Dr. McMillan's talk, titled “Regulating Femtech: Addressing Regulatory Gaps in Women’s Health Technologies,” drew an engaged audience of scholars, students, and practitioners from law, health, and technology. Dr. McMillan explored the rapid expansion of femtech—technologies designed to monitor, manage, or enhance aspects of women’s health—and the regulatory blind spots that continue to accompany this growth. 

Focusing on contraception and fertility-related technologies, her analysis examined how regulatory systems in the UK—shaped by broader EU frameworks such as the GDPR and Medical Device Regulation (EU MDR)—both succeed and fail in addressing the unique challenges these products present. Dr. McMillan argued that dominant approaches to product classification, risk assessment, and consent do not adequately account for the hybrid, data-rich nature of femtech. As a result, both users and developers remain vulnerable to legal and ethical uncertainty.

In her talk, she called for more reflexive and intersectional regulatory strategies—ones that explicitly address the risks femtech poses to women’s health and wellbeing rather than overlooking them. Such approaches, she suggested, are essential for building trust and ensuring that innovation does not outpace consumer protection.

Dr. McMillan brings extensive expertise to this topic. She holds degrees from the University of Glasgow (LLB), the London School of Economics (LLM), and a PhD in Medical Law and Ethics from the University of Edinburgh. Since joining Edinburgh Law School in 2018 as a Senior Research Fellow, she has contributed to the Wellcome Trust-funded project Confronting the Liminal Spaces of Health Research Regulation and later secured a prestigious British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship for her project Femtech: how should law and regulation respond?