[Commlist] new book: FemTech Edited Collection

Who is FemTech for?: Intersectional Interventions in Women’s Digital Health
Edited by Dr. Lindsay Balfour


This edited collection draws from cultural studies and feminist science 
and technology studies to offer a timely and exiting intervention into 
the growing field of women’s digital health. It explores the 
intersection of gender and embodied computing, with particular attention 
to access barriers and the forms of biometric surveillance that operate 
in wearables, ingestibles, and embeddables marketed to women (the 
industry generally known as “FemTech”). While the most utilized and 
profitable FemTech products include ovulation and fitness trackers, 
reproductive technologies, contraceptive microchips, and “smart” pills, 
this only represents a fraction of health concerns affecting women. 
Moreover, while the industry, with a (2019) global market share of 
18.75B (USD), is predicted to be worth 60B by 2027 (Emergen, 2020), this 
occupies a small share of the overall digital health market, which is 
estimated to grow from 84B (USD) to 221B (USD) in the same time span. 
Although the availability of FemTech has been increasing over the last 
decade, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for discreet, 
portable, and accessible digital tools that can be used in a 
self-monitoring capacity as a response to an absence of access to 
regular healthcare providers. Yet while COVID-19 has facilitated the 
growth of FemTech, it has also exacerbated and exposed significant gaps 
in the industry.

Whether a lack of critical literacy around digital health, design and 
aesthetic impediments, the reality that women’s symptoms and pain are 
not taken seriously, or the fact that most FemTech products still 
presume a white, middle class, heterosexual, reproductive, and 
able-bodied user, it is problematic that women (particularly those in 
emerging markets) still have unequal access to basic reproductive 
healthcare and women’s health technologies (Wiese, 2021). Moreover, the 
FemTech industry as a whole exposes a more widespread and systemic 
series of gaps within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and 
Mathematics). This volume aims to explore FemTech within the context of 
Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FTST), whereby the 
entanglements of race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality and other 
social and cultural identities are brought to the fore. If STS is 
inherently the consideration of the creation, development, and 
consequences of science and technology in their historical, cultural, 
and social contexts, then this collection asks, to borrow in part from 
Sara Díaz, “what role can technoscience play in the movements to achieve 
gender justice?” and how are the operations of power and privileged 
exacerbated and challenged within the women’s digital health milleu? 
(2020). In other words: Who is FemTech for?

This project, then, brings the sociology of health and gender into 
conversation with digital culture and intelligent healthcare to respond 
to the gaps in women’s access to self-monitored technologies of 
wellbeing, and in consideration of intersectional marginalizations 
within both the health and technology sectors where racialized and 
low-income women suffer disproportionately. By addressing the gaps in 
FemTech research and socio-cultural barriers to access, this volume will 
critique the forms of knowledge and experience produced through medical 
and cultural discourses regarding women’s bodies to both highlight the 
inequalities in women’s digital health, and imagine alternative models 
which optimises technology for women in a way that is safe, accessible, 
and inclusive.
As products that simultaneously require intimate access and produce 
intimate results, wearable, implantable, and ingestible technologies 
should be desired, but with caution. The knowledge produced by these 
devices allows users to experience technology at the level of the body 
in a way that seems safe, intimate, and helpful but the biometric 
practices of such devices risk subscribing to gendered and patriarchal 
norms of knowledge and surveillance. Indeed the histories of Science and 
Technology Studies, and feminist STS in particular, tell us that women – 
and especially women of colour – have always been excluded from the 
medical discourses paradoxically conceived around them.
Given, then, the gaps in investment and quality control, and taking 
seriously the social barriers to access, this project asks: who is 
FemTech really for? In the academic literature, for example, little 
critique is given to the intersections of race, class, sexuality and 
ability in products that largely assume a white, heterosexual, affluent, 
childbearing, and able-bodied user. As such, FemTech leaves out a 
significant portion of the global female population, despite its 
potential to positively affect the health and well-being of women around 
the world, particularly where class stratification, indigeneity, and 
other social challenges exclude many women from this burgeoning market 
while simultaneously making them more vulnerable to harm and illness. 
While FemTech Collective’s Annual report (2021) acknowledges that “women 
are much more than their reproductive capabilities, and women’s health 
goes beyond the needs of fertility and reproduction,” more needs to be 
done to limit the barriers many women face in accessing these products 
due to a diversity of marginalizations based on race, socioeconomic 
status, non-conforming gender and sexuality, (dis)ability and 
neurodiversity, and so on. Ultimately, this project aims to be holistic 
in approaching these gaps, to expose the lack of diversity and 
accessibility in women’s digital healthcare, and prompt a series of 
critical questions across the FemTech sector as a whole.


