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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.
Young women are more likely than young men to get health and wellness information from social media influencers, a US survey has found.
Among adults aged 18 to 29, 57 per cent of women said they received health and wellness information from influencers, compared with 47 per cent of men.
The Pew Research Center study surveyed 5,023 US adults and examined how young people consume health and wellness content online.
Local university students said influencer content frequently appeared in their social media feeds.
Kabija Koroma, a local university student, said: “It’s more exercise stuff, more like protein and like meals and like how to get ready and like the outfits of the day of videos on TikTok or lately. My favourite ones.”
About 51 per cent of women under 30 said they often consumed influencer content focused on beauty and personal appearance, compared with 18 per cent of men.
The study also found that 21 per cent of women often saw content about therapies outside mainstream medicine, compared with 10 per cent of men.
At least one-third of both young women and young men often encountered influencer content about mental health and weight loss. Around half or more of both groups regularly saw fitness-related content.
Another local university student, Ania Davis, said: “I see a lot like how to meal prep and how to get your morning started. Affirmations stuff. But I do also ask the adults around me because sometimes the internet is not right.”
Researchers also looked at why young adults sought health and wellness information from influencers.
About 51 per cent of young women said they watched the content because they wanted to change their health or lifestyle.
Women were also more likely than men to say they enjoyed hearing from people who shared their background or beliefs, at 23 per cent compared with 14 per cent.
Nineteen per cent of young women said they used influencer content to learn about topics they did not want to ask their doctors about, compared with 10 per cent of young men.
Despite regularly using social media, some students said they did not rely solely on influencer content when making decisions about their health and wellness.
Koroma said: “I’m always on TikTok 24/7 and Instagram, but I also like to ask people older than me because I don’t know everything.”
Estriol treatment may ease menopause brain fog and other cognitive symptoms, according to a small observational study of 20 menopausal women.
The study involved menopausal women with an average age of 53.
They underwent an initial assessment of their cognitive symptoms before receiving a customised regimen of estriol and progesterone for 12 months.
Estriol is a natural form of oestrogen that occurs during pregnancy and has been used in Europe and Asia to treat menopausal symptoms including hot flushes and genitourinary symptoms.
It differs from estradiol, the most commonly used oestrogen hormone therapy in the US, by binding primarily to a different oestrogen receptor in the brain.
Previous research has shown that estriol may help protect brain cells and reduce brain atrophy in the hippocampus, the region responsible for learning and memory.
After 12 months of treatment, participants reported significant reductions in brain fog, concentration problems, working memory problems, slower processing speed, verbal memory problems and problem-solving difficulties compared with before treatment.
Senior author Dr Rhonda Voskuhl, a neurologist and member of the Comprehensive Menopause Center at UCLA Health, said: “Oestrogen plays a well-documented role in protecting the brain, yet there are still no approved type and dose of treatment that specifically targets the cognitive symptoms so many women experience during menopause.
“Women are often told to simply live with brain fog, when in fact there is a neuroscience basis for it, and potentially a way to address it. That gap in care is what motivated us to look more closely at estriol.”
Researchers also examined estriol treatment in midlife female mice to investigate how the hormone treatment might work.
Estriol reduced markers of brain pathology in the hippocampus and improved measures of working and spatial memory in the animals.
The findings are preliminary. The study was a small case series with no placebo group or randomisation, meaning the results may not apply to broader populations.
The researchers said larger placebo-controlled clinical trials using brain imaging and standardised cognitive testing are needed to confirm the findings on cognitive symptoms.
The treatment used in the study was invented by Voskuhl and is patented by UCLA. UCLA licenses the patent to CleopatraRX, which sells the treatment as PearlPAK. Voskuhl serves as a medical adviser to CleopatraRX.
Women face a hidden burden navigating healthcare, with many repeatedly retelling their medical history, a national study suggests.
The findings indicate that Canadian women are taking on cognitive, emotional and administrative work alongside managing their health, including coordinating providers and advocating for care.
More than half of women surveyed, 53 per cent, reported a past or current chronic condition, while 64 per cent said there were health topics they struggled to raise with their doctor.
Sarah Hoffman, president and CEO of Pacific Blue Cross, said: “These findings challenge us to think differently about women’s healthcare and highlight the hidden work required to navigate the system.
“For many women, managing their health has also come to mean managing the healthcare system itself.
“They are acting as project managers of their own care, shouldering the invisible labour of coordinating between providers, retelling their medical history and advocating to be heard.
“The gap between men and women is meaningful and raises important questions about why younger women report lower levels of confidence and support.
“It also challenges us to consider whether we are actually making progress in women’s care, and whether the next generation is being equipped with the confidence and voice to advocate for their health.”
Overall, 71 per cent of Canadians described their doctors as supportive and 88 per cent expected their appointments to go well.
Among women living with chronic conditions, 71 per cent reported having to repeat their complete health history multiple times a year.
Younger women were particularly likely to report difficulties discussing their health. The study found 81 per cent of Gen Z women aged 18 to 30 and 73 per cent of Millennial women aged 31 to 45 had health topics they struggled to raise with their doctor.
Among Gen Z women with chronic illness, 92 per cent reported having to repeat their complete health history.
The study also found differences between young women and men. While 95 per cent of Gen Z men expected a doctor’s appointment to go well, the figure was 82 per cent among Gen Z women.
Similarly, 82 per cent of Gen Z men said they felt supported by their family doctor, compared with 66 per cent of Gen Z women.
Reasons for holding back health concerns varied between generations.
Among Gen Z women, 30 per cent cited fear of dismissal and 29 per cent fear of judgement.
Embarrassment was the most common barrier among Millennial, Gen X and Boomer women, reported by 29 per cent, 27 per cent and 35 per cent respectively.
Women who felt they needed to prove themselves to be taken seriously said they adapted how they approached appointments.
Strategies included researching medical information, repeatedly describing or justifying symptoms, bringing written notes or documentation, tracking symptom timelines, making repeat visits and emphasising how symptoms affected their daily lives.
The study also found an association between feeling supported by a doctor and expecting appointments to go well.
Canadians who described their physician as supportive were nearly four times more likely to expect appointments to go well than those who felt unsupported, at 98 per cent compared with 25 per cent.
Overall, 66 per cent of Canadians said they described their symptoms accurately. This fell to 48 per cent among those who said they felt unsupported by their doctor.
The 2026 Blue Cross Women’s Health Study surveyed 2,045 adult Canadians online in March 2026 through independent research company Research + Knowledge = Insights.
The survey had a reported margin of error of plus or minus 2 per cent, 19 times out of 20.
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