UC Berkeley launches pioneering Women’s Health & Performance Center

The University of California, Berkeley has launched a first-of-its-kind Women’s Health & Performance Initiative to bridge the gender divide in health and performance research. The multi-year project will initially involve only women athletes at the university but will soon include other academic institutions, amateur and professional sports organizations and female athletes at all levels of sports. “In the world of athletics today, there exists a significant disparity between health outcomes for male and female athletes,” says UC Berkeley President Emeritus Janet Napolitano, adding that research has collected large swaths of data on men athletes but not women. “One of the primary reasons for this is the underlying disparity between men and women in sports.”