There’s a shocking gender gap in who receives Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) from bystanders.

Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of women, taking a woman’s life approximately every minute in the US alone.

Though prompt delivery of CPR can triple a cardiac arrest victims’ chances of survival, WOMEN ARE 27% LESS LIKELY THAN MEN TO RECEIVE BYSTANDER CPR. This makes a big difference: only 1 in 8 women survive cardiac arrest, versus 1 in 5 men.

We set out to close this gender gap. We had zero paid media dollars, so we knew our solution would need to educate people on how to give life-saving CPR to women AND be capable of receiving mass coverage by the media.

We found our solution in design -- a unique approach that could spark conversation and generate awareness, but also provide practical experience that would close the gender gap in CPR.

We interviewed the authors of the American Heart Association study that first reported the gap and found three underlying reasons:

1. People think cardiac arrest is a men’s issue.

2. People are uncomfortable touching breasts.

3. When people do deliver CPR to a woman, they often do it incorrectly.

These 3 issues can be remedied by hands-on education.

The lightning strike moment came when we realized that, while health organizations teach tens of millions of people CPR every year, the manikins they teach it on are flat-chested, male torsos.

Our solution was to disrupt the implicit gender-bias of CPR training, designing a new attachment that could fit over any male CPR manikin, simulating breasts.

We called it the Womanikin, and made the design open source for faster and more equitable distribution.

Our target audience was CPR instructors and members of the general population who cared about saving women's lives.

We worked with resuscitation scientists to design the Womanikin, but also needed to keep in mind the realities of CPR educators, many of whom are independent and travel with limited trunk space. Moreover, new CPR training manikins are extremely expensive -- educators use them for 300,000 compressions before replacing them. Creating an entirely new manikin was out of the question.

The Womanikin is portable, affordable, and modular – something that would work with educators’ existing male dummies.

An added benefit: it also looks like an attachment. In-market research shows that this provides a teachable moment for educators.

Our mission was to save lives, not generate profit. So, we designed the Womanikin with easily available materials, and made it downloadable, open-source and universal.

Because women of color receive CPR at a disproportionately lower rate than white women, we sourced fabric that was shades darker than the standard manikin, inspiring deeper dialogue.

The success of The Womanikin has been nothing short of astounding.

With zero paid media budget, we generated major news stories globally, and earned 23 million social impressions.

We began an ongoing partnership with American Heart Association training centers to manufacture Womanikin attachments at scale for use in university training.

We were invited to 8 medical conferences and panels, and established a partnership with Dr. Holly Andersen, cardiologist and medical advisor to the Women’s Heart Alliance.

17% increase in our awareness KPI, examining a basket of search-terms related to female heart-health and CPR between launch on 6/1 and 8/31, compared to previous year.

62 CPR training organizations requested Womanikin attachments or downloaded our toolkit to build their own.

Gold Effie for proving The Womanikin saves women’s lives.

Fully equalizing the CPR gender-gap (our ultimate goal), would save over 30,000 women’s lives per year in the US, alone.

Let’s not stop.