Insights from Dr. Angela Kaida, Jessica Chalk, Mallorie Bronfman-Thomas, and Stephanie Gan from the Femtech Canada Forum in Vancouver
When surgeons in Canada perform procedures on female patients, they are often reimbursed 28% less than for male patients. This gap climbs to over 30% in the U.S. As Mallorie Bronfman-Thomas, Innovative Tech & Partnerships Specialist from the United Nations Population Fund’s (UNFPA) Equity 2030 Alliance pointed out during the 2025 Femtech Canada Forum, this isn’t because female anatomy is “less complex”; in fact, the opposite is often true. It is a symptom of a system that fundamentally devalues women’s health.
Hosted by Femtech Canada in Vancouver, the Femtech Canada Forum gathered innovators, investors, and policymakers to address the $1 trillion global opportunity in women’s health. This is also where a key discussion moderated by Laura Maxwell, the Director of Sustainability Strategy at Sun Life, took the main stage. It included thought leaders from Health Emergency Readiness Canada (HERC), UNFPA, Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and myStoria.
Alongside this thought-provoking conversation came a big announcement. Femtech Canada will co-lead the technology cluster of the Equity 2030 Alliance, a global initiative to normalize gender equity in science, technology and financing. This collaboration with the Alliance positions Canada not just as a participant, but as a leader in defining gender-equitable actions for over 37 countries.
This announcement was the highlight of the broader conversation about how we move from isolated pilots to system-level change.
Hear the full conversation in the video or read the key takeaways below.
The fragmentation of care
If the global stage provides the “why,” the personal stories provide the “how.” Jessica Chalk, founder of Mytoria, brought this reality home by sharing her six-year fertility journey—a path that cost her over $100,000 out-of-pocket.
Through those years, Chalk identified a massive structural failure in how we treat women’s health. The system was excellent at managing the clinical moments—the blood draws, the ultrasounds, the procedures. But it was completely absent during the “in-between.”
This “in-between” is the space where life actually happens. It is the weeks between appointments where a patient is left alone to navigate nutrition, manage skyrocketing stress levels, and interpret daily symptoms without guidance. “A lot of what contributes to your outcomes does not live in a clinical setting,” Chalk explained.
The system’s failure to address this daily reality forces patients to become their own project managers, piecing together advice from different sources. This gap is exactly why patient-led innovation is not just a “nice to have,” but a necessity. Founders like Chalk are building the tools that address the gaps that are often missed by clinical researchers, simply because they aren’t living in the void where the system stops working for patients.
Bridging the research-to-reality gap
Dr. Angela Kaida from the CIHR highlighted a similar and critical disconnect in the Canadian research pipeline that effectively halts progress before it ever reaches the patient.
Kaida explained that the system has successfully moved the needle on the “front end” through the mandatory Sex and Gender-Based Analysis (SGBA) policy, which requires every health researcher to include sex and gender considerations to qualify for public funding. Since its implementation, the number of CHR applicants for health research taking sex into consideration has surged from 30% to approximately 90%, while those accounting for gender have reached 40-50%.
The problem isn’t that we aren’t collecting data on women; it’s that we aren’t reporting it. Researchers often collect sex-disaggregated data to satisfy funding requirements, but they fail to perform “discovery variable analysis.” In simpler terms, the data on women is gathered, but it is then lumped back into a general pool during the final analysis and publication.
This creates a massive barrier for commercial founders who need specific, published evidence to validate their products for regulators and investors. For the femtech ecosystem to thrive, we must ensure that this “evidence base” actually makes it to the market, rather than gathering dust in academic journals as a half-finished thought.
Turning public ‘will’ into policy
This alignment of health outcomes and economic value is also the key to unlocking federal support. As Stephanie Gan from HERC candidly stated, “Government is often compelled to act because Canadians tell them they should”.
Policy responds to organized narratives. The reason we are seeing movement now—from the ISED 50/30 Challenge to new investment structures—is because the ecosystem is finally presenting a unified front.
We are no longer just talking about “niche” women’s health issues; we are talking about a fundamental system redesign. This is why Femtech Canada’s role as a co-lead for the Equity 2030 Alliance’s Technology Cluster is so significant.
By bridging the gap between local start-ups and global policy, engagement with the Equity 2030 Alliance can support innovations being built in Canada to have a global impact tomorrow.
The goal is to move beyond individual success stories and change the way products are built, funded, and reimbursed on a global scale. The door is now open for every player in the ecosystem—from start-ups to corporate giants—to join the Alliance and ensure that the future of health is designed for everyone.
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