What are the key questions that, if answered, could advance Women’s Health innovation?

Launch of the 100 Questions Initiative for Woman’s Health Innovation

The GovLab and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), with support from The Gates Foundation, are pleased to announce the launch of a new domain within The 100 Questions Initiative: Women’s Health Innovation. The 100 Questions Initiative seeks to identify and prioritize the most pressing, data-actionable questions that can advance evidence-based policy making, and research on societal issues.

This joint effort builds on The GovLab’s broader mission to reimagine how we ask and prioritize questions in an age defined by data and artificial intelligence—fostering a New Science of Questions that promotes democratic participation, informed decision-making, and impact-driven knowledge generation. This initiative is based on research funded by the Gates Foundation. 

Why Questions Matter More Than Ever

Questions are the foundation of insight and progress, yet societies often overlook how they are formulated and prioritized—especially in the context of rapidly evolving technologies and global challenges. In an era marked by both unprecedented data availability and growing mis- and disinformation, asking the right questions is more important than ever.

Introducing the Women’s Health Innovation Domain

The 100 Questions Initiative will now turn its attention to an urgent and historically underfunded area: Women’s Health Innovation. 

This domain will explore a myriad of issues under the women's health innovation umbrella ranging from, sexual and reproductive health, chronic and autoimmune diseases, mental health, cancer, aging, AI, and technological evolution. Through this joint initiative, we aim to identify key research and policy questions, assess the availability of relevant data, and engage global experts to drive meaningful, data-informed progress in the women’s health innovation space. 

This joint venture will build upon and complement existing work on advancing women's health including the Women’s Health Opportunity Map. Additionally, we seek to develop recommendations on women's health innovation for EU institutions to guide strategic priorities and funding approaches in view of forthcoming EU funding programming inclusive of research and innovation. This new domain responds to a clear and growing need: to better understand, address, and invest in women’s health innovation through targeted, data-informed inquiry. Despite important progress, major gaps remain in funding, research, and policy attention. Closing these gaps requires asking better questions—questions that align with real-world challenges and opportunities for progress.

What’s Next

Through our structured methodology, we will:

• Build a topic map that captures the scope of the women’s health innovation landscape.

• Recruit and engage a community of bilinguals—experts in both women’s health and data science—from across sectors and geographies.

• Source and refine a long list of questions, cluster them, and distill them into a prioritized set of ten critical questions.

• Open up the final questions for global public voting, followed by a workshop to co-develop recommendations for research, policy, and funding.

CEPS will play a key role in ensuring the European and international relevance of the final questions, and in disseminating the outcomes to guide evidence-based action across governments, NGOs, funders, and researchers.

About the 100 Questions Initiative

The 100 Questions Initiative is designed to surface the most impactful questions that can be answered with data—questions that can drive actionable insights, policy innovation, and resource allocation. The initiative leverages a unique participatory methodology that includes:

• Topic Mapping to identify key issues in a domain using The GovLab’s R-Search method.

• Engaging “Bilinguals”—experts with both domain and data expertise—to generate impactful, data-relevant questions.

• Classifying Questions using The GovLab’s taxonomy (descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive).

• Clustering and Prioritizing questions based on scientific and practical relevance, novelty, feasibility, and quality.

• Public Voting to democratize final question selection.

• Recommendations Workshops to translate findings into actionable strategies and policy pathways.

Since its launch in 2019, the initiative has catalyzed progress in diverse domains including Migration, Gender, Air Quality, Disinformation, Urban Mobility, and more. For example, findings from the Urban Mobility domain led to the development of a Regional Data Hub in Latin America, directly influencing mobility policies across the region.

Join Us

We invite researchers, policymakers, innovators, and practitioners to be part of this effort. If you’re interested in contributing to the Women’s Health Innovation domain—either as a bilingual or by supporting dissemination—please reach out.

Together, we can ensure that the questions driving women’s health research and innovation are as bold, inclusive, and actionable as the solutions we seek.

To learn more about the 100 Questions methodology, read here.