FEATURE
Women-centered technology—often labeled FemTech—has moved from niche curiosity to a serious market force.
Written by Cassandra Kelly
Photo: Droplette
THE GLOBAL FEMTECH MARKET had an estimated value of $60.9 billion in 2025 and is projected to more than double in size by 2034, growing at nearly 9 percent annually. Yet even as devices and diagnostics focused on menstruation, fertility, menopause, sexual health, and skincare and beauty draw unprecedented investment and attention, for the engineers building devices around women’s needs, the hurdles are as much cultural as they are scientific. Gaps in gender-specific data, skepticism about women as a primary user base, and stigma and taboo create a persistent sense that “serious” engineering lives somewhere else.
But for the engineers building those products, the story is more complicated than a bullish market forecast. The work is technical, certainly, but it’s also deeply personal, and often emotionally exhausting.
“It’s 2025, and we’re still working on the most basic stuff when it comes to women’s health,” said Zeinab Hosseinidoust, an associate professor of chemical engineering at McMaster University and a core researcher behind the Bfree menstrual cup. “It is sometimes emotional. It is sometimes frustrating.”
Chemical engineers and MIT-trained founders Madhavi Gavini and Rathi Srinivas echo Hosseinidoust’s sentiment. As co-founders of Droplette, a handheld micro-mist device that delivers active skincare ingredients deeper into the skin, they’ve navigated everything from gendered skepticism about “beauty tech” to the realities of building hardware for users who are juggling work, caregiving, and chronic time scarcity.
These women, and many like them, are quietly reframing FemTech beyond just a pink-washed marketing category, but instead as rigorous engineering grounded in empathy and lived experience.
The Engineers Behind the Devices
Both the Bfree Cup and Droplette began as many engineering projects do: with a clear technical puzzle.
For Gavini, that puzzle was transdermal drug delivery. “I was really interested in the ‘Holy Grail’ of delivery, which is insulin without needles,” she said. “I don’t think that’s ever going to happen because you’ve got such a tight therapeutic window and too much human-to-human variability.”
So, she turned to a more tractable but still challenging problem: moving large molecules like peptides, collagen, and hyaluronic acid into the epidermis and dermis without needles or abrasion. Skin is an extraordinarily effective barrier—compounds larger than roughly 500 Daltons don’t make it through on their own so topical creams mostly sit on the surface.
The result of that work is Droplette, a cordless, palm-sized device that converts carefully formulated serums into a high-velocity micro-mist. The droplets are tuned in size and speed so they can slip past the stratum corneum and deposit active ingredients deeper into the skin.
At McMaster, Hosseinidoust’s research began from a very different angle: antimicrobials. Trained as a chemical engineer, she has spent much of her career thinking about surfaces—wound dressings, implant coatings, water filters—that can kill harmful bacteria without damaging beneficial ones.
Instead of broad-spectrum antibiotics, she focuses on targeted antimicrobial strategies, including bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) and other approaches that can be turned into practical products. “I’m not a biologist,” she said. “I look at where these biological agents can be products, what their potential is, and how we can engineer them to get there.”
That perspective eventually intersected with menstrual health when a collaborator approached her about women’s hygiene. The vision was to bring targeted, microbiome-safe antimicrobial strategies into menstrual products—a space that has seen remarkably little engineering innovation relative to its importance.
The Bfree Cup is an early milestone in that effort. Unlike conventional menstrual cups that prioritize shape and capacity alone, the Bfree design focuses on surface behavior and material interaction with microbes. Hosseinidoust’s team engineered the material to discourage bacterial adhesion and residue buildup while remaining flexible, durable, and safe for extended contact. The cup must withstand repeated cleaning, variable water quality, and inconsistent sanitation conditions without degrading performance—constraints that shaped everything from material selection to wall thickness and texture.
Madhavi Gavini and Rathi Srinivas.
Photo: Droplette
Photo: The Hosseinidoust Lab/McMaster University
A Population the World Still Ignores
“We grow up just accepting what’s available,” Hosseinidoust explained. “We’re told ‘just use this cup, don’t complain, and feel guilty if you don’t use it because everything else is either bad for the environment or bad for your health.’ But when you look at all the advancement in every other field, you realize how little has been done here.”
The technical work is demanding. But the barriers these women encounter are rarely just technical. Funding for women’s health has historically lagged behind other areas, despite the fact that roughly half the human population menstruates, experiences pregnancy, or navigates menopause. Basic issues, from painful periods to recurrent infections, postpartum complications, and perimenopause, still lack robust, user-friendly solutions.
