The missing layer in the women’s health conversation

By Jenny Duan, co-founder of Clair Health

In the lead up to International Women’s Day 2026, women’s health leaders, experts and insiders explore the critical challenges shaping the future of women’s health

“When was your last period?”

For many women, that’s the first, and often only, hormone-related question asked during a doctor’s visit.

A complex system that influences everything from sleep quality to pain sensitivity is reduced to a singular data point: a date.

This simplification reflects a medical system shaped by decades of a lack of research in women’s health, where cyclical information was treated as a confounding factor, rather than a foundational pillar of health.

In fact, until 1993, the National Institutes of Health did not require women to be included in clinical trials.

Because of this, diagnostic frameworks were built to recognise the steady baselines of male physiology, leaving hormone-driven symptoms disregarded, and ultimately misunderstood.

I witnessed this first-hand in high school, when I volunteered at Rose Haven, a nonprofit for women and children experiencing homelessness and domestic violence.

Many of the women I worked with described debilitating symptoms, yet were met with dismissal from healthcare providers.

Without quantitative data to validate it, their symptoms were minimised.

This was the first time I understood that what cannot be measured is not taken seriously, even when someone is sitting in front of you telling you that they feel something is wrong.

The women at Rose Haven weren’t the only ones who experienced this dismissal.

Nearly 70 per cent of women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) remain undiagnosed. The average time to diagnose endometriosis is seven years.

Even cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death among women, is more frequently misdiagnosed because symptom checklists were originally developed using male data.

These are the patterns that emerge when hormones are ignored, and while awareness has increased, many of the insight solutions available today remain outdated.

When it comes to getting hormones measured, the process lacks efficiency, accessibility, and even accuracy.

Blood tests provide a single snapshot in time, both expensive and invasive, and ultimately disconnected from daily experience.

Ovulation strips require precise timing and daily interpretation, confirming a surge only as it’s happening, and basal body temperature tracking tells you ovulation has already occurred.

Although more recently developed, calendar-based apps still rely on population averages, assuming 28-day cycle regularity when nearly one in three women experience irregular cycles.

Each method is either reactive or fragmented, again attempting to simplify dynamic and individualised patterns.

The opportunity in femtech today is to build systems that embrace and interpret that complexity rather than reduce it to one hormone level from three days prior.

With continuous data collection and smarter analytical models, we can begin to see hormonal patterns as they unfold in real time.

Hormone health is the missing layer in the women’s health conversation, and for decades, women have navigated their health without the tools to help them understand it.

The idea for Clair Health came from that realisation.

At Stanford, I met my co-founder, Abhinav Agarwal, and we bonded over a shared thought that healthcare innovation, especially wearable health technology, had not been built with women in mind.

Devices had been collecting heart rate, temperature, HRV, and sleep data for years, but no one had built the algorithms to translate those signals into hormonal insight.

Clair was created to change that, continuously monitoring hormones to give women a personalized understanding of their hormone health, and how the state of their hormones influences everyday well-being.

Clair is grounded in the belief that women should not have to guess when it comes to their health.

By translating continuous physiological signals into individualised patterns over time, the goal is to make hormone health more interpretable and ultimately let women understand their overall health by taking information into their own hands.

When women have access to longitudinal insight, symptoms become contextualised within patterns, and care can move from reactive to preventative.

Femtech is entering a period of acceleration as technology advances and research gaps begin to close.

The next chapter of this industry must build the infrastructure that reflects women’s unique biology.

Clair won’t force healthcare providers to ask better questions, but it will equip women with the data to back up their symptoms when they walk into the room.

When this information becomes accessible through innovations in this space, women begin to have a long-overdue and deeper understanding of their health.