Celebrating Another Year of Progress Women’s Hearth Health

By Kathryn Schubert, President and CEO of the Society for Women's Health Research

I was honored to receive the 2025 Wenger Award for Excellence in Public Service from WomenHeart this month as part of their annual Wenger Awards celebration. I joined leaders across industry, clinical care, research, and academia to celebrate the extraordinary contributions made in women’s heart health.??

WomenHeart’s Wenger Awards was created to honor Dr. Nanette Wenger, a pioneer in women’s health and lifelong advocate for women’s heart health (not to mention a former SWHR Board Chair!). Dr. Wenger was one of the first women to attend Harvard Medical School, the first woman fellow and chief resident at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, and one of the first clinicians to focus her work on women’s heart health. Dr. Wenger is even credited with coining the term "bikini medicine," referring to health care’s limited focus on the parts of a woman's body found under a bikini. You can read more about her incredible work here. We had the honor of hearing from Dr. Wegner during the evening, and she reminded us that women are not just little men; studying the differences between men and women is critical to fully understanding, diagnosing, treating, and preventing heart disease.?

I often talk about standing on the shoulders of giants, and I can think of no greater giant in this space than Dr. Wenger. As a trailblazer, she not only led the way, but lifted us all up while she climbed. We are so grateful to her for her leadership. In heart disease in particular, we must advocate for those who are not with us to advocate for themselves – for the mothers, sisters, and daughters who left us too soon because they were dismissed or misdiagnosed. Heart disease is still the number one killer of women and men – and it is far past time that we changed that harrowing statistic.?

At SWHR, we join Dr. Wegner and WomenHeart in the work to close gendergaps in heart health, from disparities in clinical trial enrollment to delays in disease diagnosis and treatment for women living with heart disease. For example, in the Read My Lips campaign, we’re encouraging women to learn more about the impact that high cholesterol has on their heart health and speak with their doctors about their heart health history and possible need for a lipid panel test. In our Taking Action for Women’s Heart Health Advocacy Toolkit, we offer a guide to support advocacy efforts around cardiovascular disease and spotlight specific actions you can take now to advocate for women’s heart health at the congressional level. These are just a few of our resources, but you can check out all of SWHR’s heart health work here.?

An estimated 75% of women ages 60-79 have some form of cardiovascular disease. And heart disease costs the U.S. health care system an estimated $219 billion in health care costs each year. We have lived with the burden of heart disease for too long.

This February for American Heart Month, will you join us in speaking up about the impact of heart disease???

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