By Melissa Wallace, CEO Fierce Foundry

The first quarter of 2026 tells a familiar but evolving story for female founders in the U.S.: measurable progress, paired with persistent structural gaps.

On the surface, the numbers suggest momentum.

A recent Pitchbook report showed female-founded companies captured 27.7 per cent of U.S. venture capital in 2025, up significantly from 19.9 per cent the year prior.

This is not a marginal shift, it reflects a broader recognition that women are building scalable, investable companies across sectors.

But the deeper cut tells a different story.

When you isolate companies founded solely by women, funding drops to just 1.1 per cent of total venture dollars.

As many of us continue to preach, this gap has remained largely unchanged for decades, hovering around 2 per cent on average.

This is the paradox: performance is not the issue—access is.

Research consistently shows that women-led companies generate stronger capital efficiency, yet they continue to receive a fraction of funding.

As Leslie Feinzaig has pointed out, the challenge is not a lack of ambition or quality, it’s that the system still evaluates women through a narrower lens, often expecting more proof, more traction, and more certainty before capital is deployed.

A Shift in How Women Are Getting Funded

What’s changed in Q1—and what’s most important—is not just how much funding is flowing, but how it’s being accessed.

Based on the data shared by Forbes in their 6 Trends Reshaping Women’s Health Investments this is what is clear:

• A rise of angel and operator capital: More women are entering the cap table as investors, not just founders, reshaping early-stage decision-making
• Alternative vehicles gaining traction: Donor-advised funds (DAFs), syndicates, and community-driven capital pools are stepping in where traditional VC has been slow
• Lower barriers to entry for investors: Smaller check sizes and structured angel education are expanding who participates in funding innovation

This diversification matters. Traditional venture capital has historically been concentrated both in who writes checks and what gets funded.

Broadening capital sources doesn’t just increase access; it changes what is considered “investable.”

At Fierce Foundry, this is a core assumption.

The venture studio model is not just about building companies, it’s about engineering capital access from day one.

By combining capital with shared services, investor networks, and early validation, the goal is to reduce the friction female founders face long before a Series A.

Why This Matters for Women’s Health

Nowhere is this shift more critical than in women’s health.

Despite being one of the fastest-growing sectors in healthcare, projected to exceed $200B globally in the next decade, FemTech and women’s health startups remain significantly underfunded. In 2024, only ~6 per cent of healthcare venture funding went to this category.

This disconnect is not due to lack of opportunity. In fact, the opposite is true.

Thanks to another incredible article from Geri Stenger in Forbes, we know women’s health has already generated over $100 billion in exits, with 27 billion-dollar transactions and increasing M&A activity.

This is not an emerging category, it is a proven one that has simply been misclassified, undercounted, and undervalued.

The implication is clear: capital is not flowing in proportion to outcomes.

The Role of New Models in Closing the Gap

This is where new models, particularly venture studios, are becoming essential.

The traditional startup pathway assumes equal access to networks, capital, and operational expertise.

Female founders, particularly in women’s health, are often navigating all three deficits simultaneously:

Limited access to early-stage capital

• Higher burden of proof in clinical and regulatory environments
• Fewer embedded operators with domain expertise
• The studio model addresses this by collapsing time and risk:

Co-building companies alongside founders

• Providing shared services across product, regulatory, and go-to-market
• Embedding investor alignment and exit pathways from the beginning

What Q1 Signals for the Future

If Q1 tells us anything, it’s that the narrative is shifting but the infrastructure is still catching up.

We are seeing:

• Increased participation of women across both sides of the cap table
• New funding mechanisms that challenge traditional VC gatekeeping
• Growing recognition that women’s health is not niche, but foundational

But we are also seeing that progress is uneven, and in many cases, still fragile.

The next phase of growth will not come from incremental increases in funding percentages.

It will come from rebuilding the systems that determine how capital flows in the first place. Because the real opportunity is not just funding more female founders.

It’s building an ecosystem where they don’t have to fight so hard to access what they’ve already proven they can return.

Learn more about Fierce Foundry at thefiercefoundry.com

India’s top court rejected a menstrual leave petition for women and female students, saying such a law could mean “no-one will hire women”.

