Twenty-five years ago, Joanna Strober invested in a company called Babycenter. Twenty-five years later, the company still serves women, “many women,” says Strober. She was a pregnant pregnant investor at the time when she made the investment of Babycenter, and that helped to arouse a greater idea: for too long, she said, the scenario for women faced with challenges was “in the process of facing it”.
“It’s a bizarre thing … And it’s really unhealthy, and we have to change this,” Strober said at the recent CNBC Changemakers summit in Los Angeles.
For Chelsea Hirschhorn, having his first child led him to become “totally disillusioned” with the abyss between the image of the new parenting that has been marketed and the reality it has known. “The perfect image of parenting was overwhelming for a new parent,” she said. “There was a large dichotomy between the content I consumed and the first line experience at 3 am”
Hirschhorn says that there were no data available at the time to support what it felt because the subject was sub-studied and sub-financial, it therefore “took” the category of health and well-being of infants. “For any reason,” said Hirschhorn, she had “the condemnation of thinking that I could fix this”.
Although there is a distinction between the challenges of health whose two women CEO and the founders concentrate – all women will not become pregnant, but all will go through menopause – a great idea binds the two women leaders together: products, treatments and services that can meet critical needs in a poorly served and undervalued market.
“We have this idea that the perimenopause is at some point and people think they have to suffer for a very long time before they get the right care, but what we say is that you don’t have to suffer at all,” said Strober at the top of the changes. “As soon as you have their thirties and it all starts to feel bad, you should get help. The idea of suffering is really obsolete,” she said. “Women have been trained to suffer for too long.”
Strober And Hirschhorn were both appointed to 2025 CNBC Changemakers List. (Actress and entrepreneur Naomi WattsWho has become a leading defender of menopause health as a founder and director of creation at Stripes Beauty after having fought with early menopause at the height of his Hollywood renown, was also one of the modifiers of 2025.).
At the Changemakers at the top on April 8, the two CEO women shared advice and lessons from their successes bringing new commercial ideas to health care. Here are some of the key themes they addressed in a discussion with Kate Rooney from CNBC.
Women must defend themselves
In addition to the “shortage of information” that exists to prepare women for the reality of parenting, educational content for women has been censored when it is on topics related to genesic health. It was something that Hirschhorn learned once she started Frida, an era when it was “almost impossible”, she said, to find an authentic narration on the subject, and led him to create Non -censored frida.
“Sixty percent of the content of women’s health advertisements, or in general, has been in a way, form or form, rejected or filtered,” she said. It is not only online, but on linear television, part of what Hirschhorn calls a “very sexual dichotomy”, citing the fact that the content of health and male sexual well-being is approved at a much higher rate. This leaves it “incredulous”, she said, and it is a call for action to move from the health of women being a subject of provocation to a subject of public health.
“Women must defend themselves,” she said. “Women cannot be complacent, and this goes beyond health care. This can lead to a real change, in retail … in each facet of life,” she added.
Strober noted that when she built Midi health, it has become clear that a major challenge would be to work with codes created by the insurance sector for menopause, in fact, another form of institutional censorship. Midi Health has decided to position himself as a primary network care provider who had a specialty in menopause and who turned out to be a “really effective” means of gaining ground, she says, and he now has national insurance coverage with all major insurance companies in the United States
“They will not necessarily cover sexual health problems, but they will cover primary care, you will subsequent it,” she said. Considering menopause as part of women’s health, she says, the company was able to create a reimbursement mechanism that meets insurance standards.
Menopause can have a huge impact on career success
This insurance coverage is a big problem, because research shows that the lack of treatment of menopause can have a high cost with regard to the career of women. A study Strober underlined during the Discussion of Changemakers revealed that at the time of mid-Carrier when women should win their greatest successes in the workplace, the transition to menopause can retain them.
Strober said that the growing research body details how menopause can lead to discrimination at work, with women who leave jobs, or not go for increases or promotions because of symptoms, and also because they do not believe they can get the treatment they need.
“If you think you have something that cannot be corrected, it’s very embarrassing, which means that people take a step back from what they are doing,” said Strober. “They are afraid,” she added.
This can be the experience called the fog of the brain, as well as hot flashes.
“You lose energy during heat puffs,” said Strober. “People are not as confident. But if you are treated for that,” it’s just a hot flash “and you can find power,” she added.
Women’s health is, above all, a “very good business”
Hirschhorn says that by figures, there is still enormous potential in the women’s health market.
It is estimated that it reaches $ 60 billion by 2027, according to the data it cited during the event, and it is despite the fact that less than 4% of the expenses and investment of the R&D of health care go to the category-a “seismic gap”, she said.
It is a well-known fact in consumers research that women dominate household expenditure, but Hirschhorn said that on the Frida market, there is a “viral” opportunity that is underestimated.
“The creation of products for women based on real needs creates a difficult virality to recreate with other demographic data,” she said. “These women are not only buying their products, they sell them to their communities and their friends. We call it” Word of Mom “, said Hirschhorn.” It is a great unexploited opportunity, “she added.
As a former venture capital investor, Strober said it was important to accept that “people do not die of investing in women’s health”, but she added that when you can show the growth that companies like Health have displayed, it will not slow down a business. “We are the digital health company that is growing growth, probably always, very honestly,” she said. “We are growing incredibly quickly because women really need to access this care and cannot get it elsewhere,” she added.
Similar to the “virality” experienced by Frida, Strober affirms that the business model is based on itself. “Once you have taken care of one thing for women, they come back to you for something else, and if you develop this trust platform for them, where they become your patient in the long term, it’s a good business,” she said.
“We are not saying that it is a women’s business, we say that it is a very good business,” she added.
The “brothers” dominated the health of longevity for too long
This opportunity and the non-filtered realities of parenting have now increased Frida to more than 150 products, covering everything, from design to postpartum care and breastfeeding, and beyond. “My four children are a home of inspiration and my days of” Snot Sucking “are almost over,” said Hirschhorn. But she added: “The same problems exist, you just need a different toolbox.”
At Midi Health, Strober says that the next great opportunity to unlock is to create links between menopause health and longevity. “If you take care of yourself in the forties, you can really prevent a lot of diseases that come in the 80s, and we have therefore thought about this longevity market,” said Strober. “These are all brothers, all the brothers who are there and who speak of wanting to live at 150. We just want to take care of ourselves. We are not careful to live up to 150. We just want to be healthy grannies,” she said.
“What do we do, how do we take care of our brains, our bones and our aging hearts in a healthy way?” Strober requests.
She says there are many treatments, products and services to be developed by health companies that will help women in the forties, the 1950s and 60s to better answer this question.
Watch the full video below from the Changmakers summit to learn more about the critical gaps in health care that women face throughout life.