Women are 27% less likely than men to receive CPR from bystanders in public. It’s a pretty shocking gender disparity. Especially when you realize that heart disease takes a woman’s life every minute. Working with Audrey L. Blewer, Ph.D., MPH, cardiovascular specialist, we identified three reasons for this gap - People aren't aware women have cardiac events, they're misinformed on how to perform CPR on women, and our society has made touching breasts taboo. This stigma is costing women their lives.

Our goal was to bridge this gender gap in CPR by normalizing performing CPR on a woman through education. We realized that while health organizations teach tens of millions of people how to perform CPR every year, the manikins they teach on are flat-chested, male torsos.

We needed to develop a solution that would modernize CPR and training schools.

We had several key priorities:

-Spark conversation about women’s heart health and raise awareness that women also need CPR.

-Get people more comfortable touching breasts to deliver life-saving CPR

-Teach people how to correctly administer CPR to women.

Our first solution was a CPR dummy with breasts.

This would provide a prompt for CPR instructors to talk about women in cardiac arrest, normalize touching breasts for resuscitation, and help people learn how to perform CPR on women properly. However, in our interviews and partnership with stakeholders at CPR organizations we realized that the cost of an additional dummy would be prohibitive for many suppliers. We needed an inexpensive solution, and one that was could easily travel between trainings.

Enter The WoManikin - a universal CPR dummy attachment created to give the common flat-chested manikin breasts. This inclusive, affordable product was made open-source for maximum adoption and designed in collaboration with CPR educators.The WoManikin provides a natural prompt for CPR instructors to talk about the issue, normalizes touching breasts for resuscitation, and helps people learn how to properly perform CPR on women at the exact moment when people are most receptive to behavioral change: while learning. Organizations also mentioned the importance of diversity and inclusion. Every training program we interviewed talked about getting communities of color more involved in CPR training. With this in mind, we gave The WoManikin a skin tone darker than that of the most popular resuscitation dummies, as we wanted the attachment to be representative of more communities. We also created Spanish language versions of the toolkit and WoManikin website.