Issue No.84: Two different problems
One blurred conversation
The signal
Ask someone in sports tech about “women in the sector” and you’ll often get one answer to two different questions. This was a conversation I had last week when giving a guest lecture on the Sports Analytics, Technology and Innovation Post Grad course that TU Dublin runs.
The conversation unpacked the question: are we talking about who builds the technology, or what the technology is built for
Those are not the same problem and conflating them risks halting progress across both.
The strategic lens
Problem one is who builds: female founders in sports tech, facing capital access, network access, and buyers who pattern-match against the last successful founder they backed.
This is a founder pipeline problem and it shows up as fewer female-led businesses raising at every stage. Alongside, fewer warm introductions into buyer networks that are still overwhelmingly male, and support structures built around assumptions that don’t reflect how a lot of founders actually build.
Problem two is what gets built: technology for women’s sport including data infrastructure, wearables, performance tools, medical research, built by founders of any gender for an underserved athlete population.
This is a market maturity problem, not a founder problem. Women’s sport has fewer seasons of data, thinner comparables, and buyers only now starting to budget for it.
Fix one and you get more founders. Fix the other and you get better tools.
Neither tells you anything about the other.
The funding and investment angle
A founder pipeline intervention doesn't fix data infrastructure. A research grant for female athlete biomechanics doesn't put more female founders through Series A.
If you treat them as the same conversation you end up with initiatives that don’t progress the conversation forward. And when it comes to sports tech the buyer is a club or federation, not a consumer or a health system - which means a different sales motion, procurement cycle, and budget line entirely.
The same split shows up in femtech, with the buyer swapped out.
Female founders building femtech companies is a capital and network problem.
Technology built for female health - regardless of who builds it - is a research and data maturity problem, historically underfunded because female physiology was excluded from the baseline research for decades.
"Women in femtech" risks being seen as both "women building" and "technology serving women”.
The takeaway
I've sat in these conversations when the two get confused. Both are real challenges - but they need different strategies.
Next time someone tells you they're "backing women in [sector]," ask which problem they mean.
What's your read - is one of these two challenges actually further along than the other right now, or are they both stuck at roughly the same stage?
I would love to know your thoughts on this Issue by commenting below.
Thanks for reading! Nic x
