How theSkimm founder’s health struggle prompted a movement to help women prioritize theirs

Since launching theSkimm in 2012, founders Carly Zakin and Danielle Weisberg have set out to reinvent the way young women digest news with their daily newsletter. Now, 12 years later – with an audience reach of 16 million – they are on a mission to tackle preventative healthcare.

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“Women face a lot of barriers when it comes to interacting in the medical world. Whether that’s because it’s hard to get appointments and make time to carve out to get the appointments, dealing with insurance, medical gaslighting, there’s a zillion different reasons where we know gender inequity comes up in the medical field,” Zakin recently told Know Your Value.

To help women be in the driver’s seat of their own health, theSkimm recently launched a tool that schedules and tracks important medical appointments and screenings. As part of the theSkimm’s #Don’tWait campaign, the free and personalized tool covers everything from when and how to schedule your next OB-GYN appointment to navigating mental health screenings.

Data shows women in the U.S. are spending less time prioritizing their own health. In fact, nearly half of women skip preventative care and screening appointments, while 70 percent of millennials and 74 percent of Gen Z women say they struggle to prioritize their health.

For Zakin this is personal. In 2022 she underwent back surgery, and experienced lingering pain from the procedure. “It was really debilitating,” she said. “I went to another doctor to get another opinion. And I remember this doctor said to me, ‘maybe it’s just stress’.”

Though she knew it was stress that was worsening her back pain, Zakin was disappointed to find she was left with few answers on next steps or treatment options.

Navigating the medical system, she found, required her to be her own best advocate. “It wasn’t until I continued to advocate for myself, [when] I finally found a doctor who was like, it’s your obturator muscle and the interior part of your hip,” she said. “I just needed a little bit of pelvic floor therapy and then I was fine. And I think about that moment a lot. I knew my body, I knew myself. I knew that something wasn’t right.”

It wasn’t just Zakin’s experience that illuminated the challenges women face accessing health care, it was also the countless testimonies from their own friends, family, and even their readership — which is majority millennial women — that raised the need to create more awareness around women’s preventative health.

“At theSkimm we’re all about how to make it easier to live smarter,” Weisberg told Know Your Value. “Advocating for yourself, especially in the healthcare space, is so important, and sometimes truly the difference between life and death for some people. And really, step one, when it comes to self-advocacy, is taking the step to make the appointment. And that is where this campaign started.”

Yet for many women, preventative health is the last thing they think of when the demands of caring for others often take priority. Nearly nine out of 10 women who have children under 18 say worrying about their kids’ health is a barrier to prioritizing their own. “This is really about taking ownership of your health, and you can’t put on the oxygen mask for everybody else until you put your own on first,” said Weisberg, herself a mother of two.

Between juggling her professional responsibilities and parenting, she often finds it hard to carve out time for her own health. “When you look at it, [women] are taking care of people, they are doing this. They’re just not doing it for themselves,” Weisberg added. “We’re also a part of a generation that saw us stay home and skip a lot of preventative health measures during the pandemic. So, there is kind of an influx that we’ve seen coming out of that, and we want to make sure that that care is not just directed to those wonderful people we take care of, but it also needs to be directed to our own health and wellbeing.”

For theSkimm — which has an audience reach of 16 million across all platforms — this isn’t their first foray outside of news. The platform has branched into several other franchises, like theSkimm Money and theSkimm Well, as a direct result of their audience’s feedback.

“We’ve grown from the daily Skimm to having multiple different franchises that really map out how we’ve grown up with our audience. And as we’ve grown up, we’ve stepped into more responsibilities and that has meant, obviously, making decisions for yourself and the type of life you want to have,” Weisberg shared.

Whether it’s addressing readers’ concerns about sandwich-generation caretaking, to fertility challenges — and everything in between — both founders have diligently expanded their platform to serve the growing needs of their audience and meet them where they are. “All of that goes into the things that you think about during your day. How can we anticipate what you’re going to need? And how can we make it easier to navigate life, both big and small, and because all of those things really combined to take a toll on everything that this woman is trying to keep up with during her day,” Weisberg explained.

Zakin and Weisberg said the goal behind the #Don’tWait campaign is to create a tangible tool that helps women “feel empowered and informed about their health.” The tool is available for free at theSkimm.