In the Netherlands alone, more than 90 FemTech companies are trying to close the gender health gap. Until Maaike Steinebach and Sophie van Dijk founded FemTech NL, many of them were not aware of each other’s existence and working in isolation from each other.
Maaike Steinebach mentions this as an example of why it will take more than a century to close the gender health gap at the current pace. Even though closing it could generate an estimated €7.6 billion in annual societal savings in the Netherlands alone.
But closing the gender health gap matters beyond the Netherlands. Maaike and Sophie spend the rest of our conversation walking through what is needed to move women’s health forward: awareness, data, research, collaboration and funding.
Hit play below to listen to the full conversation with Maaike and Sophie. Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Towards the end of our conversation, Maaike and Sophie field a few direct questions from a founder’s perspective, and three pieces of advice stand out.
Lead With the Commercial Opportunity When Fundraising
When asked how founders should handle investors who don’t have lived experience of the problem they’re solving, Maaike has a straightforward answer. She says the most successful founders focus on the commercial opportunity and present the business case first, regardless of the topic, because every investor is ultimately looking for one. Sophie adds a one-line addition right after: data, data, data, to indicate that data is key to support the commercial opportunity.
Build Your MVP Flexible Enough to Fit Your Partner’s Infrastructure
Maaike draws this directly from FinTech. It took banks and FinTech startups five to seven years to move from competition, through a phase she calls “co-opetition,” to actual collaboration, and the startups that slowed that process down were the ones unwilling to adjust their product to fit the bank’s existing systems. She sees the same hesitation in FemTech now: founders holding onto their MVP exactly as built instead of adapting it for an insurer’s or corporate’s infrastructure. The fix is the same lesson FinTech already learned. A product that fits gets adopted faster, and adoption is what turns a good idea into a business that earns money.
Look at Competitors as Possible Collaborators
Maaike mentions a company in Hong Kong using menstrual pads to test for HPV, and a separate company in the UK running a similar test with tampons. She uses it to describe what fragmentation looks like on a world scale. Later, Sophie uses this as her example for why awareness of your own USP matters: once you know clearly what you do well, it’s easier to spot where someone else’s strength fills your gap instead of competing head-on.
All three pieces of advice ask the same thing: know what you offer well enough so you can make it fit the investor’s expectations, the partner’s system, and where a competitor’s strength leaves a gap.
Know a founder in FemTech who could benefit from these takeaways? Share the episode with them using the buttons below.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
| Time | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introduction |
| 02:55 | Introduction to FemTech and Personal Journeys |
| 05:08 | The Emergence of FemTech and Initial Challenges |
| 08:13 | Understanding the Gender Health Gap |
| 11:01 | The Role of Startups in Women’s Health |
| 13:51 | Fragmentation in the FemTech Ecosystem |
| 16:49 | Five Pillars of FemTech NL |
| 19:43 | Collaboration and Awareness in FemTech |
| 22:14 | Funding Challenges in FemTech |
| 25:18 | The Disconnect Between Corporates and FemTech |
| 28:16 | The Future of FemTech and Societal Impact |
| 43:48 | Economic Impact of Women’s Health |
| 46:49 | The Role of Men in Women’s Health |
| 49:10 | Data Gaps in Women’s Health |
| 51:22 | Awareness and Education on Women’s Health |
| 56:06 | The Future of Women’s Health Education |
| 1:00:52 | Precision Medicine and AI in Women’s Health |
| 1:03:26 | Current Initiatives in Women’s Health |
| 1:06:24 | Investor Relations and Collaboration in FemTech |
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
Most of this conversation is about systems: five pillars, ninety companies, an ecosystem that needs aligning. But three moments cut through that structure and make the gender health gap land on a personal level.
“Once You See It, You Can’t Unsee It”
Sophie’s path into FemTech runs through Flouria Health, a startup she got involved with through her work in medtech. That’s where she first learned about the gender health gap, and where she could not unsee the opportunity associated with it. Not long after, she saw a LinkedIn post from Maaike, they had coffee two weeks later, and that conversation became the start of both the Women’s Health Innovation Council and FemTech NL.
The Dog Walker Analogy
Maaike jokingly describes her actual job at FemTech NL as a dog walker. She’s holding several leashes at once: a startup, a government body, an investor, a healthcare provider, an insurer, and the moment one of them pulls in a different direction, all the others get pulled along with it. It’s a light moment in the conversation, one that Sophie turned into a post on LinkedIn.
