BIRCWH (pronounced “birch”) is an institutional mentored career-development program designed to connect junior faculty to senior faculty with a shared interest in women’s health and sex differences research.

The SCORE program funds and supports Centers of Excellence around the country that serve as vital hubs for research exploring sex differences in health and disease—providing pilot funding, training, and education for researchers. Each center has three interrelated research projects headed by leaders in the field of sex and gender.

The U3 Administrative Supplement Program supports interdisciplinary research focused on intersectionality and health among populations of women that are underrepresented, underserved, and underreported in biomedical research.

The Intersection of Sex and Gender Influences on Health and Disease is NIH’s first investigator-initiated, disease-agnostic R01 funding opportunity on sex and gender. It encourages researchers across many scientific disciplines to examine how factors related to sex and gender intersect with health and disease

Improving maternal health is a priority of ORWH and of NIH as a whole. ORWH co-leads the Implementing a Maternal health and Pregnancy Outcomes Vision for Everyone (IMPROVE) initiative and co-funds multiple IMPROVE research efforts. ORWH plays an important role in the creation and implementation of NIH-wide efforts to improve maternal health outcomes and collaborates with other NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices (ICOs). In 2021, ORWH partnered with the NIH Office of Disease Prevention and other ICOs to deploy the multi-year rigorous process called the “Pathways to Prevention” (P2P) program to assess the current state of the science in maternal and postpartum health and healthcare, and to identify gaps that result in poor health, disease, and death. As part of the P2P process, a report will be generated with recommendations for an action plan to improve health outcomes. 

For further information, please visit the NIH Maternal Morbidity & Mortality Web Portal on the ORWH website.

Spearheaded by ORWH, this landmark NIH policy outlines NIH’s expectation that sex as a biological variable (SABV) will be factored into research designs, analyses, and reporting in vertebrate animal and human studies as scientifically appropriate. ORWH continues to invest in efforts to facilitate the adoption of the SABV policy across the NIH intramural and extramural communities, as well as in the greater scientific community.

Integral to ORWH’s mission to help ensure that women are included in clinical studies, the NIH inclusion policies state NIH’s expectation that applications for research with human subjects will accurately address the inclusion of women, individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic minority populations, and individuals of all ages in all phases of research design and analyses.

Developed in collaboration with NIH institutes, centers, and offices; federal partners and community partners, the NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for Research on the Health of Women established NIH’s plan, strategic goals, and vision for women’s health research from 2024 through 2028.

The Report of the Advisory Committee on Research on Women’s Health: Office of Research on Women’s Health and NIH Support for Research on Women’s Health is a biennial report by the Advisory Committee on Research on Women’s Health (ACRWH) detailing programs and accomplishments from across NIH in the area of women’s health and sex differences research.