Women Living Better (WLB) improves the path to menopause through education and research.
In 2016 WLB was created to explain (i.e. “translate”) what was then known from research about the whole path to menopause — including the earliest part that can begin before periods and menstrual cycles change significantly.
In 2019, through a research collaboration, we set out to help fill the enormous knowledge gap about perimenopause.
Recognition
2024: Women Living Better is mentioned in a Lancet article as a “new tool…designed to empower women to recognise, understand, and manage their own menopausal symptoms through digital technology [by] provid[ing] evidence-based, realistic, and clear information about the menopause transition and its symptoms, including stories from women with lived experience and information about treatment options”. [Hickey et al 2024].
2021: Nina was honored with the North American Menopause Society’s Media Award.
Who is behind WLB?
Frustrated and confounded by her own experience with sleep and mood changes in her early 40s — which she now knows to be the beginning of perimenopause — Nina Coslov resolved to figure out why.
- Why hadn’t she known to expect changes associated with the path to menopause to begin while she was still getting a monthly period?
- Why didn’t her healthcare providers see these changes as related to perimenopause?
Once she started understanding the answers to these questions, she became determined to share what she learned to make it better for others. Nina, a former consultant and biotech program manager, dove into scientific research and connected with amazing experts, clinicians and researchers to get better answers. Many of these experts would become a part of the WLB advisor team.
In 2019, Nina discussed the state of perimenopause knowledge with Maria Shriver on the Today Show. From 2020 to 2023, Nina and her collaborators presented posters at the annual Menopause Society conference. In 2023, Nina was a speaker on a reproductive health panel at a women’s conference at Williams College. WLB’s work has been covered in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, Healio and MedPage Today. The WLB advisory group recently voiced their concerns about a “Getting Rid of Menopause” article in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece.
More about Nina
Nina Coslov started her career as a strategy consultant with The Monitor Group, now a part of Deloitte, where she learned how to tackle complex problems like why so little is known about perimenopause. After consulting, Nina was in program management at Genzyme (now part of Sanofi), leading drug development teams focusing on early-stage programs in Multiple Sclerosis, Cystic Fibrosis and IBD. Here she gained an understanding of scientific research and drug development. Nina has an MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth where she captained the Women’s Ice Hockey team and a BA from Williams College. At Williams, she learned to play ice hockey and was a member of the club ice hockey team just before it became a varsity sport. She lives in Cambridge, MA with her husband, three children and their dog Crosby, named after the hockey player.
WLB’s Origin Story
Women Living Better would not have been born if Jo McChesney, Nina’s good friend and co-founder, hadn’t been having a parallel experience with perimenopause while she too was in her early 40s and still getting a monthly period. Both Nina and Jo were told, “This can’t be perimenopause” by their healthcare providers, and it didn’t sit right with them.
Together, they created the Women Living Better website in 2018 to be the resource they couldn’t find — something in consumer-friendly language that explained what was happening to their bodies, what was causing their symptoms and what they could do to feel better.