The Vagina Business | Marina Gerner

The Vagina Business, by Dr Marina Gerner, covers key issues in women's health and the novel solutions in development to address them. The book has already been getting attention with grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and The Society of Authors. Kirkus Reviews has praised the book as "energetic, thoroughly engaging reading" and emphasized its potential to improve women's health outcomes worldwide. It has also been recommended as a must-read business book by the Financial Times.

As a journalist, Marina has written about books and arts, as well as finance and tech for over a decade. Her range of expertise has led to Marina being called "a Renaissance woman of the modern age." ​Marina has won several awards and written for The Economist, Jewish Chronicle, Guardian, Financial Times, Wired, the Times Literary Supplement, The Times, and the Wall Street Journal. She has been a contributing editor at The Sunday Times Raconteur, the i newspaper and MoneyWeek.

Before that she was a Staff Writer at Money Observer, where she wrote a column called “Marina’s Imaginary Millions.”​ She is an Adjunct Professor of Commerce & Culture at the NYU Stern School of Business (on their London campus) and she has a PhD from the London School of Economics, which was funded by merit-based scholarships.​

Show Notes:

• 00:00 Dr. Gerner discusses her background as a refugee from Ukraine and how that has influenced her journalism and focus on women's health innovation.
• 02:40 Dr.Gerner explains how her dual backgrounds in journalism and academia prepared her to write "The Vagina Business" and the challenges she faced with the provocative title.
• 08:24 Dr. Gerner describes the specific events and stories that inspired her to write the book, including learning about gender differences in heart attack symptoms and the lack of innovation in women's health.
• 14:18 Discussion of the business case and broader societal benefits of investing more in women's health innovation.
• 16:53 Dr. Gerner talks about uncovering taboos around women's health issues and the need to challenge normalized biases and pain tolerance for women.
• 21:01 Examination of the gaps in sex-disaggregated research and sex education, and the role the femtech industry can play in addressing these issues.
• 25:38 Exploration of how a family-integrated approach to women's health, as seen in the Saathealth app example, could be applied more broadly, and the importance of engaging men as allies in the women's health movement.