Hacking Your Period

For the past five years, millions of us have been recording our menstrual symptoms—like mood and pain—on a period-tracker app. Now one company is using all that data to change women’s health forever. 

- Marina Khidekel

Confession: Before reporting this story, I’d never used a period tracker app. I’m not trying to conceive, the Pill makes my cycle mind-bogglingly regular, and there’s something that turns me off about the idea that every bad mood or craving I log could be linked to my reproductive biology—a product of my hormones, rather than my humanity. But apps that track your menstrual cycle are exploding—and women’s tales of devotion to theirs dominate conversations the way Fitbits or diet trackers did several years ago. My analog ways have put me firmly in the health-obsessed minority.

The Big Bang of the menstrual-app universe happened in 2014, when Apple released its health-tracking app, HealthKit, with no option for women to track periods. An uproar ensued, and Apple added the feature, but not before sparking a worldwide conversation about inclusivity in the design of personal-tracking tools. That launched a boom in a sector now known as femtech, which has amassed more than $1 billion in funding since 2014. The world’s mostly male VCs, accustomed to complacently ignoring women’s health, are now pouring money into everything from complex, AIbased period-tracker apps to gadgets like a smart breast pump, a connected Kegel exerciser, and a wristband worn at night that tracks physical metrics tied to fertility. This past March, consulting firm Frost & Sullivan released data predicting a femtech market potential of $50 billion by 2025, backed by some persuasive figures: Women are 75 percent more likely to use digital tools for health care than men are, and working-age women spend 29 percent more per capita on health care compared to men. The realization that women would not only use technology to track their reproductive health, but spend considerable money on it, shook VCs awake.