Photo: Barbra Streisand/ Instagram
In 2012, Barbra Streisand donated $10 million to Cedars-Sinai to create a research centre focused on women’s cardiovascular health. The centre now provides research-driven cardiac care to more than 1,700 women each year, according to Cedars-Sinai. The Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center provides care to more than 1,700 women annually.
Streisand said she had long been angered by inequality, including gender discrimination in medicine. Merz said women’s health research was often constrained by political debates and by the perception that heart disease was less urgent than other conditions. The gift helped establish the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center, a facility dedicated to understanding why heart disease can affect women differently from men and improving diagnosis and treatment for female patients. She argued that women deserved the same level of scientific attention and research investment as men, particularly in an area as serious as heart disease. Its work combines clinical treatment with research designed to improve how doctors identify and manage cardiovascular disease in female patients. She hoped private philanthropy could help stabilise research funding and allow scientists to pursue questions that public grants did not always support.
The centre’s approach reflects a shift away from treating women’s heart disease as a smaller version of men’s disease. The centre’s work has helped bring greater attention to an issue that affects millions of women. Its focus on research, education, and clinical care reflects Streisand’s belief that women should not have to wait for their symptoms to resemble men’s before receiving appropriate treatment.
By studying sex-specific symptoms, risk factors, and diagnostic patterns, it aims to help doctors detect problems earlier and tailor treatment more effectively.
The donation was not simply a high-profile act of philanthropy. It responded to a long-standing gap in medicine, where heart disease research has often relied heavily on male subjects while women’s symptoms and underlying conditions can differ. Fourteen years on, the centre remains focused on closing that gap through patient care, research, and education.