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Using and Interpreting FemTech Data: (Self-)Knowledge, Empowerment, and Sovereignty

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Abstract

The emergence of FemTech has been hailed for addressing the failure of male-dominated medical and technological industries to take women’s health seriously. Wearable technology (e.g. smartwatches, bands, clothing) is often presented as taking health concerns that specifically affect women into account, and as providing women with self-monitored health solutions based on their lived experience. However, FemTech has been criticized for reproducing and exacerbating intersectional marginalizations and inequalities within healthcare in terms of access and biometric surveillance. Although FemTech is ostensibly supposed to address the needs of all women, it remains somewhat unclear—in terms of design as well as usage—exactly whose issues are being addressed, who is figured as the user, and therefore whose interests are being privileged.

This chapter confronts the question ‘Who is FemTech for?’ by focusing on the practices and knowledges involved in wearable FemTech. By combining approaches from the Philosophy of Medicine and feminist-inflected Science and Technology Studies (STS), we seek to move beyond questions of gender bias in design/production and access barriers towards examining issues of data interpretation and usage in wearable FemTech.

First, while acknowledging that access to technology itself is crucial, we expand the notion of access to include access to the data collected by wearable FemTech, the development of capacities for interpreting this data, and hence being able to benefit from the use of this technology in its full extent. Looking at the use of wearable FemTech to track health, we show that this technology currently targets only specific groups of women—and yet, even for those who have access to the technology, interpreting data and reaping their benefits are difficult and create different types and levels of inequality.

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  1. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Stefano Canali & Chris Hesselbein

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  1. Stefano Canali
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  1. Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University, Coventry, UK

    Lindsay Anne Balfour

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Canali, S., Hesselbein, C. (2023). Using and Interpreting FemTech Data: (Self-)Knowledge, Empowerment, and Sovereignty. In: Balfour, L.A. (eds) FemTech. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5605-0_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-5605-0_13

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