Women’s Health Innovation is Responding to Our Collective Call to Action
How women's voices are driving transformative innovation in healthcare and reshaping the future of women's health.
Women’s Health Innovation Is Responding to Our Collective Call to Action
In honor of Women’s History Month, we should discuss an important and deeply disturbing part of our history.
Women make up half of the global population and influence or control the purchase of approximately 80% of health insurance policies in the United States (Nielsen Healthcare Consumer Report — https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2015/the-power-of-the-purse-healthcare/).
You would think that this would motivate healthcare companies to address our needs and concerns. But that’s not what has actually been happening.
Historically, women’s health has been significantly underfunded, meaning the amount of money spent to develop new treatments, tools, and medications specifically for women has been far less than what has been spent on men.
(Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Women’s Health Innovation Gap Report — https://www.gatesfoundation.org/ideas/media-center/press-releases/2023/05/womens-health-innovation-opportunity)
In addition, bringing new procedures to market—in other words, making them available for women—often takes significantly more time and costs significantly more money compared with technologies introduced to treat male-dominated or male-only conditions (McKinsey Health Institute Women’s Health Report — https://www.mckinsey.com/mhi/our-insights/closing-the-womens-health-gap).
But this finally appears to be improving. And it’s because of all of us.
Over the past several years, investment in women’s health, sometimes referred to as “FemTech,” has surged. Funding for innovations designed for women has reached record levels in recent years, increasing 314% since 2018, which represents billions of additional dollars in funding dedicated to women’s health (Silicon Valley Bank Innovation in Women’s Health Report — https://www.svb.com/trends-insights/reports/womens-health-report/).
This shift didn’t happen by accident. It happened because women began speaking up.
In October 2017, actress Alyssa Milano encouraged women to share their stories of sexual harassment using the hashtag #MeToo, following allegations of sexual impropriety against film producer Harvey Weinstein. What followed was a global movement that inspired millions of women to raise their collective voices about experiences that had long been ignored or minimized (Pew Research Center MeToo Movement Study — https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/10/11/metoo/).
And the volume grew so loud that it could no longer be ignored.
The movement did more than transform conversations about workplace safety and gender equity. It helped catalyze a broader cultural shift—one in which women began openly discussing issues that had historically been treated as taboo, including menstruation, menopause, sexual health, and gynecologic care.
Investors, entrepreneurs, and clinicians began paying closer attention to the gaps in women’s healthcare as they realized that women would no longer remain silent and were demanding better, more tailored innovation.
The result has been a wave of new companies focused on fertility, menopause, pelvic health, maternal care, and many other areas of women’s health (FemTech Analytics Market Report — https://www.femtechanalytics.com/reports).
Yet despite this progress, one symbol of how slowly women’s healthcare evolves remains largely unchanged: the vaginal speculum.
The device used in nearly every gynecologic exam today traces its design back to the 1800s—roughly the time of the Civil War. This was before there were even cars on the road.
Early versions of the modern speculum are often attributed to Dr. J. Marion Sims in the mid-1800s, whose early gynecologic experiments were conducted on enslaved Black women without anesthesia or consent (American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology Historical Review — https://www.ajog.org/article/S0002-9378(18)30359-0/fulltext).
(PBS American Experience History of the Speculum — https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/cancer-detectives-brief-history-speculum/)
This speculum was not designed with the needs of women in mind. For many of us, the exam is uncomfortable, anxiety-provoking, and sometimes even painful.
Many women skip their screening exams because of this discomfort. When screenings are delayed, medical issues are often discovered only after they have progressed to more advanced stages (American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Screening Guidelines — https://www.acog.org/womens-health).
Finally, we are seeing some new innovation in this space.
#ItsAboutTime #FemTech #WomensHealthInnovation #HealthcareEquity #RedesignHealthcare
Several women engineers have begun focusing more attention on innovation for women, and there are several new speculum designs currently in development. Only one of these designs was developed by a gynecologist with over 30 years of clinical experience, working alongside female engineers.
The most promising innovations understand both sides of the exam. They improve the experience for the patient while also making examinations easier, safer, and more efficient for clinicians. When exams are easier for doctors to perform, they are often shorter and less painful for patients.
Meet Gynovent.
Gynovent is a women’s health company dedicated to transforming how women experience clinical care. By prioritizing comfort, safety, and patient dignity, this device reimagines an experience endured by more than 90 million women every year in the United States alone (CDC Women’s Preventive Health Statistics — https://www.cdc.gov/womenshealth/).
It doesn’t just improve an exam—it strengthens trust, increases engagement, and sets a new expectation for how women should be treated in clinical spaces.
At the heart of this work is a simple but powerful vision: women’s health products should be scientifically rigorous, deeply respectful of the female body, and designed to scale across healthcare and consumer markets.
By rethinking both the essential and the everyday, we are building a platform—and a movement—that sets a new gold standard for women’s health. Because the future of women’s healthcare should be built with women and their doctors at the center of the design process.
Women’s health may finally be entering a new era, garnering the attention and investment it has always deserved. The same collective voice that helped ignite a movement for accountability is now helping drive innovation in healthcare.
We are redesigning women’s healthcare together, and every voice that demands better care moves this progress forward.
Join the movement. Follow us and be part of the future of women’s healthcare.
#WomensHealth #FemTech #WomenInMedicine #HealthcareInnovation #FutureOfHealthcare
