Women's Health Trivia
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99 free Women's Health trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Women's health is a subject most people think they know until someone asks the average age of menopause, which cell is the largest in the human body, or why a heart attack in a woman can look nothing like the one in a textbook. This women's health trivia quiz covers the whole territory: the menstrual cycle, pregnancy and childbirth, contraception, breast and cervical cancer screening, hormones, bone health and the conditions like endometriosis and PCOS that affect hundreds of millions of women. There are also questions on the people and milestones behind modern women's medicine: Elizabeth Blackwell, Virginia Apgar and her napkin, Georgios Papanikolaou's smear test, the pill's approval in 1960, Louise Brown's birth in 1978 and the Women's Health Initiative. The set runs from easy questions for a health class or awareness-month event to expert ones for nurses, midwives and medical students. Every answer was checked against medical and encyclopaedic reference pages before publishing, and each question carries a citation you can follow.
30 of 99 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the median length of the human menstrual cycle?
28 days
28 days is the median, and the classic birth control pill pack is built around it: three weeks of hormone pills, then a week off or on blank pills.
Q 02Menopause is confirmed only once a woman has gone how long without a period?
One year
One year without a period is the test, so menopause can only be dated in hindsight; in the United States it arrives in a woman's early fifties on average.
Q 03In which country was the first baby conceived by in vitro fertilisation born, in 1978?
England
England: Louise Brown was born in Oldham even though Britain's Medical Research Council had refused to fund the research, which a private donation kept alive.
Q 04Which birth control campaigner, by then in her seventies, found the backers who got the first contraceptive pill developed?
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger found biologist Gregory Pincus in 1951, brought in heiress Katharine McCormick to pay for his research, and lived to see the FDA approve the pill as a contraceptive in 1960.
Q 05Who was the first woman to earn a US medical degree, at Geneva Medical College in 1849?
Elizabeth Blackwell
Elizabeth Blackwell got in only because the faculty put her admission to a vote of the male students, who said yes as a joke; in 1857 she founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children.
Q 06The doctor who devised the ten-point newborn health check in 1952 practised which specialty?
Anesthesiology
Anesthesiology: she had trained as a surgeon, but her mentor steered her into the young specialty, warning that the women surgeons he had trained struggled to make a living.
Q 07Which newborn check, scored out of 10 at one and five minutes after birth, is named after the doctor who devised it?
The Apgar score
The Apgar score is a surname, not an acronym: a Denver resident turned Virginia Apgar's name into the memory aid Appearance, Pulse, Grimace, Activity, Respiration about a decade later.
Q 08The Pap smear used to screen for cervical cancer is named after a physician of which nationality?
Greek
Greek-born Georgios Papanikolaou reported in 1928 that cancer cells could be spotted in vaginal smears, but the finding went largely unnoticed until he published again in the 1940s.
Q 09Almost all cases of cervical cancer are linked to infection with which virus?
Human papillomavirus
Human papillomavirus is so common that almost all sexually active people catch it at some point; the immune system usually clears it, and only a persistent infection can lead to cancer.
Q 10Which vaccine, approved in 2006, was the first to protect against the virus behind most cervical cancers?
Gardasil
Gardasil began as a three-dose course, but in 2022 the World Health Organization's advisers concluded that a single dose gives comparable protection.
Q 11Which condition affects about one in ten women of reproductive age, often causing severe period pain and taking years to diagnose?
Endometriosis
Endometriosis, in which tissue like the womb's lining grows elsewhere in the body, is slow to be diagnosed partly because severe period pain is so often dismissed as normal.
Q 12Which condition is the most common hormonal disorder in women of reproductive age?
Polycystic ovary syndrome
Polycystic ovary syndrome was given a new name in 2026, partly because its 'cysts' are not true cysts but egg follicles that have stopped growing.
Q 13About 90% of ectopic pregnancies implant in which part of the body?
Fallopian tube
Q 21Which organ takes its name from the Latin word for a flat cake?
The placenta
The placenta was named by the 16th-century Italian anatomist Realdo Colombo, who called it a 'uterine cake' because of its round, flat shape.
