The Women’s Health Topic Map: A Foundation for the Questions and Innovations That Matter

***This article was originally published on the CEPS (Centre for European Policy Studies) website.

Women’s health has long been under-explored, 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.

Why a Topic Map?

The Topic Map is a visual tool that helps us to:

• Capture the breadth and interconnectedness of women’s health, spanning medical, social, and economic dimensions.
• Identify key actors and orphan issues, revealing who is working where, and which areas remain underserved or overlooked.
• Provide a framework to guide innovation, placing innovation at the core of the 100 Questions approach.
• Take stock of the field today, offering a baseline view of where women’s health stands and where it needs to go next.

How we created It

The draft map was kept deliberately broad to ensure the full breadth of women’s health was captured as all these aspects can have implications for innovation.

We began with an in-person workshop at CEPS annual Ideas Lab event with a smaller group of bilinguals, then refined the map with feedback from the full cohort. The final version organises women’s health into four main categories:

• Key domains
• Research and evidence gaps
• Technology and innovation
• Determinants and barriers

Each of these four categories branches into more detailed subtopics, building a comprehensive web of the field.

What it offers

The Topic Map gives us a gestalt view of women’s health innovation, a big-picture lens that helps identify priorities, gaps, and opportunities. It also supports the process of matching the right experts to the right areas, ensuring the bilinguals can cover the full spectrum of women’s health.

Most importantly, the women’s health innovation branch of the map is the foundation for shaping the questions that will guide future research and investment.

Explore the map

You can explore the Topic Map on the HELIX website, along with a narrative document that provides a deeper dive into the categories, branches, and subtopics.

This is just the starting point. By mapping the field, we’ve built the foundation for identifying the questions that matter most and for sparking the innovations women’s health urgently needs. Stay tuned for the top ten questions identified!