To fill in the gaps, there’s a handful of fancy, venture-funded period-tracking apps. Apple’s Craig Federighi announces Apple Health in June 2014. The resulting graphs and data displays are academic-looking and confusing, and most of this data must be collected elsewhere first (there’s no iThermometer or MacMucus, you know, yet). In Apple Health today, users can log not only their menstrual cycles but their basal body temperature, their cervical mucus quality, and results from their ovulation tests. Because “femtech” is everywhere these days, it’s easy to forget that when Apple Health debuted in 2014, senior VP of software engineering Craig Federighi told users, “You can monitor all of your metrics that you’re most interested in.” This did not, for nearly a year, include period tracking. This is very much the industry standard - if anything, slightly better than it. At Apple, women hold 29 percent of leadership positions and 23 percent of tech positions, and almost all of those women are white. The “femtech” market is estimated to be worth $50 billion by 2025, but globally, only 10 percent of investor money goes to women-led startups. ![]() This has nothing to do with the tech industry becoming pro-woman. In the past three years, an estimated $1 billion of investment has been poured into women’s health technology. I mean, the culture I live in had already done a thorough enough job prompting me to codify myself as a “bad” woman, and now some poorly designed app was telling me I was also bad data. There was no way to explain to it that something out-of-the-ordinary had happened to my body, and while this wasn’t a huge inconvenience, it did strike me as wildly silly. I had been using the same ad-riddled, ultra-pink app since I bought my first smartphone in 2014, and now I was going to have to delete all of its learnings and start over. ![]() When it did, I realized I couldn’t just go back to logging my period as normal: The app would think I’d undergone a cycle more than twice as long as usual and adjust all my averages, rendering all of its future predictions completely useless to me. “25 days late! 36 days late! 41 days late!” it announced, as I waited six weeks for my post-procedure cycle to reset. “8 days late! 9 days late! 10 days late! 11 days late!” the cloud informed me, as the day of my abortion approached. ![]() It was very cute, and indeed, two pregnancy tests later, it could be confirmed that I was pregnant - not cute at all. Its little cloud body drifted across my iPhone screen: “7 days late!” written in friendly blue lettering on its belly. A cartoon cloud told me I might be pregnant.
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