The two-judge bench, headed by chief justice Surya Kant, said mandatory leave would make young women think they were “not at par” with their male colleagues and would be “harmful for their growth”.

The subject of menstrual leave has long divided opinion in India. While many agree with the judges’ view, others argue that a day or two off can help women manage painful periods.

Some states and a number of large private companies have already introduced menstrual leave for employees.

The court’s comments came while hearing a petition filed by lawyer Shailendra Mani Tripathi, who was seeking a national menstrual leave policy, legal website LiveLaw reported.

Tripathi later told news agency IANS that he had hoped working women would receive “two-to-three days of leave” to account for menstrual difficulties.

The judges, however, said introducing such a policy would not benefit women. Instead, they said it would reinforce gender stereotypes and affect employability.

They said this could make private-sector employers hesitant to hire women and might ultimately discourage their recruitment.

They added that “the government could come up with a menstrual leave policy in consultation with all stakeholders”, LiveLaw reported.

The comments from the top court have again put the issue in the spotlight in India, reviving debate over whether menstrual leave is a progressive step or whether it encourages stereotypes that women are weaker and unfit for the workplace.

Public health expert and lawyer Sukriti Chauhan told the BBC that by saying menstrual leave would make women “unattractive” as employees, the judges “reiterate the taboo around menstruation and rights that we have failed to address”.

She said there were laws in India covering “workplace dignity, gender equality, and safe working conditions” for women and that “denying menstrual leave violates these principles by forcing women into uncomfortable, undignified or hazardous work environments”.

“Providing menstrual leave not only supports women’s health and well-being, but also promotes productivity and efficiency in the workplace,” she added.

Some argue that giving women extra leave would be discriminatory to men and that, in a country where periods are often a taboo subject, with women barred from temples or isolated at home as “unclean”, menstruating women may be too shy to claim it.

But campaigners point out that countries such as Spain, Japan, South Korea and Indonesia already offer menstrual leave, and that studies have shown this time off can be beneficial to women.

Some Indian states also offer limited menstrual leave. Bihar and Odisha give two days per month to government employees, while Kerala provides it to university and industrial training institute staff.

Last year, the southern state of Karnataka introduced a law approving one day off a month for all menstruating women.

In the past few years, several companies have also introduced similar policies for female staff.

In 2025, industrial and services conglomerate RPG Group announced a two-days-a-month period leave policy for employees in its subsidiary CEAT.

Engineering giant L&T also introduced a similar policy, offering a one-day leave in a month, while food delivery company Zomato offers up to 10 days of period leave a year.

By Zahra Bhatti, founder and CEO, Véa

We are living through a measurement boom.

Wrist-worn wearables ship in the hundreds of millions IDC forecast worldwide shipments at 537.9 million units in 2024, with 136.5 million units shipped in Q2 2025 alone.

We can track steps, sleep stages, heart rate, HRV, temperature, glucose variability and recovery scores.

We have never had more physiological insight into the human body.

So why are women still burning out? Still overwhelmed? Still carrying invisible cognitive load that never appears on a single dashboard?

If the data revolution in health tech was supposed to empower women, why do so many feel more monitored than supported?

A number on your wrist can tell you what happened in your body. It rarely tells you why it happened, what it meant or what you need next.

That missing layer is emotional data. And femtech is uniquely positioned to build it.

We Built Dashboards. We Didn’t Build Interpretation.

Picture this.

It’s 6:47am. You’ve been up since 4 with a teething toddler, made packed lunches on autopilot, managed a meltdown at the school gates and arrived at your desk already running on fumes.

Your watch buzzes. Sleep score: 38. Stress: High. Recovery: Poor. Thanks. You already knew.

This is the problem no one in health tech wants to name.

Wearables are extraordinary at capturing signals but measurement without meaning stops at awareness.

Your HRV dips and a notification pings. It cannot tell you whether that dip came from the argument you didn’t finish with your partner, the guilt of missing bedtime again, the weight of being the only one who remembers the GP appointment or the hormonal crash of your luteal phase hitting while all of it lands at once.

The sensor caught the signal but it missed the entire story.

The evidence backs up what women already feel in their bones.

While activity trackers can increase step counts, a Lancet Digital Health umbrella review found their effect on broader psychological wellbeing is limited.

