Femtech Frontier: Authenticity, Innovation, and Policy Insights

[00:00:00] Joy Rios: Welcome to the HIT Like a Girl podcast. We are here at HLTH Europe.

[00:00:12] Brittany Barreto: This is awesome. We're in Amsterdam.

[00:00:14] Joy Rios: We're in Amsterdam. And I am with Dr. Brittany Barreto, again. Lovely to see you again. I love every single time that we run into each other.

[00:00:22] Brittany Barreto: It's always a blast.

[00:00:23] Joy Rios: Yeah. And it's mostly because I'm so impressed with how much of a badass you are, and how much you get to accomplish in all of the worlds that you're in, and everything.  

[00:00:33] Brittany Barreto: I love my life. I really, I just travel the world, and I ask people, “Did you consider sex and gender in your research, in your product design”? I really feel like I'm influencing people, and that makes me so happy.  

[00:00:44] Joy Rios: You really are. You make a huge difference, and I know that it shows up because when you go places now, and I get it probably a fraction, the way that you do, of people that feel like they know you.

[00:00:55] Brittany Barreto: Yeah, people really, they're, “Oh, hi Brittany”! And I'm, oh my gosh who is this? And they're, oh, you don't know me. I just actually, just yesterday, there was a girl in our workshop. She was, you've come on so many runs with me. And I, at first I was, oh, she listens to my podcast on her run. So cool. I'm a companion.

[00:01:14] Joy Rios: I love that. I love it when people feel that they get to know you, but they also respect you.

[00:01:18] Brittany Barreto: Yeah. It's so fun. I think that it's this mixture that I've, and it's not just how I am. I'm a scientist, so I know what I'm talking about, and I have all these data and facts, and I can get really nerdy, but at the end of the day, I'm just some lady who enjoys talking about women's bodies and anatomy, and I make it just really comfortable and fun. And people are like, what a special combo. And it's for, but for me, it's just natural it's very authentic.

[00:01:43] Joy Rios: And I love that you bring us with you because I feel like I've seen you at your doctor's office in the bathroom and all of the different TikToks that you do that you're like, I am going to share with you the absurdity that I am seeing and in such a catchy way.

So it's great. It's very educational. And I feel like that's what we all need is accessibility to the reality and not something that is super polished, to be honest.

[00:02:10] Brittany Barreto: I actually love that about TikTok now is authenticity is doing the best. In fact, videos where you're looking directly at the camera are not doing as well as if it's just like a side angle and you're living your life.

In fact, my best videos are demos, even with the audio off, just put a trending song on and it's me like messing around with some medical device and people are loving it.

[00:02:30] Joy Rios: Okay, so I want to talk to you about all of the things that you see, because you have insights to medical devices and softwares and technologies and women's health in general, and I don't know, top five that you see top three if you can think of them.

But what are the things that have left lasting impressions that you feel like other people need to know about? I am pausing because there's so many.

[00:02:50] Brittany Barreto: Let me decide what I want to pick. I'm a big fan of Nua Surgical. It's a medical device out of Ireland and it is for c sections. So essentially when you have a c section or a cesarean where your whole abdomen is cut open, they are literally using hands to hold your abdomen open.

And in fact, I've even heard of cases where they use tape, where they tape the woman's body down to the table to get the baby out. This is crazy in 2024 that's the standard of care. And so newer surgical, it fits into one of my favorite categories of Femtech, which is called duh, obviously why did this not exist yet?

And it's literally just like a deep oval that helps open the abdomen. And it takes into account all the different layers of the skin, the muscle, the uterus and then, and it opens up big enough for the baby to come out and it's going to decrease infection because you're no longer using hands.

It's going to increase your recovery time because your body is literally being pulled apart, right? And so if you have a device that's making it more of a gentle experience, the woman's going to recover faster just because she can't feel in that moment. She's going to feel it for the next few weeks, right?

[00:04:02] Joy Rios: It's muscle tissue. It's not just going to return to normal in a few weeks.

[00:04:06] Brittany Barreto: That's right. I don't know if anyone's ever had a scar that itches, but you imagine your entire abdomen has the giant one on it like that's just so uncomfortable. That's one I'm really excited about.

Another company I'm really excited about is Keg. So it's a cervical mucus monitor for fertility and they've helped over 25,000 couples have kids in the last few years. And that founder is just, she's skyrocketing. She's doing so well.

[00:04:33] Joy Rios: What are we tracking with mucus?

[00:04:35] Brittany Barreto: Sperm actually can't enter through the cervix into the uterus unless the cervical fluid is in certain alignments.

