Menopause affects all women, yet it is rarely measured. As stewardship of the Women’s Health Impact Tracking (WHIT) platform transitions to the Global Centre for Asian Women’s Health (GloW) at the National University of Singapore’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine — enabling expanded coverage of conditions, broader country participation, and deeper use by policymakers, researchers, employers, and clinicians - open-access data is helping make menopause visible, measurable, and actionable, offering a pathway to close persistent gaps in women’s health.
For women who live long enough, menopause is a universal life stage with measurable implications for health outcomes, workforce participation, and wellbeing. Yet, it remains under-measured, underfunded, and often invisible in global health datasets – making the true burden difficult to assess. This reflects a broader women’s health gap: while women live longer than men on average, they spend 25% more of their lives in poor health, driven by persistent gaps in research, care delivery, and data. The Women’s Health Impact Tracking (WHIT) platform, the world’s first publicly accessible tool designed to measure progress toward closing this gap, helps make these disparities visible and actionable. WHIT operationalizes the broader agenda outlined in the Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap, translating principles into measurable indicators that enable accountability and action across conditions and countries. Originally developed by the World Economic Forum in collaboration with the McKinsey Health Institute, WHIT has been shaped with input from more than 70 global experts and is designed to quantify progress on women’s health outcomes across conditions and countries. In January 2026, stewardship of WHIT transitioned to the Global Centre for Asian Women’s Health (GloW) at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore, marking a strategic shift toward expanded data coverage, broader national participation, and deeper use by policymakers, researchers, and clinical leaders.
At its core, WHIT tracks three key drivers that underpin women’s health disparities:
• Efficacy — whether health interventions work for women
• Care delivery — whether women can access interventions
• Data quality — whether we are measuring what matters
Together, these pillars provide a structured lens to identify where women’s health systems are working—and where critical gaps persist.
Menopause is one of the conditions studied in the WHIT dataset. Filtering by menopause on the platform reveals persistent shortcomings in both menopause care and treatment. Globally, menopause-related guidelines frequently fall short of best practices of care and only ~7% of countries assessed have formal workplace guidance on menopause – highlighting gaps beyond healthcare delivery, extending into employment policy and system-wide support. With the transition of WHIT to NUS Medicine, more countries will be studied, with the potential to expand country coverage over time, and improve visibility of menopause-related workplace policies. WHIT also highlights fundamental challenges in data quality. Prevalence estimates for menopause vary by as much as 90% across data sources, underscoring the limitations of inconsistent measurement and the need for standardized, comparable data.
These gaps matter. Women spend about 25% more of their lives in poor health than men and closing that gap could unlock over $1 trillion in economic value annually by 2040. Accurate measurement is a prerequisite for closing that gap—particularly for conditions like menopause that have historically been overlooked.
For menopause specifically, broader research underscores the health and economic implications of better measurement and care. Globally, more than one billion women are experiencing perimenopause, menopause, or post-menopause, with over 60 symptoms such as hot flashes, sleep disturbance, and cognitive effects, symptoms that can affect quality of life, workforce participation, and family wellbeing.
By bringing menopause, and other conditions, into measurable view, WHIT helps policymakers, employers, clinicians, and advocates shift from anecdote to evidence. That means tailored health strategies, targeted investments, and accountable reporting systems that ensure women’s health is no longer sidelined but central to global health progress.
As WHIT enters its next phase under new stewardship, the global community has a renewed tool not just to track progress, but to drive it. Making menopause measurable enables more effective policy design, better-aligned investments, and improved health and economic outcomes for women worldwide.
