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The rise of femtech: How brands can safeguard customer data
The global femtech industry is in great shape these days, with steady annual growth having it on course to be valued at $1.186 trillion by 2027.
Though this upward momentum is great news for industry business leaders, it’s important to remember that the rise of femtech comes with higher volumes of private customer data and a greater responsibility to protect it.
Studies show that some femtech apps have misused sensitive user data, so every femtech brand must adopt and maintain effective best practices for keeping customer data safe, staying legally compliant, and developing trust in their brand.
In this post, we’ll look at six of the most important strategies femtech brands can use to safeguard their customer data.
Understand Your Legal Obligations
As digital privacy has become a bigger and bigger topic in recent years, a regulatory landscape has emerged requiring all tech companies to adhere to strict regulations when it comes to storing and using customer data.
However, when you’re operating in the femtech space, these rules become far more stringent.
Healthcare is a strictly regulated environment due to the fact that businesses are handling highly sensitive data, and you’ll need to build a thorough understanding of your business’s obligations in this area to keep your customer data safe.
If, for example, your brand’s flagship product is an app for tracking menstrual health, the personal health data gathered on your users will fall under GDPR for EU customers, and HIPAA when you’re catering to users in the United States.
Becoming intimately familiar with all the key legislation that applies to your app and the rights of its users will give you a strong starting point for understanding the obligations your tech product needs to fulfil, and the tangible steps you can take to ensure you’re fully compliant.
Create and Implement a Data Governance Strategy
Data governance strategies establish internal rules and operating procedures that help to ensure your business’s data management aligns with legal requirements and industry standards, while also enhancing your brand’s data quality, cyber security, and operational efficiency.
Your brand’s data governance strategy should be clear and accessible to employees at all echelons of your business, especially those who come into contact with sensitive customer data.
This set of rules should include clear best practices on data storage, access, usage, and deletion.
While strong data governance is crucial for all kinds of tech companies, this is especially important for femtech businesses and other firms in the healthcare space, where seemingly minor mistakes can lead to customer harm and severe legal consequences.
By having firm guidelines for who can access sensitive data, best practices for data storage and organisation, and other important variables, you’ll be able to close off potential sources of leaks and streamline the way your business uses data for a higher-quality customer experience.
Practise Robust IT Asset Management
IT asset management is a set of practices that involves tracking all your business’s physical devices, data, and software.
With effective asset management practices in place, you’ll not only make it easier to organise your equipment and data assets but also help to prevent security vulnerabilities that could potentially put your customer data at risk.
Proper IT asset management is not only important when your data and equipment are in active use at your company but also when you retire pieces of hardware that could potentially be the source of customer data leaks.
Many IT asset management services specialise in securely recycling old equipment to guarantee the destruction of sensitive data.
By creating and upholding a system where you can track all devices used to manage sensitive customer data, you’ll be able to ensure that employees leaving the company or devices being retired won’t leave sensitive data vulnerable to leaks or attacks.
Ensure You’re Only Collecting Necessary Customer Data
When many femtech leaders wonder “how can you keep data secure?”, they may be coming from a standpoint where they’ve already collected far more data than their business really needs.
Data minimisation is a crucial concept you’ll need to embrace as a femtech brand, not only to make sure you’re keeping within data protection laws but also for the practical security measures that keep your customers safe.
If, for example, you provide an app to support women’s mental health, you might need to gather data points relating to your users’ general demographics and symptom tracking in order for the technology to function.
However, for the sake of data minimisation, you should make a point to avoid collecting unnecessary data like location tracking or personal information.
Enacting policies that ensure you’re only collecting customer data that’s absolutely necessary, you’ll both respect your customers’ right to privacy and reduce your business’s overall risk of a data breach and similar issues.
Carry Out Periodic Data Audits
Regularly scheduled data audits will give you an opportunity to review the customer data that you have stored, ensuring that this aligns with relevant privacy legislation, as well as your internal security policies and data governance strategies.
With a thorough audit of the data you’re holding, you’ll be able to flag any sensitive data that needs to be deleted, while also making decisions about moving data to more secure storage assets or updating your company’s security policies to reflect changing needs.
When you’re providing femtech tools where countless users can switch from being active to inactive or back every day, scheduling periodic data audits is essential for keeping your systems clean of outdated or expired data, and minimising the potential touchpoints for leaks, breaches, and cyberattacks.
Proactively Train Your Team
Any attempts to secure femtech customer data will only be as effective as the people managing these security measures, and human error can be a major source of security inadequacies for any tech company.
