Screenshot: Glow
Dealing with some women’s health issues can be tricky. Many people are squeamish, for instance, about publicly discussing things like menstrual cycles, miscarriages, and infertility. And so women often feel compelled to seek advice about such things behind closed doors, from a doctor or trusted friend. They may surf the web for additional info, but that can yield inaccurate information.
Glow wants to change this.
About a year and a half ago, Glow and its big-name backer—PayPal co-founder Max Levchin—launched an app that aims to help women get pregnant (or avoid pregnancies). Since then, they’ve worked to provide women with additional information and advice about their reproduction cycles.
In July, the company introduced an app called Glow Nature, giving women tips on what to do while pregnant. Now it has beefed up the app to cover another conspicuous part of a woman’s reproductive cycle: the postpartum period.
Within the app, users can keep a daily log of their postpartum behavior and feelings, receive advice on how to feel better, and read curated articles that delve deeper into this area. “Our goal here is really around tracking and helping the mom take care of herself, while she’s taking care of the baby,” says head of marketing Jennifer Tye.
Other apps, including NaturalCycles and Aesop Fertility Clock, provide similar tools. But unlike these competitors, Glow aims to create a larger community of women that can share advice among each other.
The app’s “community” forum organizes discussions into categories like “sex and relationships,” “health and lifestyle,” and “menstrual health,” but you also can create your own groups. Women are free to use pseudonyms or their first names when they join these discussions, and no other identifiers are attached to the posts.
“We want to provide people with a safe place, where they can be honest and get the help that they need,” Tye says. “And in order to do that, they have to feel like their data and identities are safe.”
The company also hopes Glow Nature will feed additional research into postpartum behavior. The app already has fed research into other areas. Last month, in partnership with the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, Glow published research showing a woman’s menstrual cycle is indeed affected by the moon—an assumption that had been around for the last millennia.
As it stands, reproductive health information can be scarce or wildly outdated. Misinformation often runs amok. If Glow has its way, this will change.
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