Gender Bias in Healthtech

Does your product work
equally well for women?

Bias in digital health is not a data problem — it is a design problem. It enters at every stage of product development, and most teams never see it coming.

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66%
more likely
Women are 66% more likely to receive a wrong diagnosis than men. Nature
84%
of AI models
84% of clinical AI models do not report gender in training data. Oxford Academic, 2025
51%
of patients
51% of patients are women — yet most health AI is trained predominantly on male data.
The problem

Invisible bias creates real clinical risk

Gender bias in healthtech enters at every stage of product development: in the team's assumptions, in the clinical evidence used, in the training datasets, in the algorithm's validation, in the UX copy, and in post-deployment monitoring.

A product can achieve excellent aggregate accuracy and still systematically underperform for 51% of its users. The cost is not abstract: delayed diagnoses, undertreated pain, avoidable adverse drug reactions.

Most teams never see it because they never look for it — not because they don't care, but because no one has given them a structured way to do it.

"Women's health represents a $1 trillion opportunity, yet captures only 6% of private health investment."
World Economic Forum, 2026
Free tool

The Gender Bias Quick Audit

10 questions. 3 minutes. Discover which stages of your product are most exposed to gender bias.

Quick bias scan — 10 questions

Question 1 of 10

0 of 10 answered
— /100

How it works

8 modules across the full product lifecycle

The full audit examines every stage where gender bias can enter your product — from who is on your team to what happens after you ship.

01

Team & culture

Who is building it, and have they named the bias explicitly?

02

Target population

Is the product population defined across sexes and genders?

03

Clinical evidence base

Does the underlying science include women in representative proportions?

04

Data & training

Is training data disaggregated by sex? Are sex-specific variables captured?

05

Algorithm design

Is model performance evaluated separately for women and men?

06

UX & clinical language

Does the product describe the female presentation of the condition?

07

Clinical validation

Does the validation study include ≥40% women with disaggregated analysis?

08

Post-deployment

Is performance monitored by sex in production?

Full audit deliverables

What you get from a complete audit

01
Score 0–100
By module and overall. Clear, benchmarkable, ready to share with your team, board, or investors.
02
Clinical red flags report
Each bias gap translated into real patient risk, written for your specific therapeutic area.
03
Blind spots narrative
The clinical story behind what your metrics are not showing you.
04
Prioritised action map
What to fix first, ranked by clinical impact versus implementation effort.
About

Why this needs a clinician

Teresa Hernandez, MD
20 years
clinical practice

Teresa Hernández, MD

Physician · Healthtech · Health Equity · WTFog founder

I am a physician with 20 years of experience in paediatrics, adolescent medicine and neonatal intensive care in Spain, Portugal and Italy.

Over these years I have seen what happens when scientific evidence does not represent the person in front of you. Clinicians work with protocols built on populations that do not capture the real complexity of human beings — and patients pay the price with delayed diagnoses, iatrogenic harm and inadequate treatments.

I founded WTFog to bridge clinical medicine, digital health and equity — and to help teams build products that work for real people, not statistical models.

Clinical rigour applied to AI: evaluating where digital health products fail and for whom (MIT · Microsoft)
Value-based Healthcare: measuring outcomes that matter to patients, not just systems (EIT Health)
Diversity as a strategic asset: inclusive organisations outperform (University of Barcelona)
Structural gender gaps and unconscious bias in medicine (MIT · Women in Leadership)
Get in touch

Ready to audit your product?

Whether you want a quick conversation or a full audit, start here. Teresa responds personally to every message.

Or reach out on LinkedIn