This week Stephanie Kramer and I had an opportunity to speak with Kimberly Seals Allers. In this episode, we learned about Kimberly's powerful work and experience and dove into some of the core principles from Stephanie's book, Carry Strong, that are crucial to supporting women as they navigate pregnancy and work. Kimberly is the founder of Irth, an app where you can find prenatal, birthing, postpartum, and pediatric reviews of care from other Black and brown women. She designed it to be the #1 “Yelp-like” platform for the pregnancy and new motherhood journey, made by and for people of color. Kimberly is a veteran journalist and five-time author turned maternal and infant health advocate and femtech founder. A former senior editor at ESSENCE and writer at FORTUNE magazine, she created Irth, as the first-of-its kind, doctor and hospital review & rating platform just for Black and brown women and birthing people. She leveraged decades of media experience and a passion for mothering into a vision and platform to use technology to amplify community voices to address racism and bias in Black maternal and infant care. Irth is a non-profit project of her 501C3, Narrative Nation, which also produces the Birthright podcast, where she shares positive Black birthing stories as a direct counter to the doom and gloom narrative too common in mainstream media coverage of Black maternal health. I
43 percent of women leave the traditional workforce when they have children. This podcast forgets about the leaning in or leaning out debate and talks to women about their journeys towards creating lives that include both family and career. Claudia Reuter, a former stay-at-home mom who went on to be a venture-backed CEO, speaks with authors, tech executives, doctors, entrepreneurs, stay-at-home moms, and more who share their professional journeys and advice for women grappling with work-life balance. This season, Claudia has partnered with Stephanie Kramer, the author of Carry Strong, to explore the topic of navigating pregnancy and work.