In May 2026 we organised a workshop at the CPDP conference called ‘Lessons from feminist FemTech on democratic value-based data infrastructures’. We organised it because we realized the complexity around making actually useful technology work in today’s society and solving these problems requires many different kinds of expertise in the room. We are Judith Zoë (The Digital Period), Marie Kochsiek (Drip) and Sophie-Louise Feith (Hanah Ecosystem). In this blog post we share our most important take-aways.
Across Europe, femtech is emerging from feminist communities, researchers, health advocates and people with relevant lived experience. Ofcourse, not all femtech is feminist. Some products consist just of pink-coded marketing strategies that exploit the health and data gaps that exist for women. However, some of the feminist initiatives build technologies that serve bodily autonomy and collective wellbeing. Yet financial frameworks judge these initiatives by frameworks designed for extractive growth, private ownership and venture-driven commercialisation. Europe says it wants value-based, human-centred technology. But financial and governance models still reward proprietary ownership, concentration of intellectual property and the commodification of health data. Feminist femtech exposes the limits of that approach.
The question we brought to the room was: what would it take to build digital infrastructure that actually serves people’s bodies and autonomy and who has a role in making that possible?
These are our three take-aways:
1. Feminist FemTech exists and it works
Many people assume that feminist values and viable technology don’t mix. Our workshop proved otherwise. Participants named a rich ecosystem of initiatives: period tracking apps built on privacy-first principles, data cooperatives, community clinics, platforms that put stewardship over profit. These are not prototypes, theoretical ideas or thought experiments. They exist, they serve people, and people love them. The problem is not that feminist tech hasn’t been invented. The problem is that almost nobody with power is paying attention to it.
2. The barriers are structural, not technical
The challenges facing feminist tech are not about lacking the right algorithm, the use of ‘deep’ tech, or enough venture funding. They are much more complex tied to systematic problems with our economy and the way we distribute power. App stores penalise privacy-secure apps by making them indistinguishable from less safe alternatives. Funding criteria reward technical novelty over necessity. Research budgets still treat menstruating bodies as a niche. Governance structures remain dominated by people who have no personal stake in the problems being solved.
What is most striking to us is how little many solutions require new(er) technology. What it requires is a doctor who actually understands the female body. A business model that doesn’t corrupt the mission. A public infrastructure that treats women’s health as a public good. Innovation, here, means social and economic imagination and support for communities far more than technical invention alone.
3. Funders and policymakers: this is a knowledge and resource problem
Again and again the same issue surfaced: the people who decide what gets funded and what gets regulated often lack both the knowledge and the lived experience to tell good initiatives from bad ones. This also leads to a recurrent phenomena where people with funding ask us (and people like us) to advise them for free on how to do their work. A database of trustworthy femtech apps shouldn’t have to be a community volunteer project. Grant criteria shouldn’t inadvertently exclude the most values-aligned organisations.
Moreover, legal frameworks already exist that could support good technology, such as the European Data Health Space, the GDPR, the DMA, Directive on violence against women. These are powerful instruments not yet being used to their full potential in this space. They are not being adequately enforced, making bad players flourish, and preventing value-based players to be seen.
We are asking funders and policymakers to do two things: get closer to the work, and trust the people already doing it. We know you also don’t have unlimited capacity, but you have way more capacity than us. Solutions will come faster if the people allocating resources stop treating this as a niche and start recognising it as exactly the kind of trustworthy, human-centred infrastructure Europe says it wants to build.
Closing thoughts
The solution will not come from one actor. The added value of our workshop was that we were able to bring many people in the same room for the first time. It allowed relationships flourish that we have developed over years of activism while working on this topic. It also shows one of the most important kinds of work that is often unseen: building community.
In the end, women make up half of this world. So let’s make technology also work for us.
Based on the workshop we have collected different feminist initiatiaves in one overview. You can find that here.
Who are we?
Judith Zoë Blijden is a philosopher and lawyer who runs The Digital Period, a platform and podcast examining our relationship with technology. Her first season was about period apps.
Marie Kochsiek is sociologist, technologist and sex educator, and one of the founders of Drip, a Berlin-based period tracker developed by a feminist collective.
Sophie-Louise Feith is a systems engineer and the founder of Hanah Ecosystem, a platform built to allow people to safely share health data with researchers.