The women’s health and wellness space is booming. The opportunities are real and so are the rewards. This is where you keep up. Welcome to The DXF Edit.
When there’s no research, women get obsessed with figuring things out themselves. We track everything, connect the dots, and swap tips that aren’t exactly scientific, long before there’s a study to back any of it up. Now the industry is going full throttle to get the data and the research. What used to be “too complicated and burdensome” to bother with is suddenly drawing real money! That’s why it’s so important for women to have money. Let’s never get this twisted. It’s not a coincidence.
Beyond access, the real question is what this data can do for our care. Oura testing whether a ring can predict preterm birth is the kind of thing we should be asking of all of it.
MONEY MOVES
Google and Flo Want to Close the Women’s Health Data Gap. Who Owns the Answers?
Google has taken a stake in Flo, and from early 2027 women who link the two apps will share cycle data in both directions. The companies say they are tackling a real problem, since women’s health has long been under-researched. Their joint research aims to build models that recognize early signs of perimenopause and patterns linked to conditions such as PCOS and endometriosis.
The data that research needs sits in a legal gray zone. HIPAA, the federal health privacy law, does not apply to most period trackers. The companies promise that Flo data will never be used for advertising or sold, while research gets a looser assurance of privacy techniques such as aggregated and pseudonymised data.
Google has history with this app. Not long ago, it agreed to pay $48 million to settle claims that code in the Flo app let it record users’ health communications without consent, and it denies wrongdoing. It also knows what large datasets can build, since its wearable-data model, SensorFM, trained on a trillion minutes of data from five million people. Cycle logs are a layer wearable sensors don’t capture. If the best women’s health datasets end up inside platforms, the knowledge built from them belongs to those platforms, and each woman is left to manage the risk through permissions she grants.
Collective X Raises $3.2M to Sell Women’s Health Research to the Companies Building Products on It
Collective X Health, co-founded by exercise physiologist Dr. Stacy Sims, has raised $3.2 million to build the research foundation that women’s health products sit on. It turns peer-reviewed studies and female-specific data into a cited database that wearable makers, digital health platforms, performance brands and sports teams license, either as their entire women’s health knowledge base or to check findings they already have. Human Powered Health and Altra Running are its first customers, and its investors call it an evidence layer for the whole women’s health ecosystem.
Its founders argue that women have been systematically excluded from health research, and Sims says she spent 25 years working from a research base never designed for women. A database built from that literature inherits its gaps, so Collective X also pays to fill them. Its grant program is funded by Momentous, a supplement company where Sims is an advisor and whose Women’s Three supplement stack she helped develop, and the findings feed back into Collective X’s evidence base.
Collective X’s CEO says every company claiming to serve women should be able to show the research behind that claim. And as it becomes easier to build devices and platforms, this evidence layer will become an attractive and competitive element.
RESEARCH & INNOVATION
Oura’s Smart Ring Gets a Medical Test: Can It Predict Preterm Birth?
Oura says its smart ring is not a medical device. But can it do a medical device’s job? Abu Dhabi’s health department is now testing whether it can warn a woman that labor might be starting too early. The two have launched a 24-month pilot called Project CRADLE, which will put the ring on women with high-risk pregnancies from early pregnancy through delivery and track heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep and activity. Researchers want a pattern strong enough to become a clinically actionable threshold, a signal that could guide treatment or prepare a neonatal unit for an early arrival.
The need is real. Complications of preterm birth are the leading cause of death in children under five, and the cause is often never identified, while the best-known screens, cervical length measurement and a fetal fibronectin test, have limited capacity to predict it. A signal that arrives before labor starts would fill a gap that has devastating effects. For now the promise is ahead of the proof, since the study has not enrolled a woman or said how many it will follow.
Pregnancy is becoming the proving ground where wearables move from selling women insight into their own bodies to supplying evidence to health systems, and a government is the partner. If the pattern holds, a woman at risk gets a warning in time to act. If it doesn’t, the result will still tell women and clinicians how much a ring can actually see.
Unravel Raises €2.96M for a Daily Saliva Hormone Test
Unravel Health, a London startup, has raised €2.96 million in a round that is still closing to build the Micro Lab, a palm-sized device that reads estradiol, the main form of estrogen, and three other hormones from a saliva sample in minutes. A woman takes the sample by placing a strip in her mouth, and the company says daily readings will fill the gap between a blood test, which captures a single day, and wearables, which can only estimate. Early-access devices are expected in 2027.
It is a tricky problem and might not be worth the investment or the effort for most women… Saliva also has a rocky record. A 2023 analysis found that saliva estradiol tests did a poor job of tracking cycle phase, and insurers’ medical policies cite ACOG and menopause-society statements calling saliva hormone testing unreliable. Whether Unravel’s approach avoids those problems is what the outside studies this round pays for are meant to show. Then comes the everyday question of whether a woman already managing a condition like PMOS will take on one more daily test, at a price and from a payer the company has not disclosed.
