A Framework for Women's Health Engineering Education: Pedagogical Foundations and Practical Implementation

Women represent more than half the U.S. workforce, yet women's health research and education remain systematically underprioritized, hindering technological innovation in this domain. Recent policy initiatives have elevated the profile of women's health and created urgency for engineering education to align with this shift. Despite growing recognition that advanced engineering approaches are essential to address sex-specific diseases and physiological differences, most biomedical engineering students graduate without exposure to women's health as a thematic focus or to the clinical problems and existing solutions in this space. To address this gap, we present a best practices guide based on six independently designed women's health engineering courses. Drawing on pedagogical literature and collective teaching experience, we document core elements and provide practical frameworks for both standalone women's health courses and integration into existing biomedical engineering curricula. This work is designed to lower the barrier for action, such that institutions can implement women's health engineering education scaled to their capacity and constraints. By training engineers to recognize and address systematic gaps in women's health engineering, we prepare them to build the life-changing technologies that women have long been waiting for.