“It’s a goldmine from a research perspective and a social perspective,” Hosseinidoust said. “But it’s personal for me too, because I see the inequalities that led us here. We’re still missing basic comfort, let alone full health.
On the consumer side, engineers like Gavini and Srinivas confront a different stigma—the assumption that anything categorized as “beauty” is inherently frivolous or unserious.
“We both come from very academic backgrounds,” Gavini said. “There’s definitely snobbery around the cosmetics industry. But we knew what we had to do to move this technology forward and felt good about bringing something into the category that actually works.”
Droplette’s consumer path has raised eyebrows among peers who equate legitimacy with U.S. Food and Drug Administration-regulated therapeutics and clinical trials. But that skepticism can ignore reality on the ground: acne, hyperpigmentation, scarring, and chronic skin conditions profoundly affect mental health, stress, and quality of life. This is especially true for women, who are socialized to treat appearance as a form of social currency.
“People send us photos and say, ‘This is the only thing that’s ever worked for my skin,’” Srinivas said. “Acne might not be a rare disease, but it changes how you move through the world.” That legitimacy gap didn’t go unnoticed by institutional funders. After years of prototyping, the founders launched Droplette in 2020 with roughly $10 million in funding from organizations including NASA, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, and the National Institutes of Health.
The early capital allowed the team to move quickly, not just into consumers’ hands, but toward longer-term medical and defense applications, where the same delivery platform could be used for wound care and other localized therapies.
By contrast, Bfree’s progress has emerged from academic research pathways and early-stage collaboration, underscoring how women’s health innovation often advances first through persistence and proof rather than immediate institutional backing.
Designing in the Real World, Not the Lab
Both teams are solving messy, real-world problems with all the constraints that implies.
For Droplette, that means designing for life, not lab conditions. The founders began with a detailed list of product requirements including that the device be cordless, portable, safe across a wide range of temperatures and humidity, and fast.
Then they handed prototypes to real people and watched assumptions crumble. Button placement that felt intuitive in the lab was uncomfortable for people with smaller hands or arthritis. A gasket that seemed reassuringly tight was nearly impossible for some users to open. Demonstration videos showing the ideal angle of use went mostly ignored.
“When you’re very deep in development, the things that seem obvious to you are not what’s obvious to a user,” Srinivas noted.
Their response was to move the power button, loosen the gasket slightly, and retune the pump so the mist still delivers effectively even when the device is held at less-than-optimal angles. From an engineering standpoint, the best solution might have involved a more constrained protocol like holding the nozzle over a single patch of skin for 20 seconds before moving on. But, “no one’s going to do that,” Gavini pointed out.
Research on the Bfree cup was recently published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces: “Self-Cleaning Menstrual Cups with Plant-Based Biodegradable Superabsorbent Fibrous Tablets for Hygienic and Sustainable Period Care.”
Photo: ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, courtesy of The Hosseinidoust Lab/McMaster University
Controlled laboratory testing of the alginate hydrogel superabsorbent material using simulated menstrual fluid in a reusable cup.
Photo: The Hosseinidoust Lab/McMaster University
“You have to keep the activation energy low,” she said. “You might drop a few theoretical efficiency points, but if it means people actually use it, that’s the right trade.” The Bfree team is navigating a different set of constraints: biological complexity, cultural norms, and global inequity. A menstrual cup has to function in settings with limited water, inconsistent sanitation, and minimal privacy. It has to be safe for long-term use, compatible with a delicate microbiome, and intuitive for first-time users who may have never encountered a reusable product before.
For many users, those constraints are not theoretical. As one early Bfree adopter described, she often travels to remote rural areas where access to sanitation during menstruation is limited. Before switching products, tampon changes dictated her movements and created constant anxiety. After discovering Bfree, she wrote, she was able to continue her fieldwork without fear of leaks or odor, freeing her to travel without the stress that had previously shaped her days.
And for many of the girls and women Bfree aims to serve—particularly in low-resource communities—the stakes are high. Access to safe, reliable menstrual products is directly linked to school attendance, work participation, and long-term economic opportunity.
“Investing in women’s health gives back, everywhere in the world,” Hosseinidoust explained. “It gives women options. It allows girls to attend school. It allows women to work. There’s a huge economic component.”
