Lewis: Rigorous assessment
A national law firm has become one of the founding partners of an accreditation scheme for professional services working for the women’s health sector.
This has checked its onboarding processes, among other elements, to ensure it does not discriminate against businesses in the sector.
There are eight other founders of FemTick, alongside insurance, accountancy, executive search, communications and digital firms, as well as HSBC Innovation Banking.
To join the accreditation scheme, firms pay for an assessment by CensHERship, which campaigns against structural bias against women’s health companies.
CensHERship said all women’s health companies it had talked to had “encountered barriers accessing financial or commercial services, including banking, payment processing, insurance or ecommerce platforms”.
More than six out of 10 reported lost revenue as a result, while others said barriers delayed launches, disrupted operations and created additional legal and operational costs.
Charlotte Lewis, a principal associate at Mills & Reeve, said women’s health businesses faced “hurdles that other businesses don’t face”.
Rather than anything “deliberate”, these businesses could find that automated systems unfairly flagged them as high risk, particularly during onboarding, for example because they were selling sexual health products.
They might also come up against an inbuilt bias in AI systems which had historically been based on research or data relating to the male body.
Another problem was advertising “censorship” because of the need to refer in detail to women’s bodies.
Gayle Curry, a partner at Mills & Reeve specialising in healthtech businesses, said some women’s health businesses had been banned by social media platforms.
Ms Lewis said that assessment for FemTick accreditation was “rigorous” in that Mills & Reeve “had to demonstrate that bias is not baked into our onboarding process”.
However, the law firm ended up scoring a distinction on its onboarding assessment, partly because the process was “very human-led, with very little AI”. The same might not apply to other firms, particularly “in the volume space”, which might operate more like banks.
Ms Lewis said a further advantage was that Mills & Reeve had purposely built a women’s health team of around 10 lawyers who “understand the barriers” faced by the sector.
Firms wanting to join FemTick complete a structured assessment covering leadership and accountability, risk classification and policy, and culture and customer experience.
Accredited service providers can display a badge to demonstrate their commitment to supporting the women’s health sector.
Ms Curry said the accreditation process, which lasted around a month in the case of Mills & Reeve, took the form of self-certification which was examined by CensHERship, and would be checked on an annual basis.
When it came to fees, she said women’s health businesses were treated exactly like other clients, with discounts for startups and scale-ups. She said many of the startups the firm had acted for were now much larger businesses.
Ms Lewis added that Mills & Reeve would be able to refer clients to other FemTick businesses, “knowing they would not come across bias”.
Clio Wood, co-founder of CensHERship, commented: “Women’s health is one of the largest and fastest-growing opportunities in global healthcare, yet the infrastructure supporting the sector has not always evolved at the same pace.
“Our founding partners for FemTick recognise the scale of the opportunity and are among the first movers helping build the infrastructure needed for the sector to scale.”