Gender Equality
The period questions girls are too embarrassed to ask
Naila Moloo built Periodwise, a free website with quizzes, visual guides and an AI chatbot that explains periods, pain and birth control to girls and young women.
Sarah answers the questions girls are too embarrassed to ask anyone else. She is an AI chatbot, and her tone is adjustable, "because not everyone was raised able to talk about this the same way," Naila Moloo says. Sarah can help visitors find their way through the site and explore questions they might hesitate to ask out loud.
The site is Periodwise, a free website that helps girls and young women understand their periods. It explains how the cycle works, why pain happens, when symptoms are normal and when they signal something more, and what the real options for relief are, natural and medical. Quizzes help visitors explore pain relief and work out which birth control options might suit them. They can also compare methods and more than twenty brands side by side.
“Period pain has been normalised to the point where people assume there is nothing to be done about it. There usually is. The problem is that no one ever told them.”
Naila Moloo
Naila built Periodwise after growing up with severe period pain that was waved off as something she was simply supposed to accept. It took her far too long to learn that there were real questions to ask and real ways to feel better, so she built the resource she wished she had had.
She studies materials engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morehead-Cain Scholar, and built Periodwise with input from OB-GYNs, combining clear explanations with practical tools. One of its newest features, Periodwise Track, lets someone record how they feel after starting a new medication or birth control method through a daily check-in that takes about a minute. It turns those entries into a report they can bring to a doctor.
Naila has published two bestselling novels and plays on the UNC women's squash team. She has been named one of Canada's Top 100 Women, DMZ's Woman of the Year, and the Public Policy Forum's Emerging Leader of the Year.
Periodwise has grown beyond the website. Its ambassador programme gets young people talking about periods across the UK, Canada and the US, and clinicians at Mackenzie Health and The Ottawa Hospital are using it as a resource for patients.