FemTech markets: building financialised consumer access to healthcare technologies

This article examines how financial capital shapes the development, accessibility, and equity claims of the FemTech sector. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork conducted across 32 FemTech-related events, including start-up showcases, investor panels, and policy forums, it analyses how venture capital logics influence product design, market targeting, and health innovation. While feminist scholarship has critiqued FemTech for reinforcing gendered surveillance and data commodification, this article reframes the conversation by foregrounding financialisation as a structural force. It finds that FemTech actors often orient their healthcare products toward investor expectations even prior to funding, privileging scalability and data extractability over affordability, inclusion, or healthcare needs. At the same time, the fieldwork reveals considerable heterogeneity within the sector, with some locally funded or publicly supported initiatives focusing on unmet health needs rather than rapid growth. The article argues for a political economy approach to FemTech that accounts for uneven financial influences and calls for more differentiated regulatory scrutiny of how capital structures digital health innovation.