The Initiative
The Women's Health Research Standard™
Establishing the quality standard for women’s health research — improving the evidence, data, and policies that drive better health outcomes for women worldwide.
The Challenge
A critical gap in research infrastructure
Women experience a disproportionate burden of chronic, complex conditions. Yet the evidence base guiding their care remains incomplete, inconsistent, and often built on assumptions derived from male physiology.
The consequence is an evidence base full of gaps, and clinicians, researchers, and women themselves making decisions based on research that is not applicable to them.
No universal quality standard exists. Our goal is to improve evidence, policy, education, and investment in a single systems-level move.
Conditions with inadequate evidence
The Solution
A research quality assessment and standards framework
The Women's Health Research Standard™ was developed and peer-reviewed in partnership with a global consortium of women's health experts and research institutions. It operates across three core domains — transforming principles such as considering sex as a biological variable from aspirational policy into assessable, scalable practice.
Inclusion
Representation and characterization of female subjects across the full research lifecycle — preclinical through clinical.
Methodology
Study design, analysis, and interpretation that accounts for female biology, hormonal variables, and sex-specific factors.
Outcomes
Measured outcomes that are meaningful, relevant, and directly applicable to women's healthcare decisions and quality of life.
What the Standard Makes Possible
A standard is only as good as what it changes.
Sets the benchmark
Defines what constitutes high-quality, applicable women's health research — a standard that does not currently exist anywhere in the world.
Audits existing research
Applies the Standard to the current body of women's health literature to evaluate quality and population applicability — revealing gaps and guiding remediation.
Improves prospective research
Evaluates future research against the Standard before funding decisions, ensuring public and private investment flows to the highest-quality projects.
Curates a rated evidence base
Builds a scored body of evidence that directly informs medical education, clinical guidelines, health policy, and research investment.
The end goal is policy integration, education reform, and a global adoption pathway — working across the health system and across sectors, so that what counts as adequate evidence for women changes everywhere it is decided.
Six Connected Arms
The Reviewer AI is the first piece to reach the public — the Standard made usable.
The Standard
The framework for assessing the quality of women's health research — Inclusion, Methodology, Outcomes.
The Platform
The Reviewer AI: the Standard, applied. Any researcher or clinician can score a paper in minutes.
Certified Research
A pathway for labs and studies to be evaluated and recognized against the Standard.
Researcher Training
Education and certification so the next generation designs studies that account for female biology from the start.
The Evidence Base
A structured, quality-scored database — the reference layer the field has never had.
Policy & Reform
Turning the evidence into standards that funders, journals, and health systems adopt.
Who Is Behind the Standard
Built across disciplines. Designed to hold up in any of them.
The WHRS™ framework was built with an international consortium of women's health researchers, physicians, and scientists — spanning medical oncology, obstetrics and gynecology, menopause medicine, psychiatry, surgery, primary care, palliative care, nutrition science, integrative and functional medicine, neuropsychophysiology, epidemiology, emergency response, and public health.
That breadth is deliberate. Women's health is not a single specialty, and the gaps in the evidence base surface differently in an oncology trial than in a psychiatric study or a surgical outcome. A standard built across disciplines is one that holds up in any of them.
The consortium brings together people who both conduct research and treat patients — so the Standard reflects not only what rigorous evidence should look like, but what clinicians actually need it to answer.