Ask most people to describe a biohacker, and you’ll likely hear about a man in his thirties with a cold plunge, a spreadsheet, and a strong opinion about seed oils. Ask a fifty-year-old woman whether she tracks her sleep, times her protein intake, lifts weights three times a week, and reads her own lab results before her doctor does, and she’ll say yes. She just won’t call it biohacking. The habits are the same. The label and who gets credit for it are something else entirely.
Start with the word itself. “Hacking” came out of computer science, coined in MIT’s hacker culture in the 1960s, and carried forward by decades of an industry that stayed overwhelmingly male. A hacker broke into systems, rewrote the rules, and achieved results others couldn’t. It was a title built by and for young men in computer labs, and it never fully shed that image, even as it migrated from code to cortisol. When a woman does the identical thing, tracks her own data, runs an experiment on her own body, optimizes a system, she’s rarely reached for that empowering word. It was never built with her in mind.
The word is one inheritance. The research is a bigger one. Biohacking borrows its playbook from exercise science and aging biology, and both fields have spent decades running their experiments on men. That research has real value. It just doesn’t always translate to women, and when habits, best practices, and medical protocols built for men don’t produce the same results in women, the mismatch too often gets written off as personal variation instead of a gap in the research.
The numbers are not subtle. A 2025 analysis in the American Journal of Sports Medicine revisited a landmark count of participants in sports and exercise medicine research. Across 1,441 studies, female participation had climbed from 39% to about 44%, which reads like progress until you get to the second finding: only 5.6% of those studies accounted for participants’ menstrual status in the design. Fewer than one in a hundred earned the reviewers’ top marks for rigorously accounting for a woman’s monthly cyclical changes.
Aging research has the same blind spot, on a longer timeline. A 2023 perspective in Nature Aging found that more than 70% of the top age-related diseases are influenced by reproductive senescence, the decline of fertility and reproductive function, yet fewer than 1% of preclinical aging studies use models designed to reflect menopause.
We are trying to understand how women age using models built on bodies that never experience menopause.
Follow the money and the story holds. The National Academies found that only 8.8% of NIH grant spending between 2013 and 2023 went to women’s health research, and that share has been shrinking even as the agency’s overall budget grew. Menopause research received roughly $56 million in 2023. For a life stage nearly every woman will go through, that’s a rounding error. With more than 1.3 million women entering menopause every year, and roughly 75 million American women in menopause at any given time, that works out to less than 75 cents per woman, per year.
The wellness industry isn’t waiting for the research
The longevity establishment is still catching up to the idea that women have different needs, but the wellness industry isn’t waiting around. Mainstream wearables like Oura, Apple Watch, and Whoop know what we at Osteoboost know: women are not going quietly into old age. Oura, for one, has built entire teams dedicated to identifying which insights actually help women age stronger.
Where gender matters most
Here are three areas where research built on men doesn’t automatically hand women the right answer.
1. Fasting
Extended fasting windows have mostly been studied in men. In perimenopausal women, the same protocol can raise cortisol and speed the loss of lean mass, the opposite of the goal. Fasting isn’t useless for women. Dose, timing, and life stage matter, and almost nobody prescribes it that way.
2. Recovery Metrics
Heart rate variability, sleep scores, and readiness algorithms shift predictably across the menstrual cycle. If the baseline your device compares you against wasn’t built with those swings in it, an ordinary luteal phase can read as overtraining.
3. Bone Strength
This is where the gap gets costly. Women can lose up to 20% of their bone density in the five to seven years after menopause, a window that lands squarely in the years women are being coached on hormones, sleep, and metabolic markers instead. Borarelyver makes it onto a longevity dashboard, which is strange given that a hip fracture at 70 ends independence faster than almost anything else.
We can’t change the past, but the future is still unwritten
The Global Wellness Summit named women’s longevity one of its defining shifts for 2026, and capital is starting to move. That’s welcome, and overdue. But a rebrand doesn’t produce a research base, and three changes would move faster than another conference panel.
Report results separately for men and women by default. Pooled averages hide the effects women need to see.
Treat menstrual and menopausal status as a study variable, not an exclusion criterion. Hormonal variability has been dismissed as noise that complicates a trial. It’s data.
Test interventions in the decades when women’s risk curves actually bend, the mid-forties through the fifties, not on a cohort of 25-year-old men with a caveat buried in the discussion section.
Women are already doing this work themselves. They track cycles, run their own experiments, compare notes in group chats, and build spreadsheets that would hold up in a lab. They’ve been generous with their data and patient with an industry that’s just now starting to catch up. It’s about time.s
About Laura Yecies
Osteoboost CEO Laura Yecies is a healthtech leader and strategist with deep experience launching and scaling medical device and diagnostic companies. Before Osteoboost, she was CEO of NeuroSync, Catch (acquired by Apple), and SugarSync. She holds an MBA from Harvard, MSFS from Georgetown, and AB from Dartmouth. Yecies is a highly-regarded speaker, podcaster, and writer on healthcare and technology.
