Our Vision
Where every woman wields the power to make informed health decisions.
Our Mission
We will champion and deliver evidence-based education, forge powerful partnerships and amplify advocacy efforts, all to ensure that every woman is equipped with the knowledge to confidently navigate her health journey.
Our Values
Inclusivity: WHEN is for every woman. We exist because women’s health has been underfunded, underresearched, and underexplained for too long. That is the gap we are here to fill.
WHEN is also for everyone whose health journey intersects with female anatomy. We understand that people identify in many different ways. Whatever brings you here, you are welcome.
Excellence: Excellence at WHEN means rigour, honesty about uncertainty, and actively seeking to be challenged. We name the gaps in the evidence. We update our work when new research demands it. We put the woman at the centre, not the diagnosis or the commercial interest.
That is the standard we hold ourselves to.
Integrity: Integrity at WHEN means walking a difficult line. When the evidence is clear, we say so. When it is limited, contested, or simply absent, we say that too. The absence of evidence does not make something safe. It also does not make it harmful. Women deserve to know when we are in that territory, not be handed a confident answer that the research cannot yet support.
Compassion: Life is messy. Caring responsibilities, cost, time, careers, and circumstances all shape what is possible for women in real life. WHEN understands that the gap between what women are told to do and what is actually possible is real.
We do not judge women for where they are. We meet them there.
WHEN’s Strategic Plan
Our DNA
Most women’s health information was not built with women in mind. It was built around specific diagnoses, clinical outcomes, and life stages that do not represent every woman’s experience. The gaps that remain get filled with misinformation, and women pay the price.
WHEN was built to change that. We are an Australian not-for-profit producing clinician-led, evidence-based health education across every stage of a woman’s life. Our content is presented in written, visual, and audio formats in plain language so every woman can find what works for her.
Education
Too many things that happen to women’s bodies have been normalised, dismissed, or left unexplained. Leaking when you sneeze. Pain with sex. Exhaustion that goes beyond tiredness. Changes during pregnancy that nobody mentioned. Symptoms in menopause that were never named. Women have been expected to tolerate these things, or find the answers themselves in a system that has not always prioritised them.
WHEN covers these topics. Directly, honestly, and in plain language. Our education is clinically reviewed, free, and accessible to every woman regardless of where she lives or what she can afford.
Network
The word Network in our name is deliberate.
In healthcare, women often receive information in silos. A specialist for one condition. A different professional for another. Rarely does the full picture come together in one place.
WHEN works differently. We bring together professionals from across medicine, nursing, midwifery, allied health, exercise physiology, fitness, clinical psychology, pharmacy, research and beyond, and we ask them all to look at the same woman. Then we build the full picture from what they know collectively.
Our Miscarriage Project is a clear example. We drew on more than 40 contributors, from obstetricians and GPs through to optometrists, podiatrists, hairdressers and dietitians, because miscarriage affects the whole body and the whole life. Hair changes after pregnancy loss. Eyes change. Feet change. A specialist in each of those areas has something important to add.
That is what a network means to us. Not a list of credentials. A different way of doing women’s health.
Clinical Governance
Anyone can publish health information online. There is no requirement to have that information checked by anyone else, no requirement to declare a commercial interest, and no accountability when something turns out to be wrong. A single person, qualified or not, can reach millions of women with advice that has never been reviewed by another set of eyes.
This is how misinformation spreads. This is also how women end up buying programs and supplements built on claims that have never been tested.
WHEN works differently. Our clinical team develops the evidence base behind every project and pillar on this site. That evidence base is then reviewed by a separate Clinical Governance Committee before any content is published. The people who develop the content are not the same people who sign it off. That separation is deliberate. It is where the accountability sits.
The committee also oversees our focus groups, ensuring that the way we listen to women is held to the same standard as the way we report to them.
The committee draws on expertise from across medicine, nursing, allied health, research, lived experience and health information, and its membership evolves as our work does.
Video made possible by Caitlin Crean
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WHEN is a women’s health organisation working to educate all women across Australia to give them the power to make decisions to live and age well through exercise and movement.