The Black community has always had a tumultuous relationship with US health care, largely shaped by historical events that have displayed the industry’s blatant racism towards the community. Those include well-known examples, from unethical medical experiments – like the Untreated Syphilis Study at Tuskegee – to instances of non-consensual cell harvesting, as was the case for Henrietta Lacks. Fast forward to modern times, and this historical medical racism has resulted in disparities like the Black maternal mortality crisis, the community getting delayed treatment for chronic illnesses, and a lack of clinical trials including Black folks.
Uché Blackstock, MD, an emergency physician and author of “Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine,” wrote her book to discuss how, even in 2024, there are still numerous recent statistics highlighting the impact of racial health inequities.
Our concerns and complaints are often ignored and minimized.
“We know that what has the biggest impact actually on health is systemic factors like quality of education, opportunities for home ownership, access to healthcare,” she says. But there’s another important layer: “Then the other piece is what happens when we access the healthcare system and [Black people] have to deal with the interpersonal racism and anti-Blackness that manifests itself in how we are often not listened to or our concerns and complaints are often ignored and minimized.”
So maybe it’s no surprise, then, that a sector of the tech world is trying to address these glaring disparities. Known as “Black FemTech,” it merges the steadily growing FemTech market – which focuses on the healthcare needs that disproportionately affect women – with efforts to combat medical racism.
PS spoke with three Black founders of tech startups that are focused on addressing the medical racism that Black women continue to face. Keep reading to learn more about their journeys – and, more importantly, the issues they hope to address.
An App to Address the Medical Racism Black Women Experience
Years back, Ashlee Wisdom, the founder of tech startup Health in Her Hue, experienced institutional racism in the healthcare industry firsthand while working at an academic healthcare center. That experience, combined with reading and researching case studies that showed poor health outcomes for Black women, motivated Wisdom to try to find a solution to change an industry failing women who looked like her. Her digital platform, Health in Her Hue, which she launched in 2018, is aimed at finding culturally responsive healthcare providers for women of color via a “comprehensive” directory.
“This directory is unique in that it allows people to filter for providers based on race and ethnicity, languages spoken, gender identity, as well as insurance accepted, location, and more,” says Wisdom, who built Health in Her Hue with three core foundations: connections, content, and community.
Ashlee Wisdom. Image Source: David S. Coy II
In addition to using tools like her own directory, Wisdom has some advice for how women of color can advocate for their healthcare needs – and that begins with learning as much as possible about their family medical history. “I know this can be challenging for many women, but for those who can, I strongly encourage them to gather this information,” she says. “It can help their doctor provide more personalized care, including tailored recommendations for screenings and a screening schedule that’s most appropriate for their health risks.”
Along with documenting family history, she believes that writing down symptoms in your phone can be really helpful, as it allows for a more empowered and informed discussion when addressing health concerns with a doctor.
An App to Combat Black Women’s Maternal Mortality Crisis
Similarly to Health In Her Hue, the Irth app is focused on taking more culturally centered approach to health care specifically when it comes to maternal health – a glaring issue, given that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than their white counterparts. Founder Kimberly Seals Allers was spurred to action after having a negative birthing experience with her first child, she says, in which her calls for help were ignored. She’s also a journalist by trade, and wrote extensively about Black maternal health care. But actually addressing the issue by creating the app was only possible after she took classes to learn about app-building with her second son, who was 12 at the time.
“I’m very proud that a problem or something that I experienced with my first child activated me in the space,” Allers says. “And then I got to create a solution with my second child.”
Kimberly Seals Allers. Image Source: Yumi Matsuo
The app provides and shares reviews of healthcare providers from parents. “We have four types of reviews [on the app],” Allers explains. “Prenatal reviews, where you tell us about your prenatal care; then there’s a birthing experience review, where we ask specifically about doctors, nurses, lactation consultants; a postpartum review for parents after discharge; and then we have pediatric reviews for babies up to that baby’s first birthday, because we know that what’s happening to Black mamas is also happening to Black babies.”
Additionally, the app allows fathers of color, who are oftentimes overlooked in the birthing process, to add their reviews. Doulas, who Allers notes act as a “neighborhood watch for birth,” are also encouraged to submit their own reviews.
According to Allers, some of the biggest issues that mothers of color have reported on Irth include their requests for help being ignored, their pain levels being dismissed, and getting scolded or yelled at by healthcare professionals.
Despite these concerning reports, Allers remains confident that her app – which has information from users across 45 states – can aggregate essential data to help improve health care and hold hospitals accountable for the treatment of Black and Brown mothers. In addition to Irth, Allers launched the “Birthright” podcast to share the joys of giving birth.
“I started this as a narrative shifting tool to counter the mainstream media’s approach to Black maternal health, which is nothing but doom and gloom – always a sensationalized headline about us dying or headline about new data about how much we’re dying,” Allers says. “So I created it as counter-narrative tool to say, actually, there’s joy in Black birth and that it’s important.”
A Website to Destigmatize Sexual Wellness For Black Women
Increased awareness of the lived realities of Black birthing people has come even more to the fore since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. During the aftermath of increased abortion bans, Kimbritive, a sexual health and wellness digital collective, leveraged its platform to create a safe space for Black women.
“We partnered with Planned Parenthood in 2022 and 2023 to hold healing and safe spaces for folks to come talk about what was going on, what’s the state of the world right now,” says co-founder Brittany Brathwaite. They also partnered with the emergency contraception pill company Julie to distribute 1,000 of pills nationwide.
Kimberly Huggins and Brittany Brathwaite. Image Source: Jalese Ayana
Brathwaite created Kimbritive with her long-time friend Kimberly Huggins in 2017, while they were both still in college. Her background of growing up in a tight-knit, religious Caribbean family that rarely talked about sexual or reproductive wellness sparked her interest in creating a platform to uplift women of color on their own journeys in this space. At the moment, Kimbritive hosts monthly sexual and reproductive wellness workshops to help women of color feel empowered and informed about their bodies and sexual wellness.
If you’re not using an equity lens . . . you actually can reinforce inequities using technology.
According to the CDC, Black women and girls account for 54 percent of the new HIV diagnoses in the US, which is 17 times more than that of White women and girls. This is just reason Brathwaite is hoping to break down some of the stigmas surrounding sexual health in the Black community by providing more resources for sexual education.
Sometime next year, Kimbritive will introduce Sugar, a specialized website acting as a “virtual care companion” designed for Black women by women’s health and wellness experts. The site will be an update from Kimbritive’s official site, offering users curated events, medically accurate information on sexual and reproductive health, and the opportunity to get advice from a host of wellness practitioners, like sex educators and mental health providers.
With so much change happening in the tech world, many Black FemTech founders hope that we can leverage these advancements to right generations-old wrongs. But Dr. Blackstock warns that certain tech – namely, artificial intelligence – needs to be built with these goals in mind in the first place. And that’s partly why having Black women in this space is so important.
“People always ask me, ‘Do you think that AI can close the gap in racial health inequities?’ I would say that, you know, we have to be very intentional about how we use it, just like any other piece of technology,” she says. “If you’re not using an equity lens, if you’re not thinking about racism, you actually can reinforce inequities using technology.”
Jada Jackson is a Chicago-based freelance journalist focused on fashion, beauty, identity, and culture. She is passionate about covering stories that showcase Black creatives and the Black experience through a global lens. In addition to PS, her work can be found in outlets such as Vogue Business, Allure, Teen Vogue, the South China Morning Post, and more.
