Conclusion: Can the “Fempire” Strike Back?

Abstract

This volume has brought together research from all over the globe to ask the question—who is FemTech for? Significantly, the chapters here have shown that future research and innovation into the sector requires deeper thinking on issues of access, intersectionality, and equity. However, they have also demonstrated the various ways in which FemTech is flourishing at the so-called “margins.” Unlike Western and Northern markets, which are no doubt growing exponentially but where the baseline user remains the same—white, heterosexual, and middle to upper class—it is the Global South that is challenging the status quos of digital health and widening our scope of what feminine technologies mean, and include, and disrupting the market with regard to gender and sexuality, race, class, and ability. Much like Seddig argues in her chapter on the “silicon Savannah,” there is much potential in these “high need, low resource” communities (page ref). But this is not to discount, of course, the realities of those marginalized in and within white, western communities, as Roberts and Roberson note, respectively, in their chapters on AI interventions for autoimmune disease, and the surveillance of black, female bodies in sport. Indeed, even in America, where FemTech investments are highest (FemTech Analytics, 2021), there is much need to consider how the industry could benefit those traditionally excluded from technological health innovation. Within heavily industrialized nations, race, class, and gender converge in ways that make access to potentially transformative tools infinitely more complex.