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Cutting through the noise in femtech – key takeaways from Women’s Health Week 2025
The flagship women’s health summit brought together over 400 visionary founders, funders and innovators, with a shared mission of transforming women’s health worldwide.
This year’s Women’s Health Week, which took place at the Barbican, London from 14-17 October, showcased a sector once considered by funders to be too much of a ‘niche’, meeting a crucial unmet need with huge market demand.
Investments are outperforming their value, regulators want to speed up the route to market, and clinical validation is cutting through the noise and demonstrating real results.
There is a buzz about the femtech sector – or at least there was in the Barbican last week – but experts have urged founders should move forward responsibility, building ethics and equity into their innovations.
Here’s our takeaways from the key conversations at Women’s Health Week.
1. Women’s health is outperforming – but angels and influencers are crucial for raising capital
Investment in women’s health is outperforming, and this trend is expected to continue, according to the panel at Women’s Health Week on Thursday 16th, where fund managers and founders highlighted significant returns, growing institutional interest, and the critical role of early-stage backers.
Sanji Chotai, a senior investment manager at British Business Bank, says she is seeing “really encouraging data” and anticipates more “outperformance”, particularly in medtech, which is drawing interest thanks to “shorter timelines to regulatory approval” and rapid commercialisation.
Series A and B activity is also picking up, but the panel agreed that early-stage capital and angel investors remain essential.
“My first angel investment in a women’s health company, I think on Series A, is going to be 20x on multiple and for our fund, it’s going to be around 9x,” said Trin Linamagi, founding partner at Sie Ventures.
“We need to take bigger bets and double down – and actually put the capital behind these businesses early on.”
Having driven successful campaigns for Soulcycle and Barry’s Bootcamp, Tatum Getty, now a founding general partner at THENA, also highlighted the importance of influencers – and not just on Instagram.
“Who is that person who believes in what we’re building and will tell their friends,” she said.
“Women have not been traditional investors they are more risk averse, smaller investment but bigger impact. They add so much more value than the amount of capital that they contribute.”
2. NICE and new pathways for health technologies
During a discussion on mastering Europe’s regulatory process, a representative from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) outlined how new rules-based approval routes, now being introduced for health technologies, are designed to speed access to innovation.
The body is also better aligning processes with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) to reduce the time it takes to regulatory approval.
“We’re taking forward the rules-based pathway for health tech,” said Kendall Gilmore, a senior advisor at NICE.
“Developing a model more similar to the medicines pathway, where, for some products, it goes through the MHRA, through NICE and then comes with a recommendation that has a funding mandate attached.”
The pathway, currently being developed will see health technologies assessed in a similar way to medicines with the first products approved from April next year.
NICE currently evaluates only a fraction of the 500,000 technologies used daily in the NHS. While a NICE recommendation is “not mandatory”, it can be a “powerful signal” to the NHS.
NICE is constantly “horizon scanning” for “disruptive products” further down the pipeline and is engaging more directly with innovators, industry associations and international partners to identify promising technologies earlier, and a new early value assessment route is giving promising products a faster track.
“If it meets an unmet need, it should be used with further evidence generation,” Gilmore explained.
“This is particularly relevant for digital health and diagnostics.”
3. Scientific validation is the most effective way to ‘cut through the noise’
In a panel exploring how to “cut through the noise” in femtech, founders were urged to bake credibility into product design from day one, with scientific proof and clinical validation the sharpest differentiator, according to Soun Rakshit, of MV Health.
“You have to spend probably two years going through the R&D process,” said Rakshit.
“That is the best and probably the only way to do it, so that by the time you get regulatory approval, you have already had significant patient feedback and iteration.”
Earning trust also means collaborating with experts who understand the problem, as Helen O’Neil, founder of Hertility, explained.
When in the development stage, O’Neil reached out to professionals, including obstetricians and gynaecologists to understand the right questions to ask based on their “clinical intuition and personal experience”.
Rakshit added: “If we can show true clinical evidence, and it does take time, it is the best way to cut through the noise.”
