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ABSTRACT: As biometric monitoring becomes increasingly common in workplace wellness programs, there are three reasons to believe that women will suffer disproportionately from the data collection associated with it. First, many forms of biometric monitoring are subject to gender bias, among other potential biases, because of assumptions inherent in the design and algorithms interpreting the collected data. Second, the expansion of femtech in particular creates a gender-imbalanced data source that may feed into existing workplace biases against women unless more effective safeguards emerge. Finally, many femtech platforms encourage the kind of information sharing that may reduce womens reasonable expectations of privacy, especially with regard to fertility data, thus increasing the risk of health data privacy invasion. This triple threat to female workers may be offset somewhat by the benefits of health data collection at work and may be remedied at least in part by both legislative and nonlegislative means. The current trend toward greater health data collection in the wake of COVID-19 should provoke a reexamination of how employers collect and analyze womens health data to reduce the impact of these new gender bias drivers.
CITATION: Elizabeth A. Brown, The Femtech Paradox: How Workplace Monitoring Threatens Women s Equity, 61 Jurimetrics J. 289-329 (2021).
Should a womans boss be able to tell whether she is pregnant from an app on her work-issued phone? Should women be required to provide their employers with access to data about their fertility or symptoms of menopause, as part of wellness programs? To what extent should employers be able to determine whether female employees have terminated their pregnancies if the employees do not volunteer that information themselves? These are some of the questions raised by a largely unregulated yet increasingly common practice: including femtech in workplace wellness programs.
"Femtech"1 refers to a growing range of mobile apps and wearables designed to help women2 take more control of their bodies, giving them greater insights into their own health and reducing their dependence on primary care doctors, obstetricians, and gynecologists. It is part of a broader set of healthrelated apps and wearables that are increasingly popular with employers, who may offer them as part of a workplace wellness program. A close examination of the potential consequences of data collection through both...