- Hello everybody.
I wanted to share some more clips with you
from this week's episode of my podcast "Doing It",
which is with Laura Shipp
who is a doctoral researcher into cybersecurity
and period tracking apps.
You may remember her from the episode of The Hormone Diaries
that I did
all about the five different fertility tracking apps
that I was using.
Laura helped with some of the research on that video
and also I interviewed her for that video
about the privacy and data side of these apps.
And we get into that and so much more in this episode.
We talk about the whole femtech industry,
who is it kind of for,
who is it leaving out
who maybe doesn't have access
to this kind of privatised health care in a way
and then also what does it mean for these private companies
to be providing these kinds of services and products
to do with our menstrual health or sexual wellness,
things that can be quite sensitive information
about our bodies and our health
and what does that mean
in terms of its relationship with capitalism and marketing
and all of that?
I hope you enjoy these clips.
If you want to listen to the full episode,
you can do so wherever you get your podcasts
and also the full video episode is available for my patrons.
So I hope you enjoy these clips.
Please subscribe to my podcast "Doing It", enjoy.
- So much of it is around
kind of centering the story of the founder in the products.
So it's often things like
someone kind of talking about their fertility journey
or their difficult periods
or talking about like breastfeeding their children
and finding it so hard to do that on the move
and things like that
and that's always such a key part
of kind of like selling the product
and justifying why it exists
because so much of femtech
kind of talks about the ways it's trying to fill the gap
that's left behind by lots of other kind of systems,
whether that's healthcare or just the lack of research
on things like,
I think like endometriosis is something that we hear
a kind of classic example of that,
just like how long it takes to get diagnosed,
how little research and how kind of
I guess how little understanding there is
of it as a condition.
And I think that's kind of like demonstrated in femtech,
all the different parts of the system kind of come together
and they, I guess kind of repackage that as saying
like here's the whole, here's the issue
and we'll fill it with this particular product
that we've designed that will allow you now to track,
you know, X, Y, and Z
so you can live a kind of healthier and better life
and so much of it is kind of saying like
so my experience as someone who has endometriosis is this
and this is how this product that I've designed
kind of solves that problem for me
and it will solve it for you too.
They call it femvertising
so kind of targeting
particularly millennials with imagery
and like really value-based marketing
because I guess they know that a lot of millennials,
myself included,
are like quite into buying from like brands and industries
that we feel like kind of are living up to the things
that we try and do on a day to day level.
- They need a feminist mission statement.
- Yeah and so many of them literally do have that
or like use those kind of words,
like mission statement or like empowerment.
It literally has a language so yeah.
- I guess one of the things that this makes me think about
is like how much can we be cynical
and kind of like question this and interrogate it
and like how much should we be celebrating
that feminist values have money behind them,
have mainstream audiences?
Like where is this line?
'Cause on the one hunch you're like
this is actually really good that feminist values are like
I guess popular enough
that companies feel like they have to adopt them
in order to make money and in a capitalist society,
like money rules all.
There you go,
that was me trying to celebrate it
and then I immediately went cynical.
- I know and I think that was the hardest part,
like I felt the same, I literally
I think it's really hard to balance that,
but it seems like maybe those feminist values
can sometimes only go so far or only take us so far
if at the end of the day
that the idea is that you were selling a product,
if you're always kind of at the end of the day,
yeah I guess trying to make money from that.
I think particularly with health
'cause yeah for me I feel like health,
should health be something that we make money from
or that money should be made from?
- I mean it is if you look at like the US
and big pharma and everything,
it is something that people have made money off
and make like stupid amounts of money off
but is that ethical?
- Yes 'cause I guess with all of those things
there's the kind of question
of who's getting left behind by that?
Who's not included in those kinds of feminist slogans?
And yeah, I definitely see with a lot of companies
that are kind of so much of the branding and the imagery
can really be focused around again, white women
and it's kind of selling this very clean version
of menstruation or sex.
Yeah, I feel like just a lot kind of gets left out
of those feminist feminist messages, if that makes sense.
- Yeah, for sure.
And like especially if it's about sex
or fertility or anything,
it's very much like your cis straight
white middle-class woman, like I feel very represented.
- It's got me down.
- Yeah, exactly, it's nailed me down,
but I am but one white woman.
So I guess one of the questions that comes up a lot
when it comes to things like period menstrual tracking apps
is the data and privacy elements
and the question of should I even care
about what these companies
may or may not be doing with my data?
Like how does it affect me in my day-to-day life
and like will I actually feel any of those consequences?
- Mmm, I think that's such a good question
'cause I think a lot of the time,
almost like the biggest and the hardest part of it
is the fact that it doesn't necessarily
change our day-to-day life in ways that we can perceive,
but it's kind of often changing the structures
or impacting the structures
that kind of shape our life, I guess.
So I guess the example I think about with these apps
is the fact that a lot of them
are kind of generating these massive data sets
around periods and health and kind of,
I just want to say vaginas generally.
And I guess like that's fine, that's really good,
we have kind of limited amounts of data on these areas
and especially in terms of large numbers,
but the ways that those kind of datasets get used
can be both kind of generating further money
for the companies that are kind of
doing this work in the first place.
So one of the apps, Glow,
they have a kind of parent company,
which is a big data lab
and all of that data is being fed into their big data lab.
And again, it's really unclear like how that might kind of,
I guess could feed back down
into the ways that kind of algorithms get produced
or new kind of products get brought out
and things like that.
And also if this data kind of ends up
shaping health and healthcare,
from what it seems like a lot of the people
that use femtech and use fertility tracking apps
or kind of period tracking apps more generally,
it's not kind of an even spread across society.
It can often be white middle class, highly educated women.
So if we're getting data sets
that are based just on those groups
and that's kind of then shaping where research is going,
where new products and kind of like drugs
or all kinds of other things come out.
- I guess it kind of like further marginalises people
who are already marginalised
in terms of healthcare and access
to all of those kinds of things.
- Totally and further erases them from that system at all.
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