4. Bias in AI is ‘real and harmful’ – and founders need to know how to address it
Experts discussed the role of AI and its potential to both help and harm women’s health, urging proactive testing and human oversight to avoid the risk of decades of a “male default model” being implemented into new solutions.
“AI that’s trained on that skewed data can really fail women,” said Sarah Montgomery Taylor, clinical lead of GenAI evaluation and scaled services at Google, highlighting familiar examples such as heart-attack presentation.
“Biases are real, and they are really harmful, and so being aware of them is so crucial.”
Panellists also flagged “measurement bias” and the “historical dismissal of women’s pain,” where systems trained on those records “can learn to deprioritise” certain signals.
Beyond bias in diagnostics, Marinos Ionnides, head of software and AI medical devices regulation at the MHRA, highlighted the risks of implementing AI in areas where there may be hidden bias.
“I’m quite worried about the deployment of software AI in places where we aren’t we didn’t know we would be finding bias [such as] appointment booking,” he said, adding that in these “unknown unknowns,” “the regulator has their greatest role”.
Founders were urged to be responsible when scaling AI, introducing guardrails such as building in equity and collecting data from the very beginning for “rigorous real-world validation”.
Clinicians need to be able to test the product and understand it to build trust, while regulatory processes should be “adaptive”, offering “clarity on what the path is to market”.
Chen Davies, founder at Anya, shared a real-world example of how products and content tailored for underserved groups drove measurable change, including a “10% population-wise” rise in breastfeeding rates in a deprived area of Blackpool after six months.
“AI should gradually complement human support without replacing it,” said Davies.
5. Consumer data can play a critical role in building the clinical evidence-base
During the final panel, participants argued that continuous real-world data, paired with clinical benchmarks, is the fastest way to fix women’s health’s “male baseline” problem and turn lived experience into evidence.
Dr Chris Curry, clinical director for women’s health at Oura, argued that wearables are “one of the big unlocks” by collecting data that gives the “whole picture of the human”.
But tracking can – should – meet clinical standards, with the panel pushing for globally representative consumer datasets.
“I see consumer data if it’s truly representative, if it’s truly globally representative, being critical,” said Micah Gellman, a senior strategist for women’s health innovation at the Gates Foundation.
“It helps us calibrate and link consumer insights and lived experience to clinical anchors and value outcomes… this kind of consumer data is one avenue that we have to really change investor appetite.”
Rhiannon White, CEO of Clue, which has a long-running research collaboration with Oura, including collecting symptom tracking data on perimenopause and pain, added that women’s spending power can actually steer where future R&D should be focused.
“We are able to shape and direct where people will put their research and put their development with our spending power,” she said.
6. The crisis in government support can be an opportunity for more innovative funding pathways
With the Gates Foundation recently committing an additional US$2.5bn for research in women’s health, Gellman also reframed the reduction in government funding for women’s health – such as that seen under the Trump administration in the US – as an opportunity for more innovate financing.
“There is a real opportunity for European and Asian government funding to step up and fill some of those gaps,” said Gellman.
“An opportunity for government funding and philanthropic funding to take new forms and to be partnering in new ways to catalyse innovation and to work with academics and industry players.”
Rather than a binary between grants and VC, the panel highlighted “blended financing mechanisms, venture philanthropy… different kinds of outcome-based financing” with public and philanthropic dollars used “to de risk, early-stage investment”.
Gellman added: “This crisis that we’re in, in terms of government funding is also an opportunity for innovative financing.”
The comments brought the conference full circle, reminiscent of those made earlier in the day, by Tatum Getty, who highlighted: “Women and small amounts of capital, can make a big difference.”
Menopause is often absent from women’s electronic health records, a study of nearly 396,000 women has found.
Researchers found menopause appeared almost seven times more often in participant surveys than in electronic health records (EHRs).
The findings suggest important reproductive health information, including age at menopause, may often be missing from health records used for research.
Audrey Hendricks, associate professor of bioinformatics at CU Anschutz and the study’s principal investigator, said: “Ultimately, we cannot study what we do not measure. We cannot treat what we do not know.
“Menopause has enormous implications for women’s health, but if we don’t consistently capture when menopause occurs and other important reproductive health information, we limit our ability to understand how this transition affects disease risk and health outcomes.”
Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz analysed data from women taking part in the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program.
They compared menopause information reported by participants in surveys with menopause diagnoses recorded in their electronic health records.
Around 193,000 menopause observations were identified in survey data, compared with approximately 28,000 diagnoses in EHR data.
Menopause was documented in electronic health records for only about 7 per cent of women in the dataset.
Nearly all participants with a menopause diagnosis recorded in their EHR also reported menopause in survey data. However, substantially fewer women had menopause documented in their health records.
Other important information was also frequently unavailable, including age at menopause, which researchers may use when examining links between menopause and chronic disease risk.
Menopause is a physiological transition that can affect cardiometabolic health and many other aspects of women’s health.
Researchers said relatively little is known about how factors including the timing and type of menopause influence health outcomes across diverse populations.
Large-scale programmes such as All of Us combine participant surveys, electronic health records and genomic data, but menopause-related research depends on relevant reproductive health information being available.
Missing menopause information can make it harder to investigate how the transition relates to health and disease.
The findings may also help researchers using All of Us data define menopause-related study populations, design studies and estimate how many participants are needed.
Hendricks said: “We have an enormous opportunity to use large-scale datasets to understand women’s health across the menopause transition and to identify who may be at greater risk for disease.
“But we need to make sure that the information researchers need is actually being collected.
“We must do a better job of capturing women’s health information, including reproductive health and measures related to menopause.”
Researchers said more complete and consistent collection of menopause and reproductive health information could help future studies examine factors such as age at menopause and their relationship with disease risk and health outcomes.
The fertility rate in England and Wales fell to a record low of 1.39 children per woman in 2025, down from 1.41 a year earlier.
New figures show that parts of London and cities with major universities accounted for many of the areas with the lowest local fertility rates.
The City of London recorded the lowest rate in 2025 at 0.37 children per woman, followed by Cambridge at 0.87 and the London boroughs of Islington and Westminster at 0.90.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) defines the fertility rate as the average number of live children women would expect to have over their childbearing lives.
Brighton & Hove recorded a rate of 0.95, followed by Southwark at 0.97 and Norwich at 0.98.
Exeter, Oxford and York, along with the London boroughs of Camden and Hammersmith & Fulham, each recorded 1.01 children per woman.
At the other end of the table, Pendle in Lancashire and Luton in Bedfordshire had the highest rate at 1.93.
They were followed by Oldham in Greater Manchester at 1.87, Bradford in West Yorkshire at 1.84 and Barking & Dagenham in London at 1.83.
The overall fertility rate for England and Wales declined from 1.41 in 2024 to 1.39 in 2025.
A rate of around 2.1 is needed for a population to remain stable over time when the impact of migration is excluded.
Twelve of the 25 local authorities with the lowest fertility rates in 2025 were in London.
In Wales, Swansea recorded the lowest fertility rate at 1.18, while Carmarthenshire, the Isle of Anglesey and Newport each had the highest rate at 1.48.
There were 585,396 live births in England and Wales in 2025, down from 594,677 in 2024 and the lowest number since 1977.
Live births fell across every region in England. The West Midlands recorded the largest percentage decline at 3.1 per cent, while the North East had the smallest at 0.3 per cent.
The average age of parents also increased slightly.
Mothers had a provisional standardised mean age of 31.1 in 2025, compared with 31.0 in 2024. Fathers had an average age of 34.0, up from 33.9.
In 1975, the average age was 26.4 for mothers and 29.5 for fathers.
The proportion of births where the mother was born outside the UK also increased, from 20.8 per cent in 2005 to 27.5 per cent in 2015 and 34.6 per cent in 2025.
India was the most common country of birth for non-UK-born mothers in 2025 for the fourth consecutive year.
It was followed by Pakistan, Nigeria and Romania.
In 2025, 56.4 per cent of births were to parents who were both born in the UK, down from 62.7 per cent in 2015.
Hormone therapy started in peri- or early post-menopause was linked to a 22 per cent lower risk of cardiovascular events in women with vasomotor symptoms in a recent study.