Actually quite cool. Your cervix, which I like to think of as like the knot on the bottom of the balloon being your uterus, the cervix is the thing that's holding the air, i. e. baby inside, okay? And it does have an opening where the menstrual effluent can come out and the semen can come in.

It actually has glands in it. I just recently learned this. It has glands. So when you're “wet”, sexually aroused, that's actually where that's coming from. I never knew that. Yeah, there's glands in your cervix that are releasing this fluid. And depending on its viscosity, if it's thick, then the sperm can't swim through it.

But if it's very liquidy, then the sperm can swim through it. And it's actually set up that way specifically to block sperm from entering when you're not fertile.

[00:05:28] Joy Rios: Oh, wow! Isn't that crazy? Our bodies are amazing.

[00:05:29] Brittany Barreto: Amazing! Women's bodies are so amazing! And they're measuring the viscosity of your cervical fluid using this.

It looks like a kegel ball with a little gold ring on it that measures the fluid. So you put it into the vagina. They actually promote brush your teeth. Put it in, brush your teeth. By the time you're done brushing your teeth, it Bluetooth connects to your phone, and it has a monitor that says whether or not your viscosity is for fertile or not. So cool.

[00:05:55] Joy Rios: That's amazing.  All right, there's two…

[00:05:57] Brittany Barreto: …at least two. I know we have other stuff to talk about. I want to talk about my book, too.  

[00:06:02] Joy Rios: Yes, I know. Okay, so you've been doing a ton of research. I want to hear how you are transitioning all of that information that is in your mind out into the world.

How has been the book writing process going for you, for one? Because that's a huge undertaking.

[00:06:18] Brittany Barreto: It is. Thank God for AI. And I'll tell you more about how I've used AI to write it. But the book is called Unlocking Women's Health. Femtech and the quest for gender equity. And it's a introductory book to innovation and women's health.

So anyone who's like, how, what is Femtech or I'm interested in this topic? This is the book they should read. Essentially what I've done is give an introduction to what is Femtech. And then I cover 16 categories of health and women's health and. It's essentially not a deep book in terms of there's only 20 pages on breastfeeding and there could be 20 books on breastfeeding, right?

[00:06:47] Joy Rios: Only 20 pages. Come on.

[00:06:48] Brittany Barreto: Yeah, but it's, so it doesn't go through all the examples and all the innovations, but it gives you an introduction to all of these things. And then you can go and deep dive further into whatever topics interest you. But essentially what I did was I took 100 founders from my podcast, transcribe their episodes, and then put them into the to the book. So it has 100 founders that are highlighted and that's really, honestly, my whole business is I prop up Femtech founders. I see what they're doing. I think it's incredible. And I just provide them a platform to be seen. So that's essentially the book is the same concept and I wrote it because I wanted to read a book on Femtech and couldn't find one.

Today, if you look on Amazon Femtech, there is nothing. There's literally nothing. So it'll be the first book on Femtech.

[00:07:33] Joy Rios: I can imagine it's already going to be a bestseller because everybody's looking for information on that. It's huge, and especially opening up the trillion dollar opportunity in women's health.

[00:07:43] Brittany Barreto: Yep. By the way, not to diminish, I anticipate it being a bestseller, and not to diminish that title, I hope so. But did you know that to be a bestseller you have to select certain categories that your book falls under? Guess how many books you have to sell in menopause to be considered a bestseller? Eleven. That's how underserved it is, that there's not a lot of books and publications coming out.

[00:08:08] Joy Rios: That actually makes me wonder what are the actual categories that you, is femtech a category?

So what categories do you choose?

[00:08:15] Brittany Barreto: We're gonna do menstruation. My publisher will pick them, but she was, I want to really make sure we get best seller. She's “Oh girl, don't worry”. And I was, “I know, but I'm still worried”. She was, let me tell you, if we select menopause, for example, she goes, let me look 11 books. I was, are you kidding me?

My mom will buy 11 books for me to get that.

[00:08:35] Joy Rios: I can’t believe there’s that little information, even publicly available.

[00:08:41] Brittany Barreto: So not to dim again, not to diminish that I'm going to be a bestselling author. I'm definitely putting that on my LinkedIn. But it actually really speaks to how underserved our industry is because you only have to sell 11 and be considered bestseller.

[00:08:52] Joy Rios: Okay. When I think about the underserving, the aspect of it, is that changing?

[00:09:02] Brittany Barreto: Yes, there is momentum, but what is it that you're seeing? Something I'm really excited about is actually universities are going to use my book for courses on Femtech now. The first ever introduction to gendered medicine studies.

