The new app, Apple Health, was announced back in June and will work with the Apple Watch. At that time when the product was presented, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi bragged that the app would let users “monitor all of your metrics that you’re most interested in.”
Unfortunately the people Federighi was speaking to didn’t include women who might be interested in including menstruation in health monitoring. The Atlantic explored why this specific aspect was left out of the application’s development.
As promised, Health is a powerful app. It allows users to track everything from calories to electrodermal activity to heart rate to blood alcohol content to respiratory rate to daily intake of chromium. But there’s a notable exception. Apple Health doesn’t track menstruation, an omission that was quickly seized upon by many tech writers as, well, ridiculous. The Verge asked “is it really too much to ask that Apple treat women, and their health, with as much care as they’ve treated humanity’s sodium intake?” How could Apple release a health-tracking app without the ability to monitor what is likely one of the earliest types of quantified-self tracking?
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Women have been keeping track of their cycle for thousands of years, and despite Apple Health’s oversight, there are hundreds of period-tracking apps available in the iTunes store. But this major app bias does seem suspect.
This, of course, isn’t the first time a tech product has prioritized men over women. The vast majority of tech companies are staffed by men, especially on the development side. Phones are too big for many women’s hands. The newest artificial hearts are designed to fit 80 percent of men but only 20 percent of women. Drop-down menus show “male” over “female” even when the rest of the menus are alphabetical. But when it comes to data-tracking, there’s a perceived element of democratization.
The desire to find period trackers is pretty prevalent, and before apps like Clue or Glow were developed, college student Heather Rivers had an idea. This was seven years ago, and after keeping track of her period on an excel spreadsheet, she thought there must be a better way. She Googled it and didn’t have much luck.
“When I didn’t find anything I decided to just make a simple weekend project version,” she said. “Thus was born Monthly Info.”
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The site was simple—users record the start and end to their period and the system extrapolates from their history to guess when their next cycle will start. Trackers could set up customizable reminders, so when it was almost that time they’d get a little email with whatever message they chose. Monthly Info was really designed for Rivers, but she added a user signup system mostly because it was easy. And people signed up. A lot of people.
“It kind of took off on its own from there and grew to over 100,000 users,” she said. “There was apparently a need for something like this, because it didn’t take much energy to make or grow.” Now, there are hundreds of period-tracking apps on the market. Considering the gender imbalance in tech, it’s fair to guess most of them are made by men. Rivers joked that it’s not hard to spot a fertility-tracking app designed by a man. They focus on moods (men want to know when their girlfriends are going to be grouchy) and treat getting pregnant like a level in a video game. “It feels like the product is mansplaining your own body to you,” said Rivers, who is now an engineer working on other projects. “‘We men don’t like to be blindsided by your hormonal impulses so we need to track you, like you’re a parking meter.’”
It sounds like having men in the drivers seat for app development may have some downfalls when it comes to women’s health. Lady app designers, step up! Or at least male app designers could recruit some expert advisers on the subject before sealing the deal on a health application.