A 2024 systematic review went further, calling the evidence for wearables improving mental health “extremely limited”.

The sensors work but the interpretation doesn’t. That gap between data and meaning is exactly where women fall through.

Women’s Mental Health Is Not a Niche Concern. It Is a Systems Failure.

Consider the architecture of burden women navigate daily.

Depression is approximately 1.5 times more common among women than men, according to the World Health Organization.

The gender gap emerges at puberty and persists through the lifespan, driven by biological, psychological and social factors that compound over decades.

In the UK, 26.2 per cent of women reported high anxiety in the most recent ONS quarterly data, compared with 18.8 per cent of men – a gap that has remained statistically significant for over a decade.

But here is the question nobody in wellness tech seems to be asking: where does all that invisible labour live in the data?

Globally, women perform 2.5 times more unpaid care and domestic work than men.

That is time, emotional bandwidth and cognitive effort that never surfaces in economic metrics or health dashboards.

Forty-five percent of working-age women are outside the labour force because of unpaid care responsibilities, compared with just 5 per cent of men.

For those who do stay at work, the toll compounds: CIPD research found that 67 per cent of women aged 40–60 experiencing menopause symptoms report a mostly negative impact at work, with 79 per cent feeling less able to concentrate and one in six considering leaving their role entirely.

These are not isolated statistics.

They describe accumulated cognitive and emotional load across a lifetime a compounding interest of stress that no single intervention can repay.

Yet most wellness technologies still focus on optimisation metrics such as: output, recovery, movement and productivity.

Women do not simply need better tracking. They need systems that reduce the burden of self-interpretation.

When did we decide that measuring a woman’s body was more important than understanding what she’s carrying inside it?

Emotions Are Not Soft Signals. They Are Early Data.

Emotions are routinely dismissed as subjective, anecdotal and too messy to measure.

But from a systems perspective, they are high-frequency signals about safety versus threat, capacity versus overload, connection versus isolation and alignment versus self-betrayal.

They are early-warning indicators arriving long before burnout becomes clinical, long before sleep deteriorates especially long before productivity drops.

Physiology lags behind the emotional moment.

Your heart rate spikes after the confrontation. Your sleep fragments after a week of over-functioning. Your inflammation markers will never capture the micro-stresses that accumulated all day. Emotions do.

They are the body’s first responders faster than cortisol, more specific than HRV, more honest than any self-reported wellness score.

When emotional data is captured consistently, patterns emerge that no wearable can detect alone: anxiety clustering after specific meetings, energy dipping during certain cycle phases, irritability rising after relational overextension, creative clarity following solitude or movement.

This is not mood tracking for novelty. This becomes behavioural pattern recognition – the diagnostic layer women have been missing and needing.

From Self-Optimisation to Self-Understanding

We have built extraordinary tools to measure the female body.

We have not yet built infrastructure to interpret the emotional load women carry daily, the invisible labour, the relational tension, the hormonal transitions and most importantly the resulting cognitive overload.

These forces rarely appear in a recovery score rather they show up unmistakably in emotional patterns.

Imagine: a wearable detects sustained stress variability. An emotional check-in identifies relational strain. Context shows deadline pressure and reduced recovery. The system responds not with another metric, but with a small, realistic intervention that fits your life.

From dashboard to preventative mental health infrastructure. THIS is the golden opportunity femtech has to lead.

When emotions are treated as structured, longitudinal data rather than vague self-expression, they become a preventative signal.

They reveal when capacity is shrinking, when boundaries are leaking, when resilience is building. They show what no heart rate monitor ever could: the moment a woman stops prioritising herself, and the pattern that follows.

This shift is already beginning.

Platforms like Véa are building emotional operating systems that treat emotions as legitimate health data translating micro-check-ins and pattern recognition into contextual insight, reducing the invisible labour of self-analysis rather than adding to it.

Not more optimisation. Not more self-surveillance. Structured self-understanding that actually lightens the load.

In a world saturated with metrics, the competitive advantage is no longer more data. It is better meaning.

Emotions remain the most underutilised dataset in women’s health. Femtech has the infrastructure, the audience and the moment to build the missing layer.

The question is whether it will.