Lived Experience Simulators
While talking through how to close the gap in understanding between men and women on this topic, Maaike mentions something concrete: men can now wear period pain simulators, or a menopause vest that lets them feel what a hot flush actually feels like. It’s a small, specific detail that highlights how even differences in lived experience can now be bridged.
These three anecdotes matter as they underscore that complex matters like closing the health gap can be captured in personal stories and easy-to-understand analogies.
🗣 Which of these moments resonated most with you? Or was there another magic moment for you in the episode? Drop it below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
The Quote from the Episode
"It's about creating a future where the health care for both men and women is equal."
— Maaike Steinebach
Maaike says this after explaining that it wasn't mandatory to include women in clinical trials until 1994. Her point is that FemTech isn’t about creating an advantage for women; it's parity between men and women.
If you know a founder who needs to hear this, use the buttons below to tell her about the episode.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
Almost every investor in this ecosystem is male, and that shows up across nearly every conversation on this podcast. But that is not the only factor holding FemTech back. The three patterns below are what's worth tracking too.
Connecting What Already Exists Is the Real Opportunity
Maaike and Sophie's HPV example, two startups solving the same problem without knowing about each other, shows what's available the moment someone makes that connection: a faster, more scalable product, just from putting two existing things together. The same pattern shows up elsewhere on this podcast. In episode 87, Hanneke Takkenberg tells Dirkjan that the initiatives working toward gender equity in tech are scattered, and connecting them is where the real progress lies. In episode 155, Beata Wandachowicz-Krason makes the same point at a technical level: digital health tools are often siloed from doctors, so patient data never reaches an official medical record.
Adoption Beats Technical Superiority
Maaike makes this point through FinTech: startups that wouldn't adjust their MVP to fit a bank's systems were the ones that got stuck, and she says the same lesson applies to FemTech now. It's a pattern that shows up repeatedly on this podcast. Carmen van Vilsteren (episode 151): A product that gets adopted will beat a technically superior product every day. Andjela Bozinac (episode 154): Technical success is only 30% of the journey; the rest is fitting into existing infrastructure. Sophia Zitman (episode 136): AI implementation failures trace back to human factors, not the technology itself.
The Missing Data Set
Sophie points to FemHealthData at UMCG as one answer to a gap Maaike calls "the glue" missing between FemTech NL's stakeholders. Ida Tin named the same gap directly in episode 140: the one data set missing from women's health is continuous data on hormones.
Each of these patterns points to the same root problem: closing the gender health gap depends on connecting people and information that already exists.
🗣️ What FemTech-related trends did you spot across episodes? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
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Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
Why do we still see so few women receive venture capital funding, even after years of research, awareness campaigns, and public commitments to change?
In episode 160, I speak with Nithya Ruff about the systems that shape innovation. We explore everything from growing up in India and building a career in Silicon Valley to open source leadership, AI, entrepreneurship, and why the funding gap persists.
In the clip below, Nithya explains one of the most persistent biases in venture capital: why men are often judged on their potential, while women are expected to prove themselves first. It is a short moment that captures a much bigger conversation about how we build a fairer innovation ecosystem.
Listen to the clip, and if the conversation resonates, subscribe below to find the full episode in your inbox on 9 July 2026 at 8:00 CET.
What I Want to Leave You With
What I Want to Leave You With
The numbers in this episode point in one direction. Maaike cites a McKinsey study putting the global opportunity at $1 trillion a year added to GDP, and a separate figure showing that every dollar spent on women's health generates $3 in GDP. In the Netherlands alone, fixing four specific conditions, endometriosis, menopause, mental health, and cardiovascular disease, could save society €7.6 billion a year. It’s not surprising that Maaike frames this consistently as a business case rather than a cause.
What stands between that opportunity and the current 123-year timeline is mostly collaboration. FemTech NL exists to compress some of that timeline by getting startups, government, investors, healthcare providers, and insurers walking in the same direction instead of past each other.
To end on a positive note, I think it’s worth remembering how recent the resistance to FemTech was. In 2018, when Maaike started writing about FemTech on LinkedIn, women asked her directly to stop, worried that talking about menopause at work would get them labeled and cost them their careers. Eight years later, the same topic is getting more and more attention, has a solid and growing business case behind it, and a growing Dutch ecosystem of more than 90 companies. The gap isn't closed. But the starting point has moved.
