Women's Health Innovation in the Nordics Starts With the Data | Blush & Bloom Podcast | Ep. 60

On this week's Blush & Bloom, Gigi Kenneth sits down with Sara Al-Dafaee, CEO and co-founder of Nordic Women's Health Hub, a nonprofit NGO based in Copenhagen. The hub calls itself the red thread of women's health innovation in the Nordics, connecting startups, researchers and policymakers who have often worked in separate rooms. Sara brings a commercial and business background to that work, and a long-running focus on AI bias and the gender data gap in healthcare.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• How Nordic Women's Health Hub grew from a group of volunteers into a structured organisation
• The hub's four pillars: innovation, knowledge, advocacy and partnerships
• How Sara gets researchers, policymakers and founders to listen to each other
• Why AI in healthcare depends on the data behind it, and what is missing for women
• Women's health data, privacy and the role of trust in Danish society
• How women's health founders can use AI in their work, critically
• The gaps that remain in the Nordics, and what's next for the hub
• The Danish idea of "ice in your stomach", and what Sara would tell her fifteen-year-old self

What is Nordic Women's Health Hub?

Nordic Women's Health Hub is a nonprofit NGO in Copenhagen that connects everyone working to advance women's health in the Nordics. It started as a movement of passionate volunteers who saw strong Nordic research and startups with no shared platform. Its work runs through four pillars: innovation, knowledge, advocacy and partnerships, designed to break down silos between them.

From volunteers to a movement

Sara joined three co-founders and took on the job of turning a fast-growing initiative into an organisation. The volunteer team grew from twenty to thirty-five in a short time, and was regrouped into operational work and strategic pillars so everyone had a clear role. She compares the earlier stage to everyone building a different part of a house; the structure brought them back to one shared plan.

Being the bridge between research, policy and startups

Sara sees her role as creating a shared language. As she puts it, "researchers they speak data, policymakers speak policy, and founders speak product". Each group works toward the same goal from a different angle, and her approach is simple: meet specialists with respect, and listen first so they listen back.

Why is AI bias a women's health issue?

AI systems learn from existing data, and much of medical research has been built around men as the default. If that data goes into AI models without accounting for who is missing, the tools risk repeating the gap. Sara argues the priority is accurate, representative data, including patient feedback and the experiences of women from minority backgrounds.

Her turning point came in 2022, on a trip through South Korea and Japan, when she first thought technology could solve every problem in healthcare. Her research back home changed her mind: "It's not about the technology, it's about the input. So technology is just the tool and the fuel is the data, and we need accurate data."

How can women trust health tech with their data?

Sara says the answer depends on where you live. In the Nordics, she sees caution around sharing data, partly because Danish society runs on high trust in institutions, and broken trust is hard to rebuild. Elsewhere, some period-tracking and health apps have shared women's data in ways that damaged trust. She suggests asking a sharper question: is the fear about sharing data, or about who uses it and how? She would like the Nordics to show that data can be used ethically, in ways that respect the women who provide it.

Where are the gaps in the Nordics?

The Nordics have strong gender policies, yet Sara says women's health is still underfunded and under-researched, especially when startups need larger funding rounds. As she puts it, "equality on paper doesn't mean equality in practice". She also points to reproductive health beyond fertility and the needs of minority women as areas that need more attention.

Ice in your stomach

Sara closes with a Danish saying that translates as "ice in your stomach": staying calm and patient when the work is hard. It will melt, she says, and you refreeze it, keeping the bigger vision in view. Her note to her fifteen-year-old self: achievement alone won't bring satisfaction, so know why you do what you do.

FAQ

Who is Sara Al-Dafaee? Sara Al-Dafaee is CEO and co-founder of Nordic Women's Health Hub, a Copenhagen-based nonprofit NGO. She has a commercial and business background and speaks on AI bias, the gender data gap and systemic change in women's health.

What does Nordic Women's Health Hub do? It connects startups, researchers, policymakers and partners across the Nordics through four pillars: innovation, knowledge, advocacy and partnerships, with events, research and an ecosystem map of women's health actors.

What is the gender data gap in healthcare? It is the shortage of medical data on women, because research has long treated men as the default. Sara argues AI tools trained on that data risk carrying the gap forward.

Should women share their health data? Sara suggests understanding who you share data with and how it will be used. Large, ethically handled datasets on women can improve research and care.

Listen and connect

Listen to the full conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. Follow Sara on LinkedIn and explore Nordic Women's Health Hub. For more conversations, visit the Blush and Bloom podcast hub, including Ep. 57 on funding women's health startups and Ep. 53 on community building in FemTech, and track your own health with the Asele app.

This episode is for general informational purposes and does not constitute medical, legal, or regulatory advice.