Ida Tin, founder of menstrual-tracking app Clue, encountered the same problem when she started trying to find an alternative to traditional contraception. ‘Menstruation is listed as one of the vital signs of the body,’ she tells me. ‘The same as: do you have a heart rate, are you breathing, what’s your body temperature. It’s a really strong indication of your health.’ And yet ‘it’s also an area where there is so much taboo and misinformation.’ As for family planning, Tin points out that ‘there’s been very little innovation since the pill came out in the 1950s. I mean, in the history of technology that’s a really long time.’
Tin set up Clue because she wanted to ‘enable women to take control of their own body and lives’, but the motivation was also personal. She’d tried the pill, but, like many women, she’d had side effects. ‘And I hadn’t had any children so an IUD wasn’t ideal. So I’d been using condoms for fifteen years.’ In frustration, Tin started looking at patent databases, but ‘everything was about putting hormones into the body’, she tells me. ‘And I felt it was a very non-data-driven approach to this problem. It made me a little bit provoked, like: why is it that nobody has given this some serious effort and consideration? It’s a pretty basic need for humankind.’
When she had the idea for the menstrual-tracking app there were only a couple of period-tracking apps available. ‘And they were very first-generation products – basically a calendar that can count to twenty-eight. And if only our biology were that simple’, she laughs. After a decade of being in the sector, Tin says, the science is still riddled with gaps. ‘There really is a lack of data,’ she tells me. Menstruation has been ‘not just overlooked, but borderline actively ignored. We do a lot of work together with science institutions because there are really a lot of blank areas on the academic map. Like, what’s even considered a normal bleeding pattern for an adolescent woman? That’s one of the things we’ve been working on with Stanford. Science just doesn’t know what’s normal.’
Given the male domination of VCs, data gaps are perhaps particularly problematic when it comes to tech aimed at women. ‘If you don’t have good data,’ explains Tin ‘it’s harder to open people’s minds that something might be an issue if they don’t encounter it themselves.’ Boler agrees. ‘We did talk to some VC investors who didn’t believe [Elvie] was an interesting proposition,’ she tells me.
The other problem women face when it comes to getting investment is ‘pattern recognition’.13 A corollary of ‘culture fit’, pattern recognition sounds data-driven, but it’s basically just a fancy term for looks-similar-to-something-that-has-worked-in-the-past – where ‘something’ could be white-male-founder-who-dropped-out-of-Harvard-and-wears-hoodies. Genuinely: I dated a guy who was working on a start-up and he referenced this uniform when he was talking about getting funding. Hoody-based pattern recognition is real. And this emphasis on recognising a typically male pattern may be exacerbated by the common belief that tech is a field where inborn ‘genius’ (which, as we’ve seen, is stereotypically associated with men14) is more important than working hard (hence fetishising Harvard dropouts).
It all feels rather catch-22ish. In a field where women are at a disadvantage specifically because they are women (and therefore can’t hope to fit a stereotypically male ‘pattern’), data will be particularly crucial for female entrepreneurs. And yet it’s the female entrepreneurs who are less likely to have it, because they are more likely to be trying to make products for women. For whom we lack data.
Still, some do manage tob break through. Tin and Boler got their funding (Boler in part from Woskow). And now these specific data gaps are starting to be filled. Before they launched, Chiaro had over 150 women test their pelvic-floor trainer, Boler tells me. ‘But we now have data on over a million workouts and we have a lot of measurements around pelvic-floor health which just haven’t existed before.’ This, she says, is the ‘exciting thing about wearable tech: giving people better information about their bodies so they can make more informed decisions’.
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But while Boler’s and Tin’s products may give women better information about their bodies, the same can’t be said for all new tech, wearable or otherwise. In the tech world, the implicit assumption that men are the default human remains king. When Apple launched its health-monitoring system with much fanfare in 2014, it boasted a ‘comprehensive’ health tracker.15 It could track blood pressure; steps taken; blood alcohol level; even molybdenum (nope, me neither) and copper intake. But as many women pointed out at the time, they forgot one crucial detail: a period tracker.16
This was not to be the only time Apple completely forgot about at least 50% of their users. When Apple launched their AI, Siri, she (ironically) could find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers, but not abortion providers.17 Siri could help you if you’d had a heart attack, but if you told her you’d been raped, she replied ‘I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’18 These are basic errors that surely would have been caught by a team with enough women on it – that is, by a team without a gender data gap.
Products marketed as gender-neutral that are in fact biased towards men are rife across the (male-dominated) tech industry. From smartwatches that are too big for women’s wrists,19 to map apps that fail to account for women’s desire for ‘safest’ in addition to ‘fastest’ routes; to ‘measure how good you are at sex’ apps called ‘iThrust’20 and ‘iBang’21 (and yes the in-built assumptions of what constitutes good sex are exactly what the names imply), the tech industry is rife with examples of tech that forget about women. Virtual reality (VR) headsets that are too big for the average woman’s