Where it might be interesting is to support undiagnosed women who are struggling to get a clear answer. As we stand, it still takes women years to get diagnoses of PMOS and endometriosis. A saliva test is an accessible way for women to collect data sets strong enough to help medical providers come to a diagnosis. And while this shouldn’t be on us to make the extra effort, what alternatives do we have?
LAW & POLICY
White House Orders an NIH Women’s Health Division and Dedicates No Concrete Funding
Trump has given the NIH 90 days to create a Women’s Health Division and set up a White House task force, run by the health secretary and the chief of staff, to coordinate the work. The order puts no dollar figure on either and applies only as far as Congress provides money. Congress has kept the government funded only through Dec 11, at last year’s levels.
That leaves a division with a mandate, no money and an overlap. The NIH’s Office of Research on Women’s Health, written into law in 1993, already led the policy that makes grantees account for sex in their studies, one of the jobs the order hands to the new division. The order doesn’t say who will run it, where it will sit or how the two will split the work. The groups welcoming it want $20 billion over 10 years. The Biden initiative that this new division revokes came with $110 million in awards and a $12 billion request.
The order came in two weeks before the midterms, with independent women’s support for Trump down from about four in ten to around a quarter. It wasn’t enough to deliver!
Texas Mother Sues Students for Life Under the Abortion Pill Law It Lobbied For
A Texas mother is suing the president of Students for Life and three other members under HB 7, the abortion pill law the group lobbied to pass. The suit says the four were in Houston on March 23, about three and a half months after the law took effect, ordering abortion pills on a phone in what it calls an apparent publicity stunt. The stunt aimed to show how easy pills are to get in Texas, and the plan hit snags: a provider had blocked one staffer’s account, and an order under an alias listed the buyer’s age as 15, below the provider’s cutoff.
The suit thins out from there. It alleges only that the four ordered, doesn’t say whether the pills even arrived, and its lawyer hopes discovery will surface more. HB 7 bars mailing, transporting, delivering and providing pills and doesn’t mention ordering them, so the transport theory needs pills to have arrived and moved within Texas. She seeks $459,782, the suit’s figure for raising two children in Texas, but would keep $10,000 if she wins, with the rest going to charity.
Each side calls the other’s move a publicity stunt. Given that the plaintiff is not connected to the students, suffered no harm from their order, and has no evidence of delivery, it would seem like she doesn’t have much standing…
ON THE FEED
Ferritin Is the New Hyperfixation. Overlooked By Your Doctor But Not By The Women On TikTok
Women are sharing how increasing their ferritin changed their life. While doctors have been accepting a ferritin as low as 16, women are bringing light to how the ‘normal’ ranges actually are! Videos on women taking their ferritin levels from 11 to 35, 14 to 54 and 19 to 117, show an improvement in dark circles, skin tone, hair strength and shine, and energy levels.
Ferritin is the protein that stores iron, and providers do not always think to check it. A standard blood count cannot see iron deficiency until it becomes anemia, and when ferritin is tested, a major lab’s normal range starts at 16 for women aged 19 to 40. The American Society of Hematology now calls 30 or lower deficient, so a result of 30 can print as normal and still meet the guideline’s definition. The society’s own president calls iron deficiency one of the most common and most neglected conditions worldwide, and routine screening in children and pregnant women may miss more than 70 percent of cases.
The chase for 70 to 100 is a creator target. ASH’s cutoffs for otherwise healthy women top out at 50, and a clinical review says ferritin’s role in skin and hair disorders is not well understood. Now the curveball is how difficult it is to increase ferritin levels! Thankfully, tiktok is full of tips and tricks from the girlies who have made it to the other side.
I Too Want To Be My Own Housewife
For a long time, the tradwives on your feed were young, either just starting out or still dreaming about it. People kept asking the obvious question: where are the 47-year-olds? If this life is so good, why isn’t anyone twenty years in raving about it?
They turned up, and they aren’t raving. Ex-tradwives have been piling onto TikTok since 2024, and one of them says there’s a reason you never saw older tradwives glowing about it. One woman gave 30 years to the role, then watched her husband walk out and empty the bank accounts. She now works three jobs. The advice in their captions is blunt: make your own money.
The numbers back them up. People 50 and older now make up more than a third of US divorces, up from 8 percent in 1990, and women’s standard of living drops 45 percent after a gray divorce, against 21 percent for men. Twenty years of unpaid work doesn’t come with a pension.
Into that feed drops Tate McRae’s “Housewife,” which opened at No. 1 on Spotify’s daily global chart with 5.671 million streams and is far from a tradwife anthem.