The odd thing is, the breast-pump industry is one that is ripe for ‘disruption’, as Silicon Valley would have it. Breast-pumping is huge business in the US in particular: given the lack of legally mandated maternity leave, for most American women breast-pumping is the only option if they want to follow their doctors’ recommendations and breastfeed their babies for at least six months (in fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that women try to breastfeed for at least twelve months).3
And one company, Medela, has pretty much cornered the market. According to the New Yorker, ‘Eighty per cent of hospitals in the United States and the United Kingdom stock Medela’s pumps, and its sales increased thirty-four per cent in the two years after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, which mandated coverage of lactation services, including pumps.’ But the Medela pump is just not very good. Writing for the New Yorker4 Jessica Winter described it as a ‘hard, ill-fitting breast shield with a bottle dangling from it’, which, as it sucks milk out of a woman’s breast ‘pulls and stretches the breast like it’s taffy, except that taffy doesn’t have nerve endings’.5 And although some women manage to make it work hands-free most can’t because it doesn’t fit well enough. So they just have to sit and hold their personal milking contraptions to their breasts, for twenty minutes a time, several times a day.
So, to sum up: captive market (currently estimated at $700 million with room to grow)?6 Check. Products that aren’t serving consumer needs? Check. Why aren’t investors lapping it up?
Addressing the under-representation of women in positions of power and influence is often framed as a good in itself. And, of course, it is. It is a matter of justice that women have an equal chance of success as their equally qualified male colleagues. But female representation is about more than a specific woman who does or doesn’t get a job, because female representation is also about the gender data gap. As we saw with Sheryl Sandberg’s story about pregnancy parking, there will be certain female needs men won’t think to cater for because they relate to experiences that men simply won’t have. And it’s not always easy to convince someone a need exists if they don’t have that need themselves.
Dr Tania Boler, founder of women’s health tech company Chiaro, thinks that the reluctance to back female-led companies is partly a result of the ‘stereotype that men like great design and great tech and women don’t’. But is this stereotype based in reality, or is it possible that the problem isn’t tech-blind women so much as woman-blind tech, created by a woman-blind tech industry and funded by woman-blind investors?
A substantial chunk of tech start-ups are backed by venture capitalists (VCs) because they can take risks where banks can’t.7 The problem is that 93% of VCs are men,8 and, ‘men back men’, explains Debbie Woskow, co-founder of AllBright, a members’ club, academy, and fund that backs female-led business. ‘We need to have more women writing cheques. And men need to recognise that backing women is a great investment.’ Woskow tells me that when she was in the process of setting up AllBright with her friend Anna Jones, the former CEO of Hearst, ‘men who should know better, to be honest’ would ‘frequently’ tell them, ‘That’s lovely, it’s great that you and Anna have set up a charity.’ Woskow bristles at this. ‘We’re not a charity. We’re doing this because women deliver great economic returns.’
The data suggests she’s not wrong. Research published in 2018 by Boston Consulting Group found that although on average female business owners receive less than half the level of investment their male counterparts get, they produce more than twice the revenue.9 For every dollar of funding, female-owned start-ups generate seventy-eight cents, compared to male-owned start-ups which generate thirty-one cents. They also perform better over time, ‘generating 10% more in cumulative revenue over a five-year period’.
This may be partly because women are ‘better suited for leadership than men’.10 That was the conclusion of a study conducted by BI Norwegian Business School, which identified the five key traits (emotional stability, extraversion, openness to new experiences, agreeableness and conscientiousness) of a successful leader. Women scored higher than men in four out of the five. But it may also be because the women who do manage to make it through are filling a gender data gap: studies have repeatedly found that the more diverse a company’s leadership is, the more innovative they are.11 This could be because women are just innately more innovative – but more likely is that the presence of diverse perspectives makes businesses better informed about their customers. Certainly, innovation is strongly linked to financial performance.
And when it comes to consumer electronics for women, Boler says, innovation has been sorely lacking. ‘There’s never been much innovation in consumer electronics for women,’ she says. ‘It’s always focused on a very superficial aesthetic level: turn something pink, or turn something into a piece of jewellery, rather than taking account of the fact that technology can solve real problems for women.’ The result has been a chronic lack of investment, meaning that ‘the actual technology that’s used in medical devices for women is sort of a kickback from the 1980s’.
When I interview her early in 2018 Tania Boler is about to launch her own breast pump, and she is scathing about what is currently available on the market. ‘It’s just horrible,’ she says, bluntly. ‘It’s painful, it’s loud, it’s difficult to use. It’s quite humiliating.’ I think of trying to hold a conversation with my sister-in-law as she sits on the sofa with her top off, her breasts wired up to a machine. ‘It’s not even that complicated to get it right,’ Boler adds. The notion that ‘it would be nice to pump while you’re able to do something else, rather than having to spend hours a day sitting there chained to this noisy machine’ should, she says be ‘a basic requirement’. But somehow, it hasn’t been. When I ask her why she thinks this is, Boler muses that perhaps it’s different for her because she’s a woman. So ‘I just go in with: “As a woman what do I want from this?”’
But if the data gap of what women actually want is fairly easily fixed by, well, asking women, there’s another more chronic gap: data on the female body itself. Boler developed her first product – Elvie, a smart pelvic-floor trainer – after realising that poor pelvic-floor health in women was ‘a massively hidden epidemic’: 37% of women suffer from pelvic-floor issues; 10% of women will need to have an operation at some point because of prolapse (where your organs start dropping through your vagina). This rises to 50% of women over fifty.
‘There’s a sense of injustice,’ says Boler. ‘It’s a big issue for women and it should be a normal part of how women look after their bodies. But you need to have information and data in order to do that.’ And when Boler was first researching the issue, that data simply didn’t exist. ‘We were trying to design a product which fits in the vagina, and so we needed to answer simple questions like, what size, how does it vary by age, by race, after children – all the usual questions. And there just was no data there at all. [. . .] Fifty per cent of the population have a vagina,’ she continues, ‘and yet there’s hardly any journal articles about this part of anatomy. Three years ago I found about four articles done decades ago.’ One of them was ‘literally by a guy who basically made a kind of plaster cast, like a mould inside the vagina, and concluded that there were four shapes: a mushroom and a cone and a heart . . .’ she trails off laughing.