[00:09:14] Joy Rios: I mean, cause that's a conversation that shows up a lot is that there's not that much curriculum for women's health. And if we want to change the discourse, we actually have to change the root of the problem. How do we get that? And so congratulations on making that happen. That's massive.

[00:09:28] Brittany Barreto: I'm so excited. So I used a lot of AI for transcribing the podcast episodes and ChatGPT is seriously the best thing for my productivity. So essentially what I did, here's a little inside AI secret that I did. I transcribed the episodes and you can hear this.

This is run on sentences. We're laughing. We're saying, “Whatever”. That's not very easy to read if I just put directly the words into the book. So what I did was I dropped the entire interviews, 45 minute interviews into chat to BT. And then I said, respond to the following question as if you are Joy and her tone of voice.

And I asked a question that I had asked in the episode. So the answer that Joy said in the interview is in there. But it gave me a three paragraph, succinct complete sentence answer in your tone of voice. So the book has different attitudes and words or whatever, based on their interviews.

But now it's succinct. So that's how I wrote the book. Isn't that so cool?

[00:10:29] Joy Rios: Yeah, it's incredible. We are so fortunate. At least for our own productivity. Half the time, a lot of times, I'm about to interview so and so, what questions, here is her LinkedIn profile. Here is her about section. Here's all information about her or her company.

[00:10:44] Brittany Barreto: LinkedIn, I do have a lot of interns and fellows that work for me and they're always looking for like recommendation letters. It's so easy now. I'm just like writing a recommendation letter for so and so for this program.

She is these five characteristics and she was really great at this and it's like amazing professional thing.

[00:11:02] Joy Rios: When you think about just running a business and being an entrepreneur, the amount of administration and things that need your attention. And you're, okay, just write an about section about yourself, but in 30 characters or less.

[00:11:16] Brittany Barreto: That's right. And you're, “How”? You know what I'm really excited for is when they finally come out with a plug in for dating apps so that AI can chat with people on my behalf and then they can ping me when they're, okay, this person's qualified enough. You can start talking to them now.

It'd be funny if your AI should just check with each other and then yeah, they're a match. Yesterday we were part of a pretty interesting ideation session. And so it was day zero at HLTH Europe. And we were three hours with how many people were in? My gosh, at least 75.

[00:11:52] Joy Rios: Yeah. Maybe even a hundred. And broken up into five different categories and addressing, how do we change and address the biggest problems of these five, I think it was five different major conversations. I was in menstruation and reproductive health. There was also brain cancer. You were in… 

[00:12:13] Brittany Barreto: …it was autoimmune and then I was in investment.

[00:12:15] Joy Rios: Can we, that tended to have the biggest conversation. We all ideated, came up with all of our ideas, presented the, what we thought was the best one at the end. And it was obvious that the investment conversation warranted the most conversation and questions and discussion at the end.

And I feel like that might be a hint at part of the biggest changes that needed that need to be made in order to make an impact in women's health. And I just want to get your feedback on that. What was it like being part of that conversation and what did you take away so far? And I know that conversation is not done yet.

[00:12:51] Brittany Barreto: Yeah. Before I say anything, let me say that I was so grateful for the experience. I thought it was, it's really well thought out, organized, executed, and I was grateful that the organizers put it on. With that being said, there was definitely even discourse within our groups and even the organizers of it in terms of what they thought was important or prioritized or even there were some comments made that it was, we have more work to do.

That's a very sexist comment that was just made we were, someone actually came up to our table and said and this is one of the organizers came up and said, you should think about women's health in terms of the fashion industry, because if you can make the case to investors that fashion has so much money because women dominate that field and try to make the case that women are participating in health care.

And I was, what are you talking about? We're talking about medical gaslighting, reimbursement codes, grant money for scientific research. How is any of this going to relate to, there is no one to one in fashion. Literally the only thing is that a more likely a woman is making a decision on fashion for her family are more likely a woman's making a decision on medicine for her family. This is literally the only crossover. I'm not going to make a whole thesis about that so even within the leadership that was so well intentioned, there was still some perception of women's health that was just so off.

So we have a lot of work to do, but we did come up with some really cool stuff and I was really excited with the idea we came up with at my table because what we were talking about is one of the biggest barriers to investment is that really early stage investment that first big round of investment because most femtech founders are actually spending their first round of funding on basic scientific research.

The reason they're doing that is because we're a hundred years behind and we don't have the data. And so we can't even make the product because we don't have the data. For example, endometriosis diagnostic, we still do not know the markers of endometriosis. So we can't even create the diagnostic test.

So the first round of funding is actually going into research. And so our argument is that's actually not investors responsibility. That's the government's responsibility to put on grants to fund research. And so we're, alright, how do we make governments fund early stage research?

