9 - Are Ovulation Biosensors Feminist Technologies?

Summary

Introduction

Towards the end of 2019, media reports emerged of a team of student researchers at the University of Copenhagen developing a chewing gum that helps women detect ovulation: when the ‘Ovulaid’ gum changes colour, women will know they’ve reached their ‘fertile window’, the days of the menstrual cycle when a woman can become pregnant (Russell, 2019). Ovulation, the releasing of an egg from the ovaries, is triggered by the rise and fall of the so-called ‘sex’ hormones, oestrogen, progesterone and luteinizing hormone. These hormonal changes can (sometimes) be detected through saliva, urine and temperature. Ovulation biosensors, like the chewing gum, claim to help women detect and predict their ovulation patterns and thus make conception easier by indicating the times at which they are most likely to conceive (Wilkinson, 2016). They can also, of course, be used to avoid conception.

Ovulation biosensors are located within a wider array of ‘FemTech’ devices/ products comprising an ever-increasing number of fertility-related apps and devices that have come onto the global market, each attempting to offer something new such as more in-depth data or greater levels of accuracy. Media stories, like the one cited, frequently accompany these developments, focusing not only on the increasing use of such devices (see, for example, Weigel, 2016) but also on the poor reliability of fertility tracking (see, for example, Kleinman, 2021). The FemTech industry (services, products and software designed to focus on women’s health) is increasingly subjected to public scrutiny. Many self-tracking apps and devices encourage women to collect and store large quantities of bodily data online, and controversies have arisen around companies’ capture and on-selling of this data (see, for example, Shadwell, 2019). In an important case, in 2021 Flo Health Inc, (owners of ‘Flo’, a period and ovulation tracking app with more than 100 million users), settled with the US Federal Trade Commission, who proved the company was sharing users’ data with third parties, including Google and Facebook, despite having promised to keep it secure (Federal Trade Commission, 2021).

FemTech is also increasingly the subject of social research, as we describe later in this chapter. A key strand of this work highlights issues of data privacy and the commercialization of women’s fertility. Science and technology studies (STS) and feminist technoscience studies (FTS) approaches are central to this field, and we situate our research in this space.