“Unfinished Business: Incorporating a Gender Perspective into Digital Advertising Reform in the UK and EU", 25 October 2025

The UK’s Billion-pound online advertising industry is thwarting women’s reproductive rights, according to a new study by Mozilla’s Senior Tech Policy Fellow Lucy Purdon.

Purdon’s research presents a gendered analysis of how women’s reproductive “milestones” — menstruation, conception, and menopause — are capitalized on for microtargeting purposes.

She argues that this data powers lucrative digital ad businesses that incentivize opaqueness while enforcing false stereotypes associated with childbearing. For example, pairing certain women’s age with a desire to bear children — which in many cases is not the reality — or the assumption that many women are able to carry pregnancies to term, further reinforces shame and stigma surrounding miscarriage and other complications. These stereotypes are detrimental to women's rights and well-being, Purdon notes.

The research titled, “Unfinished Business: Incorporating a Gender Perspective into Digital Advertising Reform in the UK and EU,” unpacks how the erosion of privacy has infiltrated FemTech apps used to track menstruation, pregnancy and manage menopause symptoms. The research also examines the regulatory landscape in the UK and proposes recommendations...

...For the study, 1,000 women and FemTech users across the UK were surveyed revealing that 82% percent were unclear about how reproductive apps were safeguarding users' data, while over 60% showed great distrust over these apps' ability to safeguard their privacy. About 44% of respondents had deleted an app due to privacy concerns and at least 20% of those respondents had deleted a menstruation or fertility app.

The research is also supplemented by qualitative interviews of over 40 FemTech industry practitioners (investors & marketers) in the U.S., UK, and across the EU, and three rounds of group discussions and interviews featuring a total of 13 Femtech founders, investors, and marketing/advertising experts who spoke to the researcher under Chatham House rules...