Under ‘Extraction Phase,’ a schematic representation of the alginate fiber production process using a wet-spinning setup and its function as a superabsorbent material for collecting menstrual fluid inside a reusable cup. Under ‘Blood Processing Phase,’ a diagram showing the biofilm and blood clot formation on the cup surface in the absence of lubricant.
Video: The Hosseinidoust Lab/McMaster University
Pushing Past the Hype
If there’s a word that gives these engineers pause, it’s FemTech.
“I actually don’t love the term,” Gavini said. “Unless you’re going to call things ‘MenTech,’ it feels condescending like, ‘tech, but for girls.’” She puts it in the same bucket as viral trends that frame women as cute but incompetent, like “girl math.” “The whole idea that it’s adorable when women can’t do math or finance just upsets me,” she added.
Hosseinidoust’s view has evolved over time. “When I was younger, I would’ve said, ‘We’re all humans, just invest in human health, this doesn’t matter,’” she said. “But the older I get, and the more barriers I encounter, the more I realize: it’s not imagined. These barriers to women are real and systemic.”
For Hosseinidoust, the term FemTech is imperfect but useful as a way to name and push against those barriers. “We might need this push to get ahead, even if it’s only for a short time,” she said. “I’m okay with that, for now. What I don’t want is for it to become an empty shell that pays lip service without changing anything.”
Both perspectives underscore the same risk: that as FemTech becomes trendy, it could drift into performative branding rather than rigorous engineering.
“The work has to be safe, it has to work, and it has to be better than what we currently have,” Hosseinidoust insisted. “This work has to be done to a high degree of quality, not just because it’s trending.”
Photo: The Hosseinidoust Lab/McMaster University
“Investing in women’s health gives back, everywhere in the world. It gives women options. It allows girls to attend school. It allows women to work. There’s a huge economic component.”
—Zeinab Hosseinidoust, Canada research chair in bacteriophage bioengineering and associate professor in chemical engineering, McMaster University
The Droplette device in action.
Photo: Droplette
A Movement in the Making
For all the challenges, Hosseinidoust sees something new taking shape. “There is a movement forming,” she said. “You can see it from many angles: the human aspect, the business aspect, the research aspect. Investing in women’s health empowers women as users and as creators. It gives them options. It opens up entrepreneurship. It makes it easier to stand on your own feet.”
More investment in women’s health and women-centered engineering doesn’t just promise better products. It points toward a healthier, more productive, and more equitable society.
And yet, the work remains grounded in basics: safer menstrual products, less painful and stigmatized periods, skin therapies that actually match the biology of the organ they’re meant to treat.
In every case, it looks like engineering that starts where good engineering always should, with a clear-eyed understanding of the problem and of the people living with it.
“Every good engineering solution starts with understanding the problem,” Srinivas said. “Sometimes that means understanding people too.”
Cassandra Kelly is a technology writer in Columbus, Ohio.
Empathy as an Engineering Requirement
For all three engineers, empathy is at the core of everything they do. Srinivas described Droplette’s customer as “anyone with skin,” but she also acknowledged that women are disproportionately the ones buying and using the device, and that their lives are shaped by specific pressures.
“The challenges women face—their routines, the obligations they juggle—those are different,” she said. “I have two kids. Madhavi has a toddler. Part of the appeal is having a technology that can slip into that chaos without adding more burden.”
That philosophy shows up in small but meaningful choices: a device that holds a long charge, capsules that are single-use and sealed so they don’t have to be stored, a treatment time under two minutes. It’s skin science designed around the lived reality of racing between childcare, work, and everything else.
For the Bfree Cup, empathy means refusing to treat menstruation as an abstract design problem. The team is drawing on both rigorous microbiology and the everyday experiences of people who menstruate. It also means deliberately inviting men into the conversation to build understanding and shared responsibility.
“I’m not going to say it in a whisper and hope you guess,” Hosseinidoust said. “I’m going to say it again and again: This is what we experience. Learn about it.”
Education, she added, has to start early for girls and boys. “Young kids don’t describe a friend as ‘the girl’ or ‘the boy.’ They just have friends,” she said. “At some age we start saying ‘we’re different,’ and somehow that becomes a barrier to understanding half of society. It shouldn’t.”
The Bfree team. From left: Shaghayegh Moghimi, Lubna Najm, Leisa Hirtz, Tohid Didar, and Fereshteh Bayat.
Photo: The Hosseinidoust Lab/McMaster University
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