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.

Today, there are countless examples that underscore that the world has been designed with men in mind: from NASA not having spacesuits to fit female astronauts to crash test dummies having predominantly male body sizes. It’s even been the subject of a best-selling book, “Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” by Caroline Perez.

But nowhere is this gender gap as pronounced -- or potentially deadly -- than in the way we teach CPR. Gender bias in CPR manikin design could be costing the lives of 30,000 women per year in the US, alone.

After being shocked by these statistics, we interviewed the authors behind the American Heart Association study that first reported the gender gap, and found three cultural reasons for it:

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 on are flat-chested, male torsos.

The Womanikin was born.

Our solution was to design a new product that would disrupt gender-bias in CPR training -- raising awareness while also helping instructors show how to administer CPR to a woman.

This is the Womanikin: a universal attachment to give breasts to flat-chested male CPR training manikins.

To make it more equitable and spread faster, our design was made open source, and paired with a highly-visible earned-media campaign

Created at the peak of the #metoo movement, where unwanted sexual touching was a daily news story, it became even more important to confront the stigma directly. It wasn’t enough to talk about the issue -- we needed people to actually practice touching a woman’s chest to give CPR.

This practice was so necessary, instructors using Womanikin in the field continue to report that even after lengthy instruction, many male students hesitate before attempting to administer CPR to the Womanikin in classes.

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 make profit. So, we designed the Womanikin with easily available materials, and made the design 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.

To announce The Womanikin, we tapped The United State of Women, a non-profit who agreed to promote The Womanikin on their social channels, showcasing our launch video assets, driving to womanikin.org.

Though we had an in-kind donation of $10K of Facebook paid media, the algorithm misinterpreted images of the Womanikin as pornography and barred them from running on the platform. (Yes, this happened.) Sadder still, this misunderstanding left us with $0 in paid media, we had to launch our creation with only organic social posts.

Knowing that it can be extremely difficult for an organic social campaign to go viral, we timed the campaign launch around a relevant media moment: National CPR Week (June 1-7). We knew The Womanikin would give publishers something interesting to run alongside traditional CPR stories. This PR strategy was effective, as we received enormous press pickup during National CPR Week.

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.

Began an ongoing partnership with American Heart Association training centers to manufacture Womanikin devices 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.