Toward feminist principles for epidemiology and public health

Background Epidemiology has traditionally examined the distribution and determinants of health in populations. While early work focused on social determinants and collective conditions, recent decades have seen a shift toward individualized, molecular, and risk-based models emphasizing behavior, biology, and lifestyle. This shift has often obscured structural determinants and reinforced a biomedical paradigm. Feminist scholarship critiques these trends by centering lived experiences, power dynamics, and inequities in health research. Main body This commentary explores how feminist principles can inform epidemiology, and Public Health, bridging the divide between positivist health sciences and feminist epistemologies. It outlines key feminist contributions including epistemology, theory, methodology, and reflexivity, and demonstrates how they can be operationalized in epidemiological practice. Feminist epidemiology emphasizes problem definition grounded in marginalized experiences, co-production of knowledge, intersectional analysis of sex, gender, and other social