For years, women’s health has been underserved, under-researched, and overlooked. FemTech has emerged to bridge that gap, offering access, autonomy, and innovation in areas like fertility, hormonal health, sexual wellbeing, and menopause support. But with this progress comes a responsibility: to protect deeply personal health data with the transparency, care, and integrity users expect.

Over the past few years, this sector has faced increasing scrutiny. Reports of data sharing with third parties, unclear consent models, and inconsistent security practices have made headlines. While not every incident leads to an immediate fallout, the impact is real: slower growth, lost user confidence, and raised flags during procurement or investment conversations.

In the past, cybersecurity in digital health was framed as a technical obligation. Today, it’s something else entirely: a litmus test for credibility.

When Trust Depends on Security

FemTech platforms operate at a complex intersection: direct-to-consumer healthcare, clinical responsibility, and a history of systemic mistrust in women’s health.

The data they hold is not just medically sensitive, it’s intimate. Information about reproductive health, mental well-being, hormone treatments, and sexual activity touches on identity, autonomy, and personal safety. As a result, expectations around security and data use are significantly higher.

In today’s landscape, users are asking more of their providers:

• Who can access my data?
• What happens if something goes wrong?
• Can I trust this service with data that defines my body, my choices, and my future?

These are not just compliance or cyber security questions. They’re questions that determine whether a product is downloaded, recommended, or trusted enough to share with a friend.

When Resilience Becomes Visible

In women’s health tech, cybersecurity issues don’t stay behind the scenes. A misstep, whether technical, contractual, or related to data use, can quickly spill into public view, affecting not just operations but also reputation, procurement, and growth.

The pressure to innovate, scale, and meet user expectations is constant. Teams are navigating a fast-moving landscape with shifting regulations, evolving technologies, and a growing number of integration points. In this environment, even well-intentioned platforms can find themselves exposed through outdated consent flows, unmonitored third-party risks, or controls that haven’t scaled with the business.

This isn’t a failure of intent. It’s the reality of a sector under pressure to move fast, support care, and maintain trust all at once.

That’s why visibility matters. Demonstrating control, readiness, and active oversight is becoming a key differentiator. Investors and procurement leads aren’t just looking at what frameworks you’ve checked off; they want to understand how resilience is maintained as the platform scales.

Operationalising Resilience

Compliance and technical leads already know where the risks sit. What’s harder is maintaining oversight across complex digital estates, fast-moving product cycles, and overlapping frameworks, while continuing to scale.

Embedding cyber resilience across a FemTech organisation doesn’t mean endless documentation. It means building the capacity to:

• Maintain visibility across infrastructure, suppliers, and sensitive workflows
• Demonstrate readiness—not just at audit, but across procurement, partnership, and investor conversations
• Align product development and data governance with user expectations
• Proactively respond to regulatory changes with agility
  
  

This is no longer a future concern. Across the UK, EU, and beyond, regulations are shifting towards models of continuous resilience, expecting providers to evidence live controls, active oversight, and real-time accountability.

As AI models, connected devices, and cross-border data flows reshape digital health, static compliance frameworks are quickly being outpaced. The organisations that lead will be those that operationalise resilience: turning trust into process, and process into a foundation for growth.