The Gender Data Gap, and Two Mainers Closing It

Dr. Lisa Belisle and Dr. Jeff Barkin are joined by Dr. Liza White and Martina Marrali, the founders of EliVive, a Maine company building a wearable that measures a woman's hormones continuously through her sweat. Both founders came to the work through their own frustrated care. Marrali spent years getting a diagnosis of PMDD, and White, a biomedical engineer who did her doctorate at the University of Maine, kept running into the limits of what a single blood test can show.

The conversation moves from the personal to the structural. A hormone measured once is a snapshot of something that changes constantly, and the founders argue the gap is not clinical indifference but missing data. Barkin presses on the science, on microfluidics, aptamers, and why an electrical signal beats a colour change, and on what it would take for a physician to use these readings in practice. Belisle pushes back on the framing, making the case that women have been supplying data for decades in the form of their own accounts, and that the numbers should sit alongside those stories rather than replace them.

They also talk about building a biotech company in Maine rather than Boston or San Francisco, the gender data gap that shaped which bodies medicine was designed around, and what patients should expect about privacy when the most intimate data of all is being collected.