After raising $2.5M in seed funding, Lisa Health announced the launch of its new app, Midday, which has been created in collaboration with Mayo Clinic. The app provides a personalized digital health solution that illuminates what is happening physically and emotionally during menopause and provides the right intervention at the right time to promote healthy aging. See this article in FemTech Insider to learn more.
Reproductive health issues have certainly been a topic in the news over the past few weeks in the United States. At Johns Hopkins University, two teams led by female graduate students are bringing much needed innovation to the reproductive health product marketplace. One company, Ovubrush, is a technology-enabled toothbrush that monitors biomarker in saliva to identify ovulation windows for conception. Another company, NovvaCup is redesigning menstrual cups to have different collapsible states which will increase ease of insertion and removal. To read more about these companies and the women behind them, check out this article posted in Johns Hopkins HUB.
In October 2020, Raven Hernandez decided to launch an eco-friendly rideshare service in Nashville that uses only electric vehicles (EVs). Earth Rides has grown quickly. In 2021, the company moved more than 180,000 passengers, offsetting 230 million grams of carbon. Hernandez’s company has since expanded from Nashville to Austin, Texas, too, and now has some 100 employees. Read more about her story in this article in Marie Claire.
In recognition of her contributions to the fashion industry, Mattel has announced its latest Barbie honoree as Vera Wang. The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Wang first became one of the youngest editors at Vogue and then became the design director for accessories at Ralph Lauren before finally becoming an entrepreneur when she opened her own boutique in 1990. How wonderful that Barbie can reflect trailblazing entrepreneurs in women’s fashion! Read more about the story in WWD.
Dr. Jennifer Doudna, who is a professor at the University of California-Berkeley as well as a 2020 Nobel prize winner for her pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, has recently launched a program entitled “Women in Enterprising Science” (WIES). The goal of the program is to enhance gender equity in bio-entrepreneurship. The program seeks to achieve this by offering scientific entrepreneurs the opportunity to receive up to $1 million of funding to create and grow new ventures around promising genomic and emerging biotechnologies. To learn more about this initiative, read this article in Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.
This October 24, 2021 Fortune article shares an interview with Anne Marie Johnson about the founding of her sustainable fashion company, Bitter Grace, and the company’s first few years in business. During the discussion, she shares that the goal of her company is to present a holistic approach to help women align their external selves with their inner selves in order to be as authentic as possible. Johnson also discusses strategic decisions that enabled the company to grow throughout the pandemic and where she sees the company heading in the next five years.
Are you a nonprofit leader who is looking for original ways to interact and engage with your supporters and funders? Check out Liz Ngonzi’s (among other things, Liz is a facilitator in the Women’s Entrepreneurship program) new article for The NonProfit Times entitled “Digital Storytelling: Five Best Practices to Activate Supporters on LinkedIn”.
In the piece, Liz discusses:
1. Promoting Your Organization’s Brand (LinkedIn Company Page and Employee LinkedIn Profiles)
2. Building Your Brand by Showcasing Your Impact and Obtaining Insights from Supporters: Posts, Stories and Polls
3. Promoting Events: LinkedIn Events
4. Hosting Events: LinkedIn Live
5. Researching and Engaging Prospects: LinkedIn Sales Navigator
This June 18, 2021 piece from Science Alert shares the grim reality that in 2020, only 12.8 percent of U.S. inventors receiving patents were women. Why does that matter for women’s health? Because inventors are often inspired to find solutions to problems that hit close to home. With so few women inventors, the opportunity for women’s health concerns to be addressed is lessened. In fact, the piece highlights, “scientific discoveries by female scientists as measured by published research papers are 12 percent more likely to benefit women than discoveries by men.” The article ends by sharing, “biases in who gets to conduct research and commercialize inventions is more than a matter of who gets to play. It’s also a matter of who benefits from the march of progress.” Let’s all work to encourage the women inventors that we know!
Women represent 32% of the eCommerce sellers online. While that is a much higher percentage that the number of women that are found in C-suite jobs, it still places women in the minority. This article in Entrepreneur encourages women in eCommerce to seek each other out for mentoring and support. The article states, “By building your community around other women, you can unlock the hidden power of wealth through shared strategies, tools and hidden secrets.”
This Newsweek piece that was released for International Women’s Day highlights seven women who have defied the odds within STEM fields (only around 30 percent of STEM researchers globally are women). The article features some well known women and some women that you might not have heard of yet.