This creates a sense of empowerment without tangible impact.
Meaningful Impact
To truly help women, apps must be evaluated not by user downloads or media buzz, but by their measurable health impact.
Ask questions like:
Does the app help detect conditions earlier?
Does it provide actionable, clinically validated recommendations?
Are insights tailored to improving health outcomes, not just engagement metrics?
At Sheranked, we prioritize apps that meet these standards, separating hype from health.