Femtech: Tech By Women, For Women

Myrth operates on a pretty simple premise: knowing yourself and leveraging the power of your in-person connections can help you grow into the version of yourself that you want to be. To do that, we track daily habits and use that data to see where we’re having successes and challenges.

That’s been the premise for a lot of other apps, too, but there was one big problem: they were apps designed by men, and they assumed the default users were other men. It has caused some issues.

Take, for example, Apple Health. When it debuted in 2014 as a companion to the Apple Watch, it was (rightly) heralded as a game-changing piece of software. It tracked heart rate, calories burned, sodium intake, blood alcohol content, and more. When Apple first announced it would be setting the Apple Watch free into the world, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering said the app would let users “monitor all of your metrics that you’re most interested in.” It was the ultimate triumph of the “know thyself” school of self improvement, where if you can track it, you can get better at it.

But they forgot one thing: the app didn’t track period cycles.

It’s one of the most glaring examples of tech designed by men that neglected the needs of its female users, but it’s certainly not the only one. There’s the ongoing conversation about the new, bigger smartphone designs being too big for women’s hands (women, on average, have hands an inch smaller than men’s). There are fitness apps that don’t account for pregnancy or breastfeeding when tracking calories or exercise. There are period-tracker apps that send highly sensitive user data about symptoms, sexual activity, and cycles directly to Facebook without their users’ knowledge.

The idea of male-presenting bodies and needs being coded as “normal” isn’t a new thing. Simone de Beauvoir talked about the male default in her groundbreaking 1949 book, The Second Sex. Even so, for more than half a century, we’ve grappled with this question of how to better serve the needs of women and others who fall outside that so-called default, with only varying degrees of success.

Myrth is part of a new wave of female-focused tech businesses trying to shift that default assumption. 

These companies often get lumped together under the moniker “femtech”, but that label only communicates so much about what the various companies are focused on. As for Myrth, well, we’re a woman-owned, woman-run business focused on making sure we fill the mental health and accountability needs of all of our members, especially women.

The female-dominated makeup of our team means we’re less likely to miss issues that make tech less useful (or even useless) to women who use it. We’re proud of that and hope we can expand on it.

One of the ways we’re working to do that is by making Myrth a safer place to share confidences. 

Women on the internet report startlingly high rates of harassment across almost all sites, from Facebook to Twitter and back again. That’s not okay with us, and we don’t want it happening on our platform, so we’ve focused on creating nano-networks: small groups built on a trust economy, where each person knows and can rely on the other people they’re in contact with. That protects everybody on our platform, but it especially protects women from the kinds of harassment they experience elsewhere online. 

Myrth is committed to meeting the needs of as many people as possible--and that includes the 50% of the population who are women.

Have you found that the tech you use isn’t well-suited to you because of your size or other needs? Is there something you’d like us to consider while building out our platform? Drop us a line and let us know.