The findings came from an observational analysis of 20 years of health data and do not show that hormone therapy caused the reduction in cardiovascular risk.
The association was strongest among Black women and women who started treatment within 10 years of menopause onset, although researchers cautioned that the findings should not guide clinical practice.
The study is the first of its kind in the US to assess the risk of future cardiovascular events among women with vasomotor symptoms who use hormone therapy during peri- and early postmenopause.
Samar R. El Khoudary, professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the VCU School of Public Health and one of the study’s senior researchers, said: “The menopause transition represents a critical window for understanding how hormone therapy may relate to cardiovascular disease risk. Our findings suggest that timing of initiation may influence cardiovascular outcomes.”
The researchers stressed that the findings do not support using hormone therapy to prevent cardiovascular disease.
Potential benefits must also be weighed against risks, including the increased breast cancer risk observed with longer-term use.
The study was not a randomised controlled trial, the gold-standard method for testing biomedical treatments.
Rebecca C. Thurston, associate dean for Women’s Health Research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and one of the study’s senior researchers, said: “These findings point to women with vasomotor symptoms as those who may show cardiovascular benefit from hormone therapy initiated during the perimenopause and postmenopausal years.
“However, conclusions should be tempered by the observational nature of the study, and findings should not guide clinical practice.”
Vasomotor symptoms, meaning hot flushes and night sweats, affect up to 80 per cent of women during the menopause transition and last for an average of seven to ten years.
Their frequency and severity build through perimenopause and typically peak in early postmenopause.
Hormone therapy replaces oestrogen and progesterone that women’s bodies stop producing after menopause and is currently the most effective treatment for these symptoms.
Clinical trials led by the Women’s Health Initiative in the early 2000s raised concerns about hormone therapy’s impact on heart disease, stroke, breast cancer and other risks, leading to years of reluctance among patients and providers to use the treatment.
El Khoudary said: “Hot flashes and night sweats have a significant impact on a woman’s quality of life and ability to work productively.
“While hormone therapy is an effective treatment for these symptoms, questions have remained about its cardiovascular effects, particularly the importance of when treatment is initiated during the menopause transition.”
More recent research suggests the effects of hormone therapy on the heart and vascular system may vary by age and treatment timing, with women younger than 60 who start treatment closer to menopause onset having different levels of risk.
In 2026, the US Food and Drug Administration removed “black box” warnings from hormone therapy products, reflecting evolving evidence on the benefits and risks of treatment.
Researchers from Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Pittsburgh analysed data from more than 2,700 women taking part in the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation (SWAN).
The women reported vasomotor symptoms and had not previously experienced cardiovascular events.
Clinical data collected between 1997 and 2017 were used to examine whether women who started hormone therapy for vasomotor symptoms were more or less likely to experience stroke, congestive heart failure, heart attack or revascularisation procedures than women who did not start treatment.
El Khoudary said: “By using data from the SWAN study, we essentially were able to emulate a series of hypothetical clinical trials to gain a deeper understanding into how hormone therapy taken to mitigate vasomotor symptoms during peri- and early postmenopause influences cardiovascular risk over time.
“It allowed us to examine clinically meaningful cardiovascular disease events over long-term follow-up in a population and treatment window that has been challenging to study prospectively.”
Starting hormone therapy during peri- or early postmenopause was associated with an estimated 22 per cent lower risk of cardiovascular disease events.
Women who began hormone therapy within 10 years of menopause onset had an estimated 27 per cent lower risk compared with women who did not start treatment.
Among Black women, starting therapy during peri- or early postmenopause was associated with an estimated 49 per cent lower risk of cardiovascular disease events.
No clear reduction was seen among women who started therapy more than 10 years after menopause onset or among White women and other racial and ethnic groups.
El Khoudary said: “The differences in cardiovascular outcomes by race and ethnicity are notable, particularly because Black women are more likely to experience severe vasomotor symptoms.
“These findings highlight the need to better understand how hormone therapy timing may influence cardiovascular outcomes across diverse populations.”
It remains unclear why cardiovascular risk differed according to when hormone therapy was started, although researchers believe differences in blood vessel health with age may play a role.
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