To minimise these kinds of risks to your customer data, it’s crucial to make time for regular employee training, including staff who don’t directly manage data.
Make sure that these training sessions are up-to-date with the latest legislation and general cybersecurity best practices, that they aim to help everyone understand why data privacy is important in the world of femtech, and the best ways to avoid falling victim to phishing, social engineering, and other potential cyber threats.
To reinforce the issues covered in your training sessions, you might want to follow this up with additional measures such as simulated phishing scam emails sent out periodically to your staff.
These kinds of tests and the data you collect from them can help gauge how effective your security training has been, and highlight any departments, teams, or individuals who might need additional education on cybersecurity.
Protecting Customers With Robust Practices
Though the rise of femtech has had innumerable benefits for women’s health, it’s important not to lose sight of the huge volumes of customer data that drive the industry, and the potential risk that this carries.
By researching your obligations as a company, and fulfilling this with robust policies, maintenance, and training programs, you’ll be able to keep providing a great service to your customers while keeping them and your brand safe.
We hope this guide has given you a great starting point for reviewing your company’s relationship with customer data and planning your next steps towards safer, more efficient IT operations.
A new Female Health Hub launched by the English FA will support women and girls in grassroots football in England with trusted advice on health issues affecting play.
The hub brings together expert-backed guidance, practical tools and player insights in one place, giving women and girls practical advice and reassurance on female health in football.
It has four core aims: to help women and girls better understand their bodies and how female health affects performance and participation, to educate players on key health topics and when to seek further advice or support, to provide practical strategies to help navigate common female health challenges, and to help break down taboos and normalise conversations around female health in football.
Users of the hub will also be able to hear directly from members of the England women’s national team, who share their own experiences of navigating female health matters while playing at the highest level of the game.
“Our ambition is to create a game where women and girls can thrive,” said Sue Day, the FA’s director of women’s football.
“To achieve that, it’s essential that players feel supported in environments that understand and respond to their female health needs.
“We’ve heard directly from grassroots players that they want better information and support around female health, but that they often don’t know where to find it.
“The launch of the Female Health Hub marks an important step in changing the landscape.
“We want every player to feel confident in her own skin and supported without judgment, so she can feel empowered by her body, rather than held back by it.”
The platform was launched following research conducted by the FA that highlighted the need for better education and support around female health in football.
According to the FA, 88 per cent of adult players surveyed said their menstrual cycle has an impact on their ability to train or play, but 86 per cent reported they had never received education about the menstrual cycle in relation to football performance and training.
The research also found 64 per cent of women experience issues related to sports bras or breast health while playing football, despite sports bras being considered one of the most important pieces of playing kit.
Players also expressed strong interest in learning more about injury prevention, at 87 per cent, nutrition, at 84 per cent, and mental health, at 77 per cent, in relation to female health.
The first phase of the Female Health Hub focuses on three of the most requested topics: menstrual health, breast health and injury resilience, with further content to follow, including nutrition and pelvic health guidance.
The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) has referred to the women’s health strategy as a ‘missed opportunity’ to address maternity services.
The renewed strategy was released by the government this week, with the aim of putting women’s experiences at the centre of care and ensuring they are “better heard and served”.
However, the government stated that because of ongoing investigations into maternity services across the country, the strategy “does not seek to address safety in maternity and neonatal services”.
The RCM described this as a “missed opportunity” and urged the government to ensure that, following the inquiries, maternity is placed “at the very heart” of the strategy.
Gill Walton, RCM chief executive, said the college was “deeply disappointed” that maternity services “do not feature as a headline priority” in the renewed strategy.
She said: “This is a significant missed opportunity and one that is very difficult to understand.
“Pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period are not a footnote in women’s health – they are one of the most significant and consequential phases of a woman’s life.
“A strategy that treats maternity as an afterthought is not truly a women’s health strategy at all. It is exactly the kind of thinking that has allowed maternity services to reach the point they are at today.”
Walton acknowledged that the strategy contained commitments on ensuring women’s voices shape their care, on supporting families through pregnancy loss and on the principle that services should be held accountable when they fail to listen to women.
She added: “But a strategy that addresses one part of women’s health while leaving maternity care behind is only doing half the job.”
Walton urged the government to ensure that this is addressed when the ongoing investigations into maternity care conclude, with any recommendations placed “at the very heart of this strategy with the seriousness and urgency that women, families and midwives deserve”.
In the foreword to the renewed plans, health and social care secretary Wes Streeting referred to the ongoing independent National Maternity and Neonatal Investigation as action being taken by the government to improve safety in maternity services.
