Women are 77% of the NHS workforce. So why are they missing from the tech that's supposed to fix it?

There's a well-documented problem in healthcare: women make up 77% of the NHS workforce but remain chronically underrepresented in its leadership. It's a gap the sector has been trying to close for years, with mixed results.

But there's an equally dangerous gap that runs sideways, and it gets far less attention. Healthtech is even less representative than the NHS boardroom. Women constitute just 21% of senior tech leaders in the UK. As a sector, we're building solutions for a majority-female workforce, and a patient population that is quite literally all of us, with almost no women in the rooms where the decisions get made.

The consequences are not just ethical. They are practical and commercial. When the people designing the tools don't reflect the people using them, you get products that miss the mark. Femtech is a case in point: it has a notoriously poor funding record, in large part because the investors making decisions are predominantly men who don't recognise the value of what's being built. It's the Dragon's Den problem: the Dragons famously didn't fund Just Eat because they weren't the target audience. A lot of femtech faces exactly the same barrier. The product is sound. The market is vast. But the people with the chequebooks don't see it.

The funding gap compounds everything else. Female founders in healthtech face both the structural biases that affect all women in tech and the additional scepticism that comes with operating in a regulated, complex sector. Getting a healthtech company off the ground requires capital, credibility, and connections - three things that are harder to accumulate when you're starting from outside the traditional networks that have historically governed both finance and medicine.

There's also a pipeline problem that starts far earlier than anyone in a boardroom wants to admit. I'm told there are no girls in my son's A-level Computer Science class. STEM initiatives, well-intentioned as they are, tend to funnel girls toward caring scientific careers like medicine rather than into engineering or software development. 

Representation also suffers from a mentorship deficit that compounds across generations. Women are less likely to apply for roles unless they feel they meet every requirement on the list - a pattern that's been studied extensively and remains stubbornly persistent. Without visible female leaders to learn from and be sponsored by, the pathway to seniority becomes harder to imagine and harder to navigate. The old boys' network did not survive this long because men are more talented. It survived because access to information, opportunity, and advocacy was quietly reserved for people who already belonged to it.

And then there are the structural realities that have never fully been reckoned with: the disproportionate weight of caring responsibilities, the career disruption of childbirth, the persistent labour gap within the home. These are not insurmountable, but they are real, and pretending otherwise doesn't make healthtech more inclusive - it just makes it more oblivious.

At Hexarad, we were deliberate from the start. Our founding team brought real clinical experience, because we believe you cannot build meaningful solutions for the NHS without understanding how it actually works. But we were equally deliberate about building a team that reflects the reality of who's on the wards, who's in the waiting rooms, and who's on the receiving end of every delayed scan result. That combination of operational credibility and genuine representation has been central to our success.

I'm building a network of female leaders across commercial and technology roles in healthtech, because the informal support structures that others take for granted don't yet exist for us in the same way. 

The NHS cannot be transformed by an industry that doesn't understand it. And healthtech cannot understand the NHS if it refuses to look like it. More founders, more investors, and more hiring managers need to make the connection between who is in the room and what gets built. We did. It works.