FemGAP

III. Current Project Ideas

What FemGAP is building right now.

Our current work centers on two tracks: research that makes youth women's health needs more visible, and education that helps students understand and shape the systems around those gaps.

Branch 1

Research / Innovation

At the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference 2026, FemGAP engaged with founders, venture capitalists, and operators across healthcare and life sciences. One theme emerged consistently: the youth women's health space remains deeply undersaturated, both in terms of available products and services and in terms of accessible, trusted knowledge.

What surfaced in those conversations

  • A lack of products and services designed for young women's health needs
  • A lack of awareness and education, even where solutions already exist

These insights directly inspired FemGAP's youth-focused women's health research initiative.

Research Motivation & Market Context

FemGAP aims to build on existing market research, especially a widely cited Boston Consulting Group study on unmet consumer health needs. BCG found that nearly one-third of unmet demand, approximately $11 billion, is concentrated in weight management, skin, hair, and nail health, and mental health.

Our hypothesis is that these unmet needs may look different for college-aged and early-career women. Multiple founders and investors emphasized that this group represents a major long-term consumer base, yet remains difficult to understand due to fragmented preferences, evolving identities, and limited age-specific data.

Proposed Research Design

FemGAP proposes a two-part national survey of college-aged women across the United States to capture both demand-side needs and knowledge gaps.

Part I

Unmet Needs & Priorities

  • Which health concerns young women prioritize most
  • How perceived needs differ from current market offerings

The goal is to identify where unmet demand exists specifically within the youth women's health consumer segment, and how it diverges from broader findings.

Part II

Awareness, Knowledge, and Barriers

  • Awareness of existing women's health products and services
  • Where young women primarily receive health information
  • Barriers to discovery, trust, and usage
  • Gaps between available solutions and perceived relevance

This component explores whether the primary constraint is innovation itself, or translation and connectivity.

End Goal & Impact

This project aims to produce a public-facing publication that informs go-to-market strategies for founders and consumer health companies, helps venture investors better understand youth women's health as a distinct market, and provides policymakers, healthcare professionals, and educators with insight into the structural barriers shaping young women's health decisions.

Branch 3

Education

Data gaps in women's health do not exist solely in research. They also persist in how knowledge is translated, shared, and made accessible. These gaps shape who is informed, who is empowered to act, and who ultimately drives innovation and policy.

For young women in particular, who will shape the future of health systems, technology, and decision-making, limited access to this knowledge constrains participation in the spaces where change is created.

Our education model

To address this, FemGAP's third core project leverages UC Berkeley's DeCal model, which enables undergraduates to design and teach student-led courses.

This DeCal is designed to

  • Examine gaps in women's health research, data, and systems
  • Build shared language and foundational understanding around women's health inequities
  • Increase awareness and connectivity across disciplines
  • Equip students to engage in shaping women's health through research, policy, and innovation

Topics and ideas we'll cover

The course will broadly explore missing bodies in research, gender bias in diagnosis and care, what counts as health data, data feminism, algorithmic bias, the limits of traditional health metrics, invisible care costs, venture capital and FemTech, policy failures, institutional accountability, and what women-centered system design could look like.

Throughout, students will examine how research, markets, and policy interact and how more equitable models can be designed from the ground up.

Stay tuned

DeCal launching in Fall 2026 at UC Berkeley.

We're building this as an entry point for students who want to understand women's health inequities and contribute to the future of research, policy, and innovation.