Geronimus first proposed the weathering hypothesis in a 1992 paper on the health of Black women and infants. She found that Black women's birth outcomes worsened as they moved from their teens into their twenties, while white women's did not. She argued that repeated stress was aging their bodies faster. A 2006 study she led found that Black adults had higher allostatic load, a measure of stress on the body's systems, than white adults at every age, even among those who were not poor.
Weathering helps explain why education and income do not close the racial gap in health. A college-educated Black woman faces a higher risk of pregnancy-related death than a white woman who did not finish high school. That finding comes from a 2019 CDC analysis of 2007 to 2016 data.
The gap is large. In 2023, Black women in the US died from maternal causes at a rate of 50.3 per 100,000 live births, more than three times the white rate of 14.5, according to the CDC. Geronimus expanded the concept in her 2023 book Weathering.