Building global infrastructure for women’s health data

2025 was a transformative year for the World Economic Forum and its Global Alliance for Women’s Health. One key outcome was the Women’s Health Impact Tracking platform (WHIT), which was built to answer a simple, high-stakes question: are we making real progress in closing the women’s health gap, and where should action go next?

Developed by the Alliance in collaboration with the McKinsey Health Institute, WHIT is a first-of-its-kind, publicly accessible tool created to support the agenda set out in the Forum’s Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap: How to Improve Lives and Economies for All white paper.

The blueprint made the case that closing the women’s health gap is both a moral imperative and a growth strategy. WHIT helps translate that case into measurable progress by tracking key indicators across conditions and countries.

Now, WHIT is entering its next phase. In a major milestone for the global measurement infrastructure behind the Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap agenda, WHIT is being transitioned to its new host: the Global Centre for Asian Women’s Health (GloW) at the National University of Singapore Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine (NUS Medicine).

Incubated at the Forum and shaped through consultations with 70-plus experts, WHIT will benefit from expert stewardship at NUS Medicine to scale its reach, develop metrics for more conditions and more countries, and strengthen its long-term impact.

Women still face a persistent health gap, spending 25% more of their lives in poorer health than men, despite making up half the world’s population. The human and economic costs are no longer ignorable.

An earlier report from the Forum and McKinsey Health Institute estimated that closing the women’s health gap could boost the global economy by at least $1 trillion a year by 2040, while improving health and quality of life for millions.

Building on that work, the blueprint examined nine conditions that together drive about one-third of the women’s health gap: breast cancer, cervical cancer, menopause, endometriosis, premenstrual syndrome (PMS), post-partum haemorrhage, maternal hypertensive disorder, migraine and ischaemic heart disease.

Closing the gap for these nine conditions alone could add approximately 27 million disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) annually, equivalent to 2.5 additional healthy days per woman per year and deliver $400 billion in annual global GDP by 2040, the white paper added.

Yet the data points to a core challenge: women’s health priorities remain underfunded and under-measured relative to burden.

For example, PMS, menopause, maternal health conditions, cervical cancer, and endometriosis make up 14% of the women's health burden but receive less than 1% of cumulative research funding (2019–2023) for the 64 conditions driving the women's health gap.

Clinical research gaps deepen the problem. Only 10% of clinical trials for key conditions impacting the health of women report sex-specific data. And while 54% of the women’s health burden is in low- and middle-income countries, only 23% of clinical trials for these nine conditions focus on these regions.

These insights point to the same conclusion: closing the gap requires solutions — and it requires the ability to consistently track whether solutions are working, reaching women, and being measured properly.

WHIT was created to translate the Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap agenda into practice by providing indicators that track progress on closing the women’s health gap globally, across conditions and countries.

At its core, WHIT tracks progress across three drivers of the gap:

This makes WHIT deliberately action-oriented: it helps decision-makers focus on what can be improved, not only what is broken.

Access to clearer, actionable data
WHIT translates complex datasets into accessible, synthesised insights, making women’s health data easier to understand, compare and use. It provides a unified evidence base to inform decisions across policy-making, research, advocacy and funding.

Deeper insight into conditions that matter most
As a first-of-a-kind metrics dashboard focused on conditions that differently affect women, WHIT enables more targeted action on care delivery, effectiveness of medical treatments for women, and data availability. It highlights where the greatest needs and opportunities lie.

Smarter investments through transparency and alignment
By revealing misalignments between disease burden and resourcing, WHIT helps direct funding toward high-impact conditions and geographies. It complements and amplifies existing datasets, including the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) Global Burden of Disease and World Health Organization (WHO) mortality data, enabling governments, businesses and researchers to triangulate insights and monitor progress at global and national levels.

As WHIT moves to NUS Medicine, its next phase will focus on expanding condition coverage beyond the initial nine conditions, improving the quality of data, strengthening participation across countries – particularly in low- and middle-income settings – and deepening use cases for stakeholders across disciplines.

The transition supports three practical priorities:

From pilot to scale
WHIT launched to measure progress on an initial set of conditions and countries. With NUS Medicine as its new host, the platform will expand to more conditions and more geographies, building on an architecture designed for scaling.

Science that can meet policy and investment
WHIT’s focus on efficacy, care delivery and data helps ground decisions in what works for women, what reaches women, and what needs to be measured to accelerate progress.

Transparency and comparability
Stewardship by NUS Medicine helps ensure open access, robust governance and greater visibility among policy-makers, researchers and practitioners, creating the ecosystem for collaborations needed to sustain progress.

The goal is to support ministries of health and partners in adopting shared indicators and improving routine reporting, enabling WHIT to become a long-term, scalable tool that drives accountability and accelerates progress worldwide for women’s health.