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200 trailblazing leaders in women’s health and femtech

This list was originally published for Women of Wearables on 27 January, 2026. Read the original piece here.

In 2025, the women’s health market advanced on multiple fronts, fueled by increased recognition of research gaps, strong funding pledges, and regulatory shifts. A record $2.5 billion commitment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation over five years aimed at transforming women’s health R&D — particularly in underfunded areas like menstrual, gynecological, sexual, and maternal health — was among the year’s most significant funding news. 

From a policy and clinical research perspective, 2025 saw meaningful progress in regulatory and scientific communities. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the FDA initiated the removal of long‑standing “black box” warnings from hormone replacement therapies (HRT) used in menopause care, promoting a more evidence‑based approach to treatment and potentially improving access and clinician confidence.

Despite this progress, 2025 also exposed ongoing challenges in the research ecosystem. In the US, federal funding cuts and concerns about the future of landmark studies — including uncertain funding trajectories for long‑running projects like the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) — highlighted persistent vulnerabilities in public support for women’s health research. In response, nonprofit groups like Women’s Health Access Matters (WHAM) launched initiatives such as the 2025 WHAM Edge Awards, which provide critical support for early‑career researchers investigating sex‑based differences in disease outcomes and expand research capacity where traditional funding paths fall short. 

Technological and scientific advances also made headlines: research into biomonitoring and sex‑specific physiological responses underscored how data science and large‑scale analysis can uncover previously obscured health transitions, such as the systemic physiological changes associated with menopause. Meanwhile, clinical practice discussions expanded into areas like PCOS treatment adaptations and the use of GLP‑1 drugs, reflecting shifting real‑world use patterns and a call for more dedicated research in hormone disorders. 

Scientific Breakthroughs

In 2025, for the first time, scientists engineered mice that undergo full menstrual cycles — including endometrial breakdown and bleeding — enabling women’s health researchers to study menstruation in a controllable lab model. This overcomes a major barrier in reproductive biology since traditional lab animals do not naturally menstruate. Dr. Kara McKinley and her team at Harvard’s Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology led this innovation. This new model opens doors to mechanistic studies of menstruation itself and conditions like endometriosis and heavy menstrual bleeding.

Another notable breakthrough was the development of ILETIA, an AI-enhanced method to predict the optimal interval between trigger injection and oocyte retrieval in IVF cycles. This individualized approach outperformed both clinician judgment and standard models for predicting oocyte maturity. A collaboration of Chinese reproductive biologists, including Binjian Wu, Qian Li, Zhe Kuang, Hongyuan Gao, and others (published on arXiv) contributed this prototype, building a predictive model using a dataset of nearly 10,000 patients.

When it comes to menstrual health, researchers identified novel molecular biomarkers and endotypes of unexplained infertility from menstrual blood serum extracellular vesicles, revealing potential diagnostic signals that could differentiate infertility subtypes. Led by K. Brennan, R. Vaiciuleviciute, I. Uzieliene, et al., this work was published in Scientific Reports in April 2025.

In the menopause space, a major data-science project analyzed ~300 million lab tests from more than a million women to dissect physiological changes across menopause, revealing step-like shifts in endocrine, bone, and metabolic systems at the time of the final menstrual period. Glen Pridham, Yoav Hayut, Noa Lavi-Shoseyov, Michal Neeman, Noa Hovav, Yoel Toledano, and Uri Alon published this in late 2025, applying deconvolution techniques to large cohort lab data. This work provides a quantitative physiology map of menopause, uncovering how hormone loss impacts multiple organ systems and offering benchmark data to guide treatment and hormone replacement strategies. 

Funding & Investment

Pivotal — the philanthropy founded by Melinda French Gates — and nonprofit Lever for Change announced more than 80 organizations worldwide selected as awardees of the $250 million Action for Women’s Health global open call. This initiative was launched to fund community-driven organizations improving women’s mental and physical health across different regions and life stages, with each award ranging from $1 million to $5 million.

The UK charity Wellbeing of Women announced a £1.2 million investment in 18 pioneering women’s health research projects covering ovarian cancer diagnostics, blood clotting in endometriosis, menstrual and sexual health, pregnancy, fertility, and contraception research. Led by the Wellbeing of Women Research Advisory Committee, chaired by Professor Hilary Critchley, these awards launched in 2025. 

NIH and other major global funding bodies (e.g., MIT’s Fairbairn Menstruation Science Fund) launched targeted funds to investigate uterine immunology, chronic disease risk, and menstruation biology, supporting long-term scientific progress. The Fairbairn fund ($10M) exemplifies this trend.

Funding commitments like these support the next generation of women’s health science and help fill historical research gaps. 

Taken together, these developments illustrate that 2025 was a pivotal year in recalibrating how the market, policymakers, funders, and researchers approach women’s health — moving from fragmented, historically under‑resourced areas into a more coordinated, evidence‑rich, and multi‑stakeholder ecosystem with increasing momentum toward equity and impact.

List Criteria

In response and for the fourth year in a row, we set out to celebrate leaders and innovators shaping the present and future of women’s health. We invited our community to nominate founders, scientists, researchers, innovators, and advocates—and were thrilled to receive more than 400 submissions in just over two months! 

This year, more than ever, we received an overwhelming number of nominations for founders who have raised funds for their startups, which shows that the needle is slowly moving towards greater investment in this space. Finally!

The key criteria this year were focused on several areas, such as funding raised (>2mil.), major breakthroughs and milestones achieved for the company, key partnerships announcements, and other similar achievements that made the progress of the company notable in 2025, which means a great proportion of our list consists of founders, entrepreneurs and CEOs of women’s health companies. 

We also tried to include as many people from key industry organisations that are flying the flag for the women’s health movement, ecosystem builders, key industry event organisers, notable investors, policymakers, and media professionals who are diligently covering femtech topics in their stories and columns. 

Ultimately, our compilation of 200 Trailblazing Leaders in Women’s Health and FemTech aims to make the industry more accessible, inclusive, and ultimately visible, not just when it comes to the women’s health movement and innovation, but also the people who stand behind it. 

Make sure to follow our channels below to be among the first to hear our news and updates, and to find out more about nominations for other categories and lists we plan to publish this year!

  • Become a WoW member here
  • Find out more about WoW on our website
  • Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date with our activities
  • Follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram
  • Join our LinkedIn femtech group where we discuss all things women’s health, femtech innovation, and investment
  • Reach out to our team at Women of Wearables at [email protected] to say hi, or find out how we could collaborate with you

FULL LIST

Disclaimer: The list has been arranged alphabetically and not in rank. We have also not included any medical titles in our list of participants, so it’s easier to navigate the list in alphabetical order by the name of the person. There are many more leaders who should be on this list and our aim is to include as many new names as possible every year. If you wish to suggest a correction or want to make a suggestion about someone who is not included in this year’s list, please drop us a line at [email protected], and we will make sure to have them in mind for next year or add them to one of our other lists this year, such as the menopause and perimenopause list. 

Check out our 2024 list, 2023 list and 2022 list

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