Women continue to experience a significant health gap, typically influenced by access to treatment, effectiveness of treatment and available resources dedicated to understanding health conditions, with wide-ranging human and economic implications. To contribute in narrowing the women’s health gap, the Global Centre for Asian Women’s Health (GloW), under the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine) will take over the hosting and enhancement of the Women’s Health Impact Tracking (WHIT) platform, a first‑of‑its‑kind, publicly accessible tool which measures progress on closing the women’s health gap across a set of conditions and countries.
The WHIT platform—initiated and developed by the World Economic Forum (WEF), in collaboration with the McKinsey Health Institute (MHI)—consolidates and translates complex datasets into clear, comparative insights. It supports decision-making across clinical and public health agencies, research institutions, advocacy groups, and funding bodies. Highlighting conditions that uniquely or predominantly affect women, it identifies where needs are greatest and where care delivery, clinical effectiveness, or data quality require closer attention. By comparing disease burden with current investment patterns, WHIT helps to identify under-resourced areas. It complements major datasets such as the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) and WHO mortality data, offering a consolidated view of gaps and opportunities at global and national levels.
Research by the WEF and MHI indicates that closing the women’s health gap could yield substantial benefits, including improvements in quality of life and productivity. Earlier analyses estimate that narrowing the gap could add up to US$1 trillion to the global economy annually by 2040[1]. These findings underpin The Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap, which outlines the global actions needed to advance women’s health—and which provides the foundation for the creation of WHIT, as a tool to measure progress against this agenda.
Professor Chong Yap Seng, Lien Ying Chow Professor in Medicine, and Dean of NUS Medicine, said, “As stewards for the WHIT platform, NUS Medicine will build on its already strong foundations so that the platform can serve as a high quality, long-term resource for policymakers, clinicians, researchers, and the public. Advancing women’s health requires coordinated, international effort—to ensure that the issues affecting women are measured consistently and understood more clearly.”
Moving forward, WHIT will further broaden its condition coverage, improve data quality, strengthen participation from countries—particularly low- and middle-income regions—and deepen use cases for stakeholders across disciplines. The aim is to establish a comprehensive and long-term data/information platform that enhances accountability and supports coordinated action on major health conditions among women. It will continue to support leaders across sectors in building a future where women’s health is understood, prioritised, and improved worldwide.
Professor Cuilin Zhang, Director of GloW, NUS Medicine, said, “Improving women’s health requires sustained attention to the conditions that affect us most, risk factors that lead to the conditions, effective methods that treat the conditions, and factors that shape our access to screening, diagnosis, and care. WHIT brings these issues into focus by organising information and data in a way that is accessible, understandable, transparent, and actionable. We aim to extend its reach so that countries and partners can make better-informed decisions to support women’s health across diverse landscapes. Maintaining and lifting the platform would require tremendous, joint efforts from multiple disciplines in our ecosystem—involving epidemiologists, clinicians, data scientists, economists, and more. We welcome partners and collaborators.”
[1] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Closing_the_Women’s_Health_Gap_2024.pdf