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Why non-reproductive health? Fertility is a well-funded market with $1.6B dollars provided for research in the USA alone in 2022, compared to the dismal $1M dollars given to vulvodynia (a non-reproductive pain disorder). What’s more, 80% of FemTech funding goes toward reproductive health. Add to that women's fertility and body autonomy is regularly politicized. The result are negative outcomes for women. For example, they are 3-6x more likely to experience adverse drug reactions, 50% more likely to die of a heart attack, and 25% more likely to be misdiagnosed from a stroke.
We see women's non-reproductive health as a holistic approach to providing women the opportunity for wellness in the long term. We want to see a world where women can access life-changing modalities without a doctor framing her choice with her body's ability to conceive while her symptoms compared to those of men.
How are you going to do this? Imagine that men’s health is a car on the road, 500 years ahead of women’s health due to historic exclusion and even women being banned from clinical research. Funding women’s health is a great effort, but it only puts women’s health on the road.
We want to catch up.
Asterisk a DataDAO for that reason. Through daily check-ins, women around the world contribute to the first female-only data lake for researchers, FemTech founders, governments, NGOs, journalists, and LLMs. Our customers can sort data by region, age, ethnicity, disorder, medication, and more, and clinicians can invite participants to focus groups and trials through our app. Participants, in turn, receive personalized trends over time and governance tokens, leading to women voting on their own healthcare for the first time in history.
Actually worldwide? Yes. One of our core governance directives is that we must fund research and startups equally across the five continents, as women are equally distributed across the globe. 90% of research funding is in the Global North, meaning what women’s health research has been done is white women’s health. We refuse to perpetuate that paradigm. As such, Asterisk must have an active chapter in each of the five continents — preferably more, according to population density.
We welcome you to join the DAO as a member at any level. However, there are a few key roles we’re enthused to fill. Send us your application, here.