Because The Futureis Female

According to research by App Annie, Australians on average use 36 different apps per month, six more than the global average. Needless to say, we have never had so many tools or so much information at our fingertips.

FemTech is one industry that has been on the rise in the past five years and is essentially the rise of technology geared towards improving women’s lives and finding solutions to female-specific problems. At the moment, much of the technology revolves around healthcare, however there is a larger scope for products and services that work specifically with women in mind, not to mention the opportunities for female entrepreneurs to step up in an industry that has previously been male-dominated.

The New Yorker recently interviewed one of the pioneers of the ‘FemTech’ movement, Ida Tin, who created an app called ‘Clue’ which is a period and ovulation tracker. She mentioned that in the early days she struggled to get investors on board as many of the people she pitched to were male and said they would not invest in a product they wouldn’t use themselves.

Shockingly, only 9 per cent of decision makers at US-based firms are female (according to angel.co), and this means that female problems often receive far less attention and funding than they deserve. Why? Because most investors go for ideas that they can personally identify with, and if 91 per cent of the industry is male, you can begin to see why female issues often get pushed to the side.

In an article by Smart Company, Shruthi Parakkal from Frost & Sullivan said, “women’s health is often side-lined as a niche market; however, tides are changing, and this can be attributed to the rise of the ‘she-economy’, where women are not only playing an increasingly influential role across the healthcare continuum, but also have higher purchasing power.”

“For instance, the economic contribution of women is expected to outpace the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of China and the United States by 2020.”