Is Femtech the New Cult of Domesticity?
More and more, I have become convinced that femtech as a category is our modern day manifestation of Catharine Beecher’s separate spheres ideology.
It’s hard to distill the contemporary American female experience. Many of its nuances come out of nineteenth century feminism, which emerged in the United States in two competing doctrines: 1) the separate spheres ideology, which said that men and women were biologically suited for different social contributions, and 2) the Seneca Falls Convention’s Declaration of Sentiments ideology, which argued that the male sphere ought to be opened to women, removing gender as a barrier to entry into professional and public life. Both were fiercely pro-woman, but carried different agendas.
In our world today, the latter view, which ultimately grew into 1970s Gloria Steinem feminism, has ostensibly been the winner. Today, women participate in the workforce (nearly 30% of women in heterosexual marriages are the breadwinners), engage in politics (we’ve now even got a female Vice President), and are legally equal to men thanks to the Nineteenth Amendment.
But Catharine Beecher, who championed the separate spheres ideology with her vision of conservative feminism, has always been most interesting to me. I wouldn’t have expected my experience as a VC to be characterized by regular consideration of her work, but 2021 has been full of surprises…
Beecher was one of the very first advocates of women’s rights, although she was a fierce traditionalist. (Roughly a century later, Phyllis Schlafly’s trajectory would look uncannily similar.) She was arguably her day’s most influential crusader for the Cult of Domesticity, through which she argued that the fundamental biological differences between men and women made them better suited to different societal realms: women at home and men as professionals and public figures. She was committed to the advancement of women, and this was her chosen route.
More and more, I have become convinced that femtech as a category is our contemporary manifestation of Beecher’s ideology and the Cult of Domesticity.
Let me start with a brief overview of femtech. The category is made up of software and technology companies that exist to address women's biological needs, ie. our health and wellbeing. It’s healthtech with a focus on women, and can by and large be broken down into the following five categories:
Fertility Solutions (period tracking, IUI, IVF, egg preservation...)
Pregnancy and Motherhood (self-explanatory)
Sexual and Gynecological Health (routine GYN care, sex ed, STIs, menopause, pelvic health...)
Chronic Disease (cancer, depression, heart disease...)
Lifestyle and Wellness (holistic mind-body solutions, emotional wellbeing…)
The issues that many of the companies within these categories are looking to solve are serious and important. And given the gross underrepresentation of women in medical research and the extent to which women are overlooked in the current healthcare system (with grave implications on their physical and mental health), innovation is both sorely needed and more difficult to achieve.
But the femtech category handicaps itself: it’s frustratingly separate from the healthtech vertical, is overly concerned with cutesy branding, makes up for under-resourcing with empty messaging, and over-prioritizes reproductive health while under-prioritizing all other female health issues.
So what does this have to do with Catharine Beecher and the Cult of Domesticity?
Semantics matter: The language used to discuss women’s rights within the separate spheres ideology clearly signaled that women would not reach outside of their prescribed domestic bounds. Like the notion of a domestic sphere, the word “femtech” itself implies that women’s health exists independent of healthcare or healthtech. We’re referring to the health of half the world’s population, but presenting it as a discrete category distinct from other health issues. Femtech places women’s interests as dissociated from the larger world of healthtech.
The boundary is the impediment: By asserting a clear division between female domestic and male public spheres, Beecher was able to advocate for women’s rights in a non-threatening way, emphasizing the primacy of conventional gender roles and status quo. The limitations inherent to her argument are echoed in tactics used today within femtech (ie. girly branding for serious issues), which keep femtech pigeonholed within a narrow definition of what can be feminine care.
Women are valuable insofar as they reproduce: Beecher’s whole argument for why women deserved more autonomy came out of her belief that women were singularly important to society for reproduction.
In femtech today, the distribution of funding towards fertility supports this same idea. 65 percent of all femtech funding is targeted at fertility solutions, even though less than 45 percent of the US female population is of reproductive age, and only a portion of that subset is actively trying to get pregnant, is pregnant, or is post-pregnancy. The message here is that women’s health matters insofar as childbirth is concerned; most everyone else (menopausal and post-menopausal women, especially) must fend for themselves within a system deprioritizing their health interests.
Money isn’t ladylike: While Catharine Beecher certainly believed in elevating women’s status through increased societal recognition of domestic contributions, she believed that money should remain firmly within the male sphere. Appreciation was to be shown via vocalized gratitude rather than payment.
Similarly, within femtech today, despite all the buzz around female founders and femtech products, there’s disappointingly little funding. The vertical remains significantly underdeveloped, with a stark disparity between how much women spend annually on medical expenses (which is estimated at approximately $500 billion) and how little healthcare R&D is targeted at women’s health issues (only 4%).
In 2020, femtech as a vertical raised $749.22 million from VC, according to PitchBook numbers, the highest ever for the category. In contrast, healthtech raised $22.03 billion from VC in 2020. Given that women make up 50% of the population receiving global healthcare, this distribution ratio makes no sense at all. The very existence of a separate femtech implies that women’s needs can be met by a niche industry, when we actually need a structural reorientation of priorities and funding within healthcare itself.
We don’t always see it, but Beecher’s theory may have won out more than we think. This is not to say that amazing things aren’t happening in the femtech space, but I think serious changes could be made. And when it comes to Beecher, despite my disagreements, I still respect parts of her theory. But for now, I’m ready to see the modern day Cult of Domesticity busted.