Women’s Health Tech Entrepreneurs Combat Period Poverty and Increase Representation at the USPTO

Roughly half the world’s population menstruates at some point in their lives. While menstruation is essential for human life and a critical indicator of health, it is plagued with stigma. Around the world people who menstruate are routinely kept isolated or home from attending school, work, and cultural and religious events because they lack access to affordable and sustainable menstrual health products.

Women’s health tech¹ — a growing industry that harnesses the power of technology to build solutions to unmet needs in women’s health — can provide access to innovative, affordable, and sustainable menstrual health products. Aside from selling a useful product or service, women’s health tech companies aim to deliver educational resources, provide choice in the marketplace, and reduce stigma surrounding women’s health. Women’s health tech can help address period poverty, among many other serious health and cultural issues that affect people who menstruate, while also increasing representation for women in intellectual property (IP) law and at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

Period poverty

Period poverty is a symptom of socioeconomic equality, and generally refers to inadequate access to menstrual products, education, hygienic facilities, waste management, or some combination thereof. This phenomenon is underreported and under-studied, but some research estimates that up to 500 million people globally face period poverty. Period poverty is an imbalanced hardship and is not exclusive to the developing world. Research suggests that period poverty affects an estimated 11 million people in the United States, including about 14% of college-aged people who menstruate and over 200,000 unhoused individuals.

The root causes of period poverty are multi-faceted and vary across cultures. But a common denominator is the lack of affordability and consistent access to menstrual products. In parts of the world where there is a general lack of access to clean water and adequate sanitation infrastructure, people who menstruate face hardship and shame when menstruating. The stigmas, lack of education, and taboos around menstruation lead to a culture of silence while severely impacting the lives, access to education, and autonomy for those who menstruate.

Period poverty seriously impacts those who experience it. Not only can poor menstrual hygiene result in physical ailments — including fungal infections, urinary tract infections, yeast infections, infertility, and birth complications — it also robs women and girls of opportunity. Women and girls who experience period poverty are significantly more likely to miss school and work when they menstruate. A UNESCO report estimates that one in 10 girls in Sub-Saharan Africa misses school during their menstrual cycles, causing some girls to miss up to 20% of a given school year. Many girls drop out of school entirely once they begin to menstruate. In the U.S., nearly one in five girls have missed school due to lack of access to affordable menstrual products. In Bangladesh, a study showed that women missed an average of six days per month of work while menstruating. School and work absenteeism result in diminished earnings prospects for women and contribute to loss of economic independence.

A tool to combat period poverty: The past, present, and (post-apocalyptic) future of the menstrual cup

A major challenge in combatting period poverty is that traditional menstrual products, such as tampons and pads, are single-use products, and in the U.S., at least, are subject to a “pink tax.” These products are costly, can be difficult to obtain, and generate significant waste. One sustainable and affordable solution is the menstrual cup or disk, which has increased in popularity in recent years — and, as demonstrated in HBO’s The Last of Us, may be a viable period product while surviving a fungal-zombie-induced pandemic. Menstrual cups are made of silicone or rubber that menstruators insert into the vagina during menstruation to collect fluid. They can hold up to three times as much fluid as tampons and need only be emptied and rinsed before being reused.

Menstrual cups offer several advantages over traditional menstrual products, one of the most notable being that they are reusable. Depending upon the product, menstrual cups cost between $20-$40 and can be used for up to 10 years. Given that the average person who menstruates spends between $120-$180 per year on menstrual products, menstrual cups are an attractive alternative for those experiencing period poverty. Menstrual cups or disks are also well-suited for use by people who menstruate in areas with poor waste management infrastructure because they generate a fraction of the waste of single-use products.

Menstrual cups and other menstrual products have been opening doors to women for many years. Leona W. Chalmers obtained a patent on one of the earliest commercial iterations of the menstrual cup in 1937, titled “CATAMENIAL APPLIANCE” (U.S. Patent No. 2,089,113). However, rubber shortages due to World War II and society’s general discomfort in intimately addressing menstrual health using an insertion device kept Chalmer’s invention from taking hold. Many other inventors obtained patents on menstrual cups and improvements thereto throughout the 20th century. However, the menstrual cup never achieved the widespread popularity of single-use menstrual products. Losing profit from a reusable product deterred companies from pursuing menstrual cups further. In fact, society hasn’t been ready to adopt the menstrual cup until very recently.

