Report by Roshni Singh, Stefaan Verhulst and Cosima Lenz: “Women’s health has long been underexplored, fragmented, and too often reduced to a narrow set of issues like reproductive or maternal care. Yet women’s health spans a much broader spectrum—from chronic disease and mental health to the social and economic barriers that shape outcomes. Despite its vastness and centrality to human wellbeing, there has never been a comprehensive map that captures the full range of issues, actors, and gaps across the field.
Such a map matters. Without it, we risk overlooking key questions that have not yet been answered (orphan issues) or proritized or missing opportunities to align research and innovation. Topic mapping provides a systematic way to capture the complexity of women’s health, reveal its interconnectedness, and point to where innovation is most urgently needed. It also helps surface the different actors working across the ecosystem, enabling more strategic collaborations.
Today, we release the first version of the Women’s Health Topic Map.
The Topic Map is part of 100 Questions initiative under the Gates-funded R&I project, where CEPS and The GovLab have teamed up to ask: what are the most important questions that could truly advance women’s health innovation?
Before answering that, we first needed to map the field of women’s health itself. To build this foundation, we convened 77 “bilinguals” — experts working at the intersection of women’s health and research or data—who helped us create the first-ever Topic Map of women’s health.
You can explore the Topic Map on our HELIX website, along with a narrative document that provides a deeper dive into the categories, branches, and subtopics…(More)”.
