Healthcare Professionals Form First-of-Its-Kind Women’s Health AI Consortium

In a major step forward for female medicine, Willow Innovations Inc. (Willow) and Ema EQ have established the Women’s Health AI Consortium, the first industry entity focused on creating shared benchmarks, ethical standards, and transparent evaluation frameworks for artificial intelligence (AI) in women’s health needs.

Women’s health technology has historically been underserved, underfunded, and misunderstood, leaving 50% of the population the last to receive adequate clinical attention and the first to encounter AI tools built on incomplete data, deployed without sufficient oversight, and validated against benchmarks that were never designed with them in mind, according to Consortium creators. The Women’s Health AI Consortium was formed to close that gap before this usage becomes the default.

“Women’s health AI is moving at a pace that demands immediate, coordinated accountability,” Willow CEO Sarah O’Leary said. “This Consortium gives the industry a clear, shared standard—one that is built on evidence, reflects lived experience, and holds every tool accountable to the women it serves.”

The Consortium’s governance framework is organized around six core commitments:

• Ethical and safety standards
• Bias reduction and cultural integrity
• Emotional and clinical quality at scale
• Contextual and longitudinal intelligence
• Mentorship for ethical AI builders
• Transparent oversight and continuous improvement

The initiative is designed to benefit the broader female health AI ecosystem by giving women and the companies serving them greater confidence in the tools they encounter through shared expectations for quality and trustworthiness. For organizations developing or deploying AI in women’s health, it offers clearer reference points for design, validation, and procurement, helping connect innovation to the way trustworthy women’s health AI manifests in practice, and supporting cohesion across the field rather than fragmentation.

“At Ema, we have seen firsthand how AI can transform women’s health outcomes, but only when it is built right,” Ema EQ CEO Amanda Ducach stated. “We co-founded this Consortium because the stakes are too high to leave standards to chance. Women deserve AI that is clinically safe, culturally aware, and designed with them, not just for them.”

The Women’s Health AI Consortium is governed by a multidisciplinary board of clinicians, technologists, ethicists, and health innovators, including O’Leary; Ducach; Ema Chief Science Officer Morgan Rose; Audrey Tsang, board member and former CEO at Clue; Ethan Cowan, Ph.D., in history and philosophy of science and technology; Tanvi Jayaraman, M.D., clinical lead at Oura; and Carrot Fertility Chief Medical Officer Asima Ahmad, M.D. Jennifer Yoo, a partner at Latham & Watkins, serves as a board observer.

With the Consortium’s formation, AI tools are now expected to meet accuracy benchmarks, contribute data that helps close women’s health gaps, and remain transparent about their data sources. Tools should be honest with users about their limitations and built to reflect the full reality of women’s lives.

The Women’s Health AI Consortium aims to close the gap between the pace of AI development and the standards that guide it. Models currently are trained on data that under-represent women and without clinical review. The Consortium, established by clinicians, technologists, ethicists, and regulators, is developing the first shared benchmarks and governance framework for AI that serves women’s health.