Women’s health tech joins the fight

Menstrual cups and other innovative menstrual products demonstrate the role technology can play in improving women’s healthcare and, ultimately, advancing women’s rights. However, such products only work if they are effective and affordable. Menstrual products must also be integrated into broader efforts to destigmatize menstruation and educate people about menstrual health.

The women’s health tech industry is addressing these issues through innovations that would not have been possible even a generation ago. Women’s health tech innovations generally consist of wearable devices, software, pharmaceuticals, apps, and consumer products that address conditions that are specific to women, predominantly affect women, or present differently in women than in men. Traditionally, medical researchers generally assumed that male and female bodies were essentially identical apart from their sex organs, which led to male physiology becoming the default in healthcare research and clinical trials. The impetus for the foundation of women’s health tech as a distinct discipline was the growing recognition of the significant physiological differences between male and female bodies.

Examples of women’s health tech innovations include wearable devices, which can predict the menstruator’s period by measuring changes in their body temperature. Menstrual cycle tracking apps can identify the menstruator’s fertile windows, provide recommendations for athletic training, and help the menstruator manage their period symptoms. Innovative menstrual products — like pain-relieving tampons, reusable pads, period underwear, and smart menstrual cups — provide more options to menstruators than ever before. Some women’s health tech companies also focus on the education and logistics angles in the fight against period poverty, such as a telehealth and e-commerce platform and a last-mile delivery service.

Women in health tech IP

Women’s health tech not only provides women with new menstrual health options — it creates new opportunities for women in entrepreneurship and increases women inventorship.

In 2023, the value of the women's health tech market was $51.8 billion, and is estimated to grow to over $117 billion in 2029. Entrepreneurs founded over 40 women's health tech startups per year from 2013-2020, and funding in the women’s health tech space rose from roughly $100 million in 2010 to $2.5 billion in 2021. Women appear to be the primary beneficiaries of this market growth, with over 70% of women’s health tech companies having at least one female founder, according to one study. But there is still room to grow. Only about 1% of healthcare R&D is invested in female-specific conditions outside of oncology, so significant white space exists for women entrepreneurs to join the women’s health tech wave.

Developing an innovative women’s health tech product or service is only part of the puzzle for women entrepreneurs; they must also secure patents and other forms of IP protection for their innovations if they are to realize their full value. As with R&D funding for women’s healthcare, significant white space exists in the IP landscape for women’s health tech innovations. For example, a search of filed U.S. patents and applications reveals 25,320 results related to penis pumps and implants, but only 6,124 results related to menstrual cups and disks.² Women remain severely underrepresented among inventor-patentees, but that gap may be slowly closing in women’s health tech and related fields. While women accounted for only 16.5% of inventors among international patent applications in all industries in 2021, they accounted for 29.6% among patent applications in the biotechnology industry.

Women’s health tech innovations can be patent-protected with utility patents or design patents. While the earliest menstrual cup was patented in the 1930s, the USPTO grants patents on variations and improvements to the menstrual cup. Patent applications in established technologies such as menstrual health products typically focus more on incremental changes to existing technologies than on radical new designs. For example, a search of filed U.S. patent applications related to “menstrual cup” reveals almost 3,000 applications filed since 2013, showing that even technology nearly 100 years old can still provide opportunities for enterprising inventors.³

The biggest hurdle to getting through the patent office for a simple mechanical device, such as the menstrual cup, is overcoming obviousness rejections under Section 103 of the Patent Act. But the history of the menstrual cup and society’s readiness for adopting the menstrual cup may help overcome this significant hurdle.

Katrine Marçal, author of Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men, quoted Robert Shiller, a winner of a Nobel Prize for Economics, who suggested that “many inventions take time to catch on precisely because a good idea alone won’t cut it. Society at large must also recognize the usefulness of the idea. The market doesn’t always know what’s best for itself. . . .” Katrine Marçal, p. 7. In other words, just because something appears obvious in hindsight does not mean it was obvious at the time it was invented. Improvements to the menstrual cup, as well as many other exciting technologies in the women’s health tech industry, may not be considered obvious in the eyes of the USPTO because society at large was not ready for the menstrual cup until very recently. Just because researchers historically failed to consider women's bodies while innovating a product does not mean that new designs accounting for the female body should not be awarded patent protection. For example, prior to August 2023, the absorbency of menstrual products had only ever been tested with water or saline solution instead of blood. Findings from this and other studies that appreciate the differences between blood and saline could lead to patentable advancements in menstrual care.

Women’s health tech will not solve period poverty on its own, but it is a promising avenue for combatting a serious problem that affects people who menstruate.