A majority of health research focuses on men's bodies. Nonprofit FemTechAZ aims to change that

A conference on Thursday in Phoenix aims to bring together people and organizations that can drive innovation in women’s health and health care.

The FemTech summit is part of an effort to bring parity to health care; studies from firms like Deloitte and McKinsey point out that a majority of health research focuses on men’s bodies.

A few years back, The Show reported on a lack of sports medicine — and health care research more broadly — focusing on females.

Sidnee Peck is co-founder of FemTechAZ, which is putting on the conference. The Show spoke with her earlier and started with what exactly FemTech refers to.

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There's a lack of sports medicine research involving women

Mark Brodie

The Show spoke with sport and exercise medicine doctor and clinical assistant professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine — Phoenix Leah Hillier about how female athletes tend to suffer injuries at higher rates than male ones.

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Full conversation

SIDNEE PECK: FemTech is, in the way we use it — so in fairness, it’s used differently across the world. It is for women’s health innovation. So this is across the board: women’s bodies work differently than men’s.

So this includes our brains, our bones, our hearts, our limbs, our joints. And anything that addresses a women’s health problem with an innovation in that space, we put under the umbrella of FemTech.

MARK BRODIE: So would this potentially also include things like cancer research or neurological research that is done sort of generally but tends to focus more on men’s bodies and brains as opposed to women’s?

SIDNEE PECK: Absolutely. So you hit on a key point, which is that 4% of medical research is done on women’s bodies. And only 6% of R&D. So you can imagine most medical solutions today are built based on the male physiology.

And luckily, somebody decided to study the woman’s body — which, there’s reasons they weren’t studied for a long time. But we learned that the entire body operates differently, and because of our unique hormones and the way we respond to things, we do need to take a step back and go through almost every intervention on a woman’s body.

MARK BRODIE: What kinds of things are you finding so far in terms of differences that maybe you wouldn’t have thought about?

SIDNEE PECK: So my co-founder, Dr. Mitzi Krockover, would be the expert on this one. I’m more on the business side. I won’t make any medical claims. But one example that we like to use is heart attack symptoms.

So if you’ve watched a movie in America, you know what it looks like when a man is having a heart attack: the grabbing of the arm or the chest. In women, it might be more subtle, like fatigue or just general achiness.

And again, not a medical provider, but just that difference, that the way a heart attack looks for a woman than it does for a man, just that simple education and then different interventions there could save more women’s lives because we don’t notice it.

MARK BRODIE: So you mentioned that one of the things you’re working on is devices and technology to help women’s health, women’s bodies. Do you need to have that research done first, though, to sort of know what kind of specific technology might be most useful?

SIDNEE PECK: Absolutely. So the role that FemTech AZ as an organization is playing is bringing the ecosystem together. So we built FemTech AZ because we saw the gaps — these 4% and 6%.

We see the huge opportunity. We are 50% of the population. We’re in pain 25% more of our lives than men. And we have money to spend, which is a very strong economic driver to do this. And we noticed that in Arizona, we have this whole pipeline starting with research to really build women’s health innovation here.

So our role is a convener. So we bring all these groups together as an ecosystem to help advance women’s health innovation, and that does start at the research end. So we have strong medical schools, and those are typically going to be your square-one starting point for identifying the key issues and using research to drive innovation and then it’s going to move all the way through the innovation pipeline.

MARK BRODIE: What to you are some of those key issues? Like, what are some of the areas of study and areas of innovation that would be most beneficial?

SIDNEE PECK: I mean, all of them. Yeah. So I would say some of the things that are very hot right now — excuse the pun — menopause and perimenopause are having their moment.

And as you can imagine when you look at — so most of my life has been startups — when you look at it through a business lens, a lot of female leaders step back or leave the workforce in moments of menopause transition because their symptoms are confusing, they didn’t understand why they were tired, why they were feeling frozen shoulder, all these additional pains, because we didn’t understand it.

And so I think perimenopause and menopause are going to be huge for the workforce, for general understanding for women. But frankly, we’re discovering — I read a new article every day that has something new.

I won’t remember the person or the name properly, but they just opened a center for research for women’s performance under the Women’s Soccer National League because the way women’s joints heal is different than the way men’s joints heal.

So everything is a baby step until it’s a huge leap, and I would say it’s across the entire body — mental health, physical health and our entire systems — that there’s still opportunity to study and build.

MARK BRODIE: How big of a slice of health innovation in general is this? Specifically looking at women’s health, women’s bodies, both physical and mental health?

SIDNEE PECK: Like in the marketplace?

MARK BRODIE: Yeah.

SIDNEE PECK: McKinsey has done multiple studies on this in partnership with the World Economic Forum. They released an estimate that it would be worth — if we started answering all the gaps in the continuum of care — it would be worth a trillion dollars annually, globally by 2040.

And so that’s imagine us ramping up our systems to be able to serve all these needs every year, adding a trillion dollars into the market simply by saying, "Ah, we took all this entire medical system over here, and now we’re looking at it for these different bodies."

MARK BRODIE: Is that in terms of like the research and the development of products, but also as you referenced earlier, being able to keep women in the workforce for longer and helping them overcome injuries and not cost the healthcare system additional money?

SIDNEE PECK: It is. It’s all of these things. They have a really great report — anyone can find it easily by Googling "McKinsey Women’s Health Innovation Report" — and there’s a lot of different slices.

So they look at the impact on just providing the care, $50 billion in the U.S. I think it was about $300 billion for the impact on the workforce for women going through menopause. So it’s just those who are directly providing care — clinicians, hospitals, directly providing care to women — those who are women in the workforce and all the businesses that employ women, which is almost all of us; and the entire global impact of this industry.

MARK BRODIE: So you referenced getting this ramped up. What will it take to do that in Arizona?

SIDNEE PECK: Yeah, you know, we’ve gotten a lot of great interest and early partnerships. We started this effort a little over a year ago. We spent 2025 on kind of an awareness roadshow. So the conversation started happening. That started bringing up some of the gaps that we were seeing.

For example, there was a study that we reference: Arizona ranks 40th in women’s health outcomes and 46th in access and affordability for care for women. So highlighting these issues in Arizona, calling the key leaders together.

So it’s already starting to happen. We are just continuing to host more events that bring innovators and our ecosystem together, and we’ll be bringing a lot of these key leaders together at our Leadership Summit.

MARK BRODIE: One of the things that you’ll be doing at a summit that’s coming up is releasing a working on a blueprint. What do you hope to achieve with that?

SIDNEE PECK: Sure. So this is the beginnings of what we are calling the "Blueprint for Women’s Health Innovation in Arizona." And we’re in Phase 1, which is identifying the gaps. And we’re really diving in to say where can we improve and then we’re going to start to discuss this with some of our key leaders in the ecosystem next week and say, "Here are the gaps. Now who’s ready to step up, and how can we start to really drive closing some of these gaps and drive accountability to advance women’s health innovation in the state?"

Not only is it sometimes difficult to pitch women’s health innovation ideas to a group of men whose bodies don’t experience these things, but it can also be one layer harder if the founder happens to also be female.

And so this is a key area where we can really equip our founders and our investors to say, "Hey, here’s how we’re both going to come together to understand the huge opportunity here and not get caught in the thought that there’s a nuance around the female body." This is just another market opportunity.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Sidnee Peck, co-founder of FemTech AZ. Sidnee, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

SIDNEE PECK: Thank you.