Listen to the full conversation with Ana Herrero-Wallace on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Sophie van Dijk
Sophie spent over a decade in corporate leadership across multinationals before completing an INSEAD MBA, work that positioned her at the intersection of healthcare, technology, and what she now describes as one of the largest, most underfunded markets in healthcare: women's health.
Her entry into FemTech was more personal than strategic. Through her work at Flouria Health (episode 102), a startup built around treating physical and psychological health together instead of in separate silos, she first encountered the scale of the gender health gap. That experience is also what led her to Maaike: the two met after Sophie saw one of Maaike's posts on LinkedIn, and a coffee meeting two weeks later became the start of the Women's Health Innovation Council.
Today, Sophie works to close that gap through FemTech NL, the Women's Health Innovation Council, advising early-stage companies, and board positions that connect new innovation with the funding, regulatory, and operational structures needed to actually scale it. In this episode, that shows up directly in her advice to founders: lead with the data, because that's what turns a social case into a commercial one.
You can connect with Sophie on LinkedIn.
About Maaike Steinebach
Before FemTech, Maaike spent 20 years in financial services and technology leadership across Asia, holding C-suite roles at Fortis Bank, ABN Amro, and Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Singapore, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. In 2018, she co-founded the HK FinTech Association and the HK Women Chief Executive Network. In 2019, she became General Manager of Visa Hong Kong and Macau, where she led partnerships with Airwallex and ZA Bank.
In 2023, Maaike pivoted to FemTech, driven by a belief that technology can democratize the mental, physical, and financial wellbeing of both men and women. She founded FemTech Future, an advisory firm that helps FemTech companies and corporates integrate women's health into the workplace and educates leaders on the category. She's also a co-founder of the Women's Health in Focus Summit and The Health Suite.
Maaike is now one of the leading voices on FemTech in Asia, a region where women's health remains underfunded, under-researched, and often taboo. Her work has been recognized with awards, including Prestige Women of Power 2025 and Harper's Bazaar's Inspirational Women Award 2023, and she sits on the board of the Splash Foundation, a Hong Kong NGO teaching underprivileged families to swim.
You can connect with Maaike on LinkedIn.
About FemTech NL
FemTech NL is the organization Maaike Steinebach and Sophie van Dijk built to connect the Netherlands' fragmented FemTech ecosystem. On their own site, they describe themselves as passionate about closing the gender health gap through technology and innovation, working by creating synergies between startups, investors, researchers, healthcare providers, and tech hubs.
Sophie describes the organization's role as twofold: amplifying the voices of startups, and acting as a catalyst that keeps the ecosystem aligned so energy isn't lost to fragmentation, leaving founders free to focus on building and scaling. That work is organized around five focus areas, communication and awareness, funding, data, ecosystem, and research, the same five pillars Maaike and Sophie walk through in this episode.
FemTech NL grew out of an earlier project. About a year before founding it, Maaike and Sophie co-founded the Women's Health Innovation Council to build an international platform for FemTech innovators. That work surfaced a more specific gap: the Netherlands needed its own national ecosystem. FemTech NL is the result.
You can learn more about and join FemTech NL via their website, and you can follow them on Instagram and LinkedIn.
Listen to Episode 159 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Events that Women Disrupting Tech Must-Attend
Some great events take place this spring. Below are some that you definitely want to check out. For a full overview of all events, including links to buy tickets, please check the events page.
AI Summer School for Women Entrepreneurs
If you're an entrepreneurial woman sitting on an idea, wondering if you could build it with AI, this is for you.
On 13 July, the first 4-week online cohort of the AI Summer School for Women starts. It's organized by learning & development specialist Ilkem Kayican Dipcin with the goal to help women build real products and businesses using AI.
Here’s how it works:
→ Thursday evenings (20:00–22:00 CET): Live sessions: new content, demos, hands-on practice
→ Saturday mornings (10:00–11:00 CET): Group check-ins: weekly deliverables, peer feedback, Q&A
What you’ll build over 4 weeks:
• Week 1: Validate your idea with AI-powered market research
• Week 2: Build your brand voice, visuals & content strategy
• Week 3: Write proposals that convert + automate your first task
• Week 4: Demo Day pitch + 30-day personalised action plan
By the end of the summer:
You've built confidence that you can build with AI.
You'll graduate with a certificate as proof of what you've achieved.
You'll have an actual business asset that you can start to monetize.
Ilkem has space for max 12 women, and you can enroll here: https://ilkemkayican.com/summer-school
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