Q 22The human uterus is usually described as being the shape of which fruit?
A pear
A pear, turned upside down and roughly the size of a fist; by the end of pregnancy it has stretched to many times that size.
Q 23Which human cell is among the body's largest, at about a tenth of a millimetre across?
The ovum
The ovum is thought never to be replaced: a girl is born with her eggs already formed, and their number falls as she gets older.
Fallopian tube: as the embryo grows it can burst the tube and cause major internal bleeding, which is why an ectopic pregnancy is treated as an emergency.
Q 14Which pregnancy complication is marked by new high blood pressure and protein in the urine, usually after 20 weeks?
Pre-eclampsia
Pre-eclampsia has no cure while the pregnancy lasts; symptoms usually ease once the baby is born, so in serious cases doctors bring the delivery forward.
Q 15Gestational diabetes usually goes away after the birth but raises the mother's later risk of which condition?
Type 2 diabetes
Type 2 diabetes: the pregnancy hormones that make the body less able to use insulin are gone after the birth, but the mother stays more likely to develop type 2 later in life.
Q 16Folic acid is taken in pregnancy mainly to reduce the risk of which group of birth abnormalities?
Neural tube defects
Neural tube defects such as spina bifida arise in the first weeks of pregnancy, often before a woman knows she is pregnant, which is why folic acid is added to bread and cereals.
Q 17Which hormone drives contractions in childbirth and triggers the release of milk during breastfeeding?
Oxytocin
Oxytocin works by positive feedback: each contraction signals the brain to release more of it, which makes the next contractions stronger and more frequent.
Q 18What name is given to the irregular 'practice' contractions that can start weeks before real labour?
Braxton Hicks contractions
Braxton Hicks contractions, described by an English doctor of that name in 1872, can be mistaken for labour but usually fade with rest and a drink of water.
Q 19The first milk a mother produces in the days after delivery, rich in antibodies, is called what?
Colostrum
Colostrum is thick, golden yellow and so concentrated that a newborn, whose digestive system is still tiny, needs only a very small amount at each feed.
Q 20Which condition, affecting at least one in ten new mothers, is suspected when low mood lasts beyond two weeks after a birth?
Postpartum depression
Postpartum depression is not only a mother's illness: fathers and partners can develop depression after a baby arrives too.
Q 24A surge in which hormone triggers ovulation, the release of an egg from the ovary?
Luteinizing hormone
Luteinizing hormone is what home ovulation tests look for in urine: a positive result means an egg should be released within the next day or so.
Q 25Home pregnancy tests work by detecting which hormone in urine?
Human chorionic gonadotropin
Human chorionic gonadotropin appears only once a fertilised egg has attached to the wall of the womb, so finding it in urine signals a pregnancy; levels then climb fast for about ten weeks.
Q 26The 'meno' in menopause comes from the Greek word for what?
Month
Month: French doctors coined the word in the early 19th century from the Greek for 'month' and 'a cessation'; English speakers had been calling it the change of life.
Q 27Which protein does a woman's skin lose about 30% of in the first five years after menopause?
Collagen
Collagen keeps skin firm, so its sudden fall as hormone levels drop at menopause is why skin can turn thinner, slacker and quicker to wrinkle.
Q 28Heavy periods are a common cause of a deficiency in which mineral?
Iron
Iron is lost with blood, so women aged 19 to 50 are advised to get 18 mg a day, more than twice the 8 mg recommended from 51 onwards.
Q 29The menopause drug Premarin is made from hormones in the urine of which pregnant animals?
Horses
Horses: Premarin's estrogens are still purified from pregnant mares' urine, and it was the pill tested in the Women's Health Initiative, whose 2002 results led many women to give up hormone therapy.
Q 30Which agency launched the Women's Health Initiative, a study of postmenopausal women, in 1991?
The NIH
The NIH set it up partly to test whether hormone therapy protected older women's hearts; instead the combined-pill trial was stopped early in 2002 after showing more heart problems, strokes and breast cancers.