The mammalian oviduct is lined by a pseudostratified epithelium comprising two main cell types: secretory cells and ciliated cells. Like many other epithelia, it is thought to also contain a population of stem cell-like progenitors, which are important to maintain tissue homeostasis. Such progenitors are hypothesised to actively divide, to facilitate epithelial regeneration upon wounding and to ensure the tissue remains healthy. However, these cells have remained unidentified. On p. 3031, Pradeep Tanwar and colleagues use lineage tracing in mice to identify the oviductal progenitors as secretory cells expressing the Pax8 marker gene. They show that these cells actively divide in the oviductal epithelium, and that this cell population is expanded in humans who are predisposed to ovarian cancer. Like progenitor populations in other tissues, the Pax8+ cells respond to canonical Wnt signalling, which governs their differentiation into ciliated cells and simultaneously maintains the stem cell-like population. These results are a step forward in understanding tissue homeostasis in the oviduct, and may provide insight into how cell proliferation is regulated and subsequently becomes dysregulated in ovarian cancer.