The strategy also refers to the new National Maternity and Neonatal Taskforce, chaired by Streeting, which aims to help deliver “safer, more equitable care” for women, babies and families.
The foreword said that, because of ongoing initiatives, it was “important that this work continues without restriction and that the government can properly respond to the findings”.
It added: “This renewed women’s health strategy therefore does not seek to address safety in maternity and neonatal services other than that related to women’s health before and during pregnancy and the actions we are taking immediately to improve maternity and neonatal care.”
The strategy does, however, include plans to prioritise health education in schools, communities and healthcare settings to “empower women” with the “knowledge and tools they need to help control their fertility” and “prepare for the best pregnancy outcomes.
It also promises to provide women with access to “safe and high-quality contraception, abortion care, fertility services, preconception care and support after pregnancy loss in convenient settings.
Article produced in association with London Pregnancy Clinic and Jeen Health
For the majority of couples planning a pregnancy, genetic testing is not something they think about until a problem arises.
Pre-conception genetic carrier screening challenges this approach by identifying risk before pregnancy begins.
As panel sizes have grown and at-home testing options have become widely available, carrier screening is transitioning from a niche clinical referral into a mainstream component of reproductive planning.
What Carrier Screening Tests For
Being a carrier of a genetic condition means carrying one copy of a variant in a gene associated with that condition, without being affected by it.
In most cases, carriers are entirely unaware of their status.
The clinical significance of carrier status emerges when both members of a couple carry a variant in the same gene: in this scenario, each pregnancy carries a one in four chance of resulting in a child who inherits two copies of the variant and is affected by the condition.
The conditions most frequently included in expanded carrier screening panels include cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), fragile X syndrome, sickle cell disease, and a range of metabolic and enzyme deficiency disorders.
The Beacon 787 carrier test, offered by Jeen Health, screens for 787 conditions from a single sample, making it one of the most comprehensive panels currently available to UK families.
Who Is Most Likely to Benefit
Any couple planning a pregnancy can consider carrier screening. It is particularly relevant for:
- Couples with a family history of a known inherited condition
- Those from populations with higher carrier frequencies for specific conditions, including Ashkenazi Jewish, South Asian and African communities
- Couples pursuing fertility treatment, where genetic information informs treatment planning
- Those who wish to have the most complete picture of their reproductive health before conception
Importantly, being a carrier of a condition does not mean a child will be affected. It means there is a defined statistical risk that can be quantified, discussed and planned for with appropriate clinical support.
How the Test Is Performed
Carrier screening is typically carried out on a blood or saliva sample.
For at-home options such as the testing offered by Jeen Health, a cheek swab collection kit is dispatched to the patient, the sample is returned by post, and results are delivered digitally within a defined turnaround period.
In-clinic carrier testing may use a blood draw and provides the advantage of immediate access to a clinical consultation at the point of result delivery.
London Pregnancy Clinic offers genetics counselling through its partnership with Jeen Health, allowing couples to receive and contextualise carrier test results with expert support.
Genetic counselling before and after testing is recommended by Genomics England as a standard component of any genomic testing pathway.
What Happens If Both Partners Are Carriers
If both partners are identified as carriers for the same autosomal recessive condition, they are typically offered further counselling to discuss their options.
These may include proceeding naturally with an awareness of the risk, using prenatal diagnosis (CVS or amniocentesis) during pregnancy to test the fetus, or pursuing preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) in the context of IVF, which allows unaffected embryos to be selected before transfer.
The purpose of identifying carrier status before pregnancy is to give couples time to consider these options without the added pressure of an ongoing pregnancy.
Knowledge of carrier status does not remove reproductive choices; it expands the information available when making them.
The Role of Pre-Conception Services
Carrier screening sits within a broader category of pre-conception care that includes fertility assessments, general health optimisation and, where relevant, management of existing conditions before pregnancy begins.
London Pregnancy Clinic offers pre-conception services encompassing fertility investigations, genetics counselling and carrier testing as part of an integrated 0th trimester approach, allowing couples to address genetic and clinical risk factors before their pregnancy starts rather than after.
Disclaimer: This article is produced for informational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
Clinical guidance referenced reflects published NHS, NICE and RCOG standards as at March 2026. Individual circumstances vary; readers are advised to consult a qualified healthcare professional before acting on any information in this article.
This piece was produced in association with London Pregnancy Clinic and Jeen Health, which provided background clinical information for editorial purposes.
Hyperlinks to external sources are included for reference only and do not represent an endorsement of any product, service or organisation.
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