And we were, what if there was some like grant matching program where if you're investing in women's health, if a company gets a million dollars from investors, governments will match it with another million or something like that. And the idea we actually, at the end of the day, boiled down to was in the United States, we're actually just started a lobbying group, a PAC, that is going to be influencing policy at capital to say be in every room in every conversation, essentially forcing the conversation around sex and gender and medicine.

What if Europe had something similar, where there was a lobbying group that's lobbying the EU, lobbying the European Investment Fund, which is a giant trillions of dollars fund that invests in funds around Europe.

What if they actually said, “Hey, if you get money from us, we require that 10 percent of your health care investments are in women's health. So how do we lobby them”? So that was our idea that we came up with that I was pretty excited about.  

[00:16:11] Joy Rios: I mean, I'm a huge advocate for policy being a driver of change. And if things aren't mandated, a lot of times they won't change. Change doesn't just and similar with power. It's not given. It's taken.

[00:16:24] Brittany Barreto: Yeah, it's similar to, we can look at the climate tech industry. So much climate tech startups actually allocate some of their budget to lobbying, maybe not so much anymore, but they used to write because we were literally fighting the perception that global warming wasn't real, right?

Now we're all accepting it. Okay. I feel like we're in the same boat with femtech right now where people are like, is it really that bad? And in 20 years, no one is going to say that it's niche or that it's not that bad. Everyone's going to be on board and pushing it.

[00:16:52] Joy Rios: And one of the conversations I think with investors or the investment conversation is the mindset shift of thinking, okay, let's not, let's stop complaining about the problem and start thinking about the opportunity because if the investment folks in their mind are just thinking numbers guess what? There is so much opportunity to be made from all of the advancements that could happen.

And when one thing that's so the only thing that stuck with me from the conversation was the amount of money that's been committed to women's health. And I think it was something like, 100 million dollars, right? And the lady in the back was, can we just talk about how much it costs to house an elephant in the Zurich zoo? 70 million dollars. 

[00:17:34] Brittany Barreto: 70 million dollars a year and Switzerland, that same country that pays 70 million a year for the one elephant. It dedicated 11 million for five years for women's health research.

[00:17:44] Joy Rios: How can we not be, thank you. Thank you for half of the population to just have a fraction of the budget that one elephant gets.

And I love elephants. I do too. I'm so dear and matriarchal. Yeah, we love them.  

[00:18:01] Brittany Barreto: No, they keep their budget. Also give us budget.

[00:18:03] Joy Rios: And it's just wild to think that that is the absurd conversation that we are having. And it feels like half the time are we taking crazy pills?

[00:18:15] Brittany Barreto: Yeah. Another thing I felt like we got too hung up on and actually disagreed and I was, I'm not in charge here. How much do I pipe up? But it was, people kept saying we just need the data to show the exits. We need the data to show the market value. We need the data because as long as we have the data and the key studies, then the investors emotions will be taken out and they'll just invest.

[00:18:36] Joy Rios: And I just would disagree with that so much. Do you get taken out?

[00:18:39] Brittany Barreto: No, they never get taken out. No, I thought honestly. So I got a job in venture capital about six years ago and I thought I was going to learn about all this financial modeling and I was going to see the real like quantitative investment decision making.

There was, that existed, but it was honestly, at the end of the day, not the thing that made it. It was important to get it to the deal, to the table, to show the market was there that the business model was edited, but the actual decision was based on how cool our general partners thought it was because most of in venture capital is about recruiting your friends to also invest.

Because if you're the only investor, it's not going to work. So you need to actually see, sell the deal to your peers, and then you also need to sell the deal to your investors and your fund so that they continue to fund you. And if you're talking about heavy menstrual bleeding and you have three white guys running a fund, how are they don't even feel like, even if they do feel passionate about heavy menstrual bleeding, there's not that many other people that are passionate about it.

And so they need to think about their own success rate of like, how can I recruit other people to care about this? And so data or not I also, here's on a hot take. I honestly thought, I think the Me Too movement has hurt us in terms of, I think that men are afraid of saying something stupid, whether they are intentional or not.

It's actually a risk factor that they need to take into account in terms of, if I'm on a board of a vaginal microbiome sequencing company and I say something stupid, I might get sued, my fund might dissolve, and it's a big PR thing potentially. You know what, it's safer for me to just not be in a company where I have to say the word vagina.

