How Health Apps Let Women Down
Women have many reasons for tracking their health, but the apps they turn to are often disappointing
Banana icons with condoms. A heavy focus on moods. Fetuses the size of grapes. Women have long had to deal with sexist features in health apps. A running joke for a while was that it’s not hard to spot a fertility-tracking app designed by a man. While these apps serve a simple function in theory—to track things—the story of how they came to be biased toward men’s interests is yet another that makes the underrepresentation of women in tech so apparent.
With pink floral backdrops and weight-tracking features in apps that congratulate users for losing weight, developers have made it clear what they think about women. A full year after Apple Health was launched, the company realized it had left out a key feature: a period tracker. Sexist health apps like Glow and Eve have not only failed to accommodate women in the various stages of our lives, but they have also caricatured women’s bodies and reinforced negative concepts about menstruation and pregnancy.
Women were tracking their cycles long before we could ever monitor and record our health with personal devices. As the researcher Whitney Boesel has told the writer Rose Eveleth in 2014, “So many regular facets of being a woman…
