Heart Disease Is Killing Women. Our Culture Is Letting It.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death for women in America. It kills more women than cancer, yet it rarely carries the same urgency. Culturally, it has been treated as background noise. Familiar. Easy to overlook.

That silence is learned.

We live in a culture that rewards women for endurance. For pushing through pain. For staying productive, no matter the cost. Those expectations shape how women interpret their symptoms and how systems respond to them. When women are taught to downplay discomfort, it becomes easier to justify dismissal.

In healthcare, the pattern is consistent. Women’s symptoms are questioned. Pain is reframed as stress. Urgency is softened into reassurance. The issue is not that heart disease in women is difficult to detect. It is that women are not taken seriously when they speak.

This is not simply a medical failure. It is a cultural one.

Medical research has long treated male bodies as the default. Diagnostic standards followed that assumption. Over time, bias became routine. Women are misdiagnosed not because the evidence is unclear, but because the system has been slow to center their realities.

Culturally, we have grown comfortable with awareness without accountability. We wear the colors. We share the messages. Visibility has replaced responsibility, and symbolism has stood in for structural change.

Women change culture differently. We talk to each other. We compare notes. We warn one another when something feels off. Not because it is empowering language, but because it is survival behavior.

Heart Month should not be performative. Going red should signal refusal. Refusal to be rushed. Refusal to be dismissed. Refusal to be excluded from the data and decisions that shape care.

Heart disease is killing women. That is a fact.

The cultural silence around it is a choice.