Chapter submissions are invited from a range of disciplinary backgrounds 
including healthcare, digital media, the medical humanities, cultural 
studies, science and technology studies, gender studies, disability 
studies, as well as regional studies focused on the underserved areas of 
women’s digital health. We take FemTech to include digital and/or 
technological interventions marketed to women in the broadest sense 
including both software and hardware. Possible topics might include:
-	Biometric surveillance
-	Consumer culture and FemTech as commodity
-	Anti-violence or anti-assault tech
-	Self-monitoring -	Equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in women’s 
digital health
-	Sexual health
-	Mental health
-	Taboos and stigmas
-	Historical analyses of women’s health and emergent technologies
-	Alternative digital health models
-	Research, innovation, and investment in FemTech
-	Regional or comparative analyses, particularly in Global South, ASEAN, 
MENA, South American or Indigenous contexts

Prospective authors are asked to submit a 500 word abstract and 150 word 
bio to (Lindsay.Balfour /at/ coventry.ac.uk) by June 1, 2022.
This collection is being developed with strong interest already 
expressed by Palgrave McmIllan who are looking to expand their Science 
and Technology Studies list with regards to women’s health. It will be 
edited by Dr. Lindsay Balfour (she/her), Assistant Professor of Digital 
Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) at Coventry 
University. Dr. Balfour’s research draws on the relationship between 
humans and machines (HCI) and employs an intersectional feminist and 
cultural studies perspective to look at digital intimacies and science 
and technology studies. Currently, she is conducting feminist analyses 
of surveillance capitalism and embodied computing including the concept 
of “tracking” through wearables, implantables, and ingestibles.

Her work aims to engage academics, policymakers, and industry 
stakeholders and will assess the extent to which women's digital health 
might address barriers such as the lack of research, investment, quality 
thresholds, and diversity, while remaining safe, accessible, and 
sustainable. The project offers wider benefits concerning the global 
health of women, such as those outlined in the UN Sustainable 
Development Goals regarding Women and Girls, and in particular targets 
focusing on sexual and reproductive health.
Dr. Balfour is a member of the Postdigital Intimacies Research Network 
and the author of Hospitality in a Time of Terror, published in 2017 and 
nominated for the Gustave O. Arit Award for best first book in the 
Humanities. Her most recent publication are “#TimesUp for Siri and 
Alexa: Sexual Violence and Virtual Domestic Assistants” and the 
forthcoming “The Fit Man’s Burden: Gender and Commodity Racism in 
Biometric Fitness Trackers.” Dr. Balfour also has experience working 
with diverse stakeholders and constituent groups including educators, 
curators, legal experts, government officials, community organizers, and 
non-profit leaders.


Works Cited

Esmonde, Katelyn (2020). “‘There’s only so much data you can handle in 
your life’: Accomodating and resisting self-surveillance in women’s 
running and fitness practices.” Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise 
and Health 12.1: 76-90. 
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2159676X.2019.1617188

Lupton, Deborah (2017). The Quantified Self. Cambridge: Polity.

N.a. (2020). “Femtech Global Market Map.” Fermata Inc. 
https://sg.hellofermata.com/blogs/blog/femtech-global-market-map-released-by-fermata-inc-nov-2020

N.a. (2020). “Femtech Market to Reach USD 60.01 Billion by 2027.” 
Cicion. 
https://www.prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/femtech-market-to-reach-usd-60-01-billion-by-2027-cagr-of-15-6-emergen-research-899205870.html

N.a. (2021). FemTech Collective Market Report. www.femtechcollective.com

Thomas, Jenny (2021). “FemTech has a key part to play in women’s health 
strategy.” Digital Health London. 
https://www.digitalhealth.net/2021/06/femtech-has-a-key-part-to-play-in-womens-health-strategy/

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