[00:20:16] Joy Rios: So a couple of things have shown up for me. One has been conversations where specifically in investing men have this opportunity to fail forward. And a lot of times like they fail and you're, Oh, guess what? Or they, we raised half of a half a billion dollars and we still went down and guess what, that person the CEO of the next company. I'm, we don't get that privilege. Elon Musk, Adam Neumann yeah. And then the other one was, and on the teams of folks writing the checks for investment that like somebody mentioned that when you can see where people spend their time on that, like for women founded companies, they spend the majority of their time looking at the team slide.

Who is in charge? However, for male founded companies, they look at the vision and or the numbers. And so we're like, we're just getting scrutinized on completely different things.

[00:21:09] Brittany Barreto: I thought that was so interesting that DocSend, they said DocSend. So for those who don't know, a lot of founders will send out their pitch deck using DocSend because then you can tell who's looked at it.

You can see what pages they look, slides they looked at. And how long, it's really, that female founded decks, the investors are so excited. Spending most of their time on the team slide but male founded decks are spending their time on the business model slide.

[00:21:29] Joy Rios: And I almost feel hey, if you're looking for data, there's some data. Hey, we're looking we're getting judged totally differently.

[00:21:36] Brittany Barreto: Yeah. And I'd like to think that they're looking at our qualifications, but who knows what they're actually, I don't know.

[00:21:43] Joy Rios: And I think that we're really there's no doubt about it, we're up against the yuck factor.

We have a yuck factor, just of people, and it has to do with how we name things. Half of the population, the males don't menstruate, so if they don't understand it, they don't they don't experience it, then, like, why should we prioritize it, right? Because they're the other half of us.

[00:22:02] Brittany Barreto: Yeah. Some people were arguing if we can just educate them about it, then they'll know more about it, and then they'll invest, and I'm, investors don't know anything about, how to fly a drone on Mars and they'll still invest in that company. They trust that you are the expert in it.

And they, and again, if it's cool, then they'll fund it. Crypto or blockchain or whatever. They don't actually know how that works. We can tell them all the day long about vulvas and breasts and how fallopian tubes work, that actually might not be, I think it's important to even try to get an investment from them, but at the if they don't even know what a fallopian tube is.

And they don't need to know how it works to make the investment decision because they make investments in things they know nothing about all the time.

[00:22:47] Joy Rios: And this, you can say the same about policy and I brought this up about like ectopic pregnancies and I'm just, okay, so a lot of women's health conversations have to do with medical conditions regardless of whether they want or don't want that child and that doesn't seem to be.

[00:23:04] Brittany Barreto: I love to have audacious goals, and I have an audacious goal for changing policy around abortion and pregnancy. Big, that's big, right? So here's the angle I want to work on. We today consider the first day of pregnancy as the last day of your period. Which is, on average, ten days before an egg is even released from your ovary.

So we're calling you pregnant for almost two weeks before an egg is even able to be fertilized. And so when we talk about a six week ban, we're actually talking about a four week ban. Because two of those weeks are, you weren't even actually pregnant. And the reason that they made this the standard was because back 80 years ago or 100 years ago, they decided that women wouldn't be able to remember when they had sex or when they ovulated, but they would remember the last day of their period because they'd be so happy it was over.

Oh, that's how women would remember. And so that's what they created. The standard of care was when was the last day of your period? We're going to call the next day one of your pregnancy. See, even though you weren't even ovulating yet, because we don't trust that you would remember, know that, or experience remember having sex with your partner or whatever.

Isn't that wild? The unintended consequences of things like that. Yes, because if you think about it, a four week ban, then you're not missing your period yet, right? That's the policy I want to change I'm going to go in there and be, this is literally just science whether you think I'm pro choice or pro life obviously, everyone knows what I am, but I'm just making an argument for science I agree with you I agree with you.

[00:24:36] Joy Rios: So I love the audacious goals of changing curriculum and education. So you're, I love that you are, and then also policy. I'm, you are speaking my love language.  

[00:24:48] Brittany Barreto: Yeah, because this is we, I love podcasting and I love having 3D printed uteruses at conferences and stuff. But if we're really going to leave a legacy, change the world, really move mountains, these are education and policy are huge.

[00:25:04] Joy Rios: Yep. I'm here for it. I'm here for it. I'm here for you. Thank you for being here.

[00:25:08] Brittany Barreto: This was so fun. Thank you. 

[00:25:11] Joy Rios: My pleasure.

Thanks for listening. You can learn more about us or this guest by going to our website or visiting us on any of the socials with the handle HIT Like a Girl pod. Thanks again. See you soon.

Again, thank you so much for listening to the HIT Like a Girl podcast. I am truly grateful for you, and I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave us a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend?

All those things help us podcasters out so much. I'm the show's host, Joy Rios, and I'll see you next time.

I'm the show's host, Joy Rios, and I'll see you next time.