WoW Woman in FemTech I Marina Gerner, author of The Vagina Business: The Innovative Breakthroughs that Could Change Everything in Women's Health
Marina Gerner is the author of The Vagina Business: The Innovative Breakthroughs that Could Change Everything in Women's Health. The US paperback is published on June 3rd!
Focused on cutting-edge innovation in women’s health, the book has been recommended as a Book of the Month by the Financial Times and won the Porchlight Business Book Award and the Mindvalley Book Club Award.
With The Vagina Business, the first mainstream book on femtech, she fights to change the narrative about female bodies, stop the normalisation of female pain and channel more investment, more research, and more buzz into femtech.
As a seasoned journalist, Marina has written for publications including The Times, Wall Street Journal, Money Observer, and Wired. She brings academic rigour to her work as an Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and holds a PhD from the London School of Economics. An in-demand speaker, Marina has spoken at conferences like SXSW, female empowerment summits, and employee engagement events around the world.
Tell us a bit about your background and your projects so far.
I’ve been a journalist for over a decade, writing on issues that impact women’s lives, from health to personal finance. Over the years, I have focused on the femtech industry—a field I’ve found both inspiring and challenging. My book, The Vagina Business, was born out of years of research and interviews with innovators in the field, and I continue to speak and write about the future of women’s health—on podcasts and at conferences. As a side hustle, I teach at the NYU Stern School of Business on the London campus.
I was born in Kyiv, grew up in Frankfurt, briefly lived in New York, and am based in London, where I can be found drinking cappuccinos with friends and taking my baby to bars.
How did you get into writing about this industry? Has it been an easy industry to write about or have you had many challenges?
As a writer, I’ve always been drawn to amplifying the stories of women and underrepresented voices.
I’m unusual in that I cover an eclectic range of subjects. My friend Jess likes to call me a “Renaissance woman for the modern age,” which makes me laugh, but I’ve also embraced it. Women’s health innovation is inherently multi-disciplinary—you need insights from tech, medicine, economics, and sociology—and my eclectic perspective helps make sense of it.
Writing about femtech has its challenges. The industry is still often underestimated—and so is the idea that it deserves serious journalistic attention. Being a professional writer is, in many ways, like being an entrepreneur: it’s a relentless hustle.
How long did it take you to be where you are now? What was the biggest obstacle? What are the challenges of being in the industry you are in?
It’s taken years of reporting, writing, researching, listening—and a lot of persistence—to get to where I am now. I came into this space as a journalist and had to carve out a path to write about an industry that’s still often underestimated and underfunded. That’s what makes The Vagina Business such an unusual book. Just yesterday, a comedian who read it told me, “I’ve never read anything like this before!”
One of the biggest obstacles has been getting people to recognise that femtech is even a thing—and why it matters. When I started working on The Vagina Business, every publisher my agent and I spoke to said we’d need to change the title. For many people, the word “vagina” is still too much. But the reality is that this industry deals with life-changing issues—and it deserves real investment, research, and attention.
In the book, I interview over 100 people across 15 countries to highlight the most pioneering innovations in femtech around the world. I wanted to show not just the obstacles but how immense the opportunities are in this space and how high the stakes really are.
The challenges are often structural: limited funding, regulatory inertia, stigma, and an entrenched bias in medical research and innovation. But that’s exactly why femtech matters. It’s not just an industry, it’s a movement with the potential to change women’s health.
What are your biggest achievements to date?
Becoming an author and becoming a mother at the same time!
What are the projects you are currently working on?
I do a lot of public speaking, including employee engagement events at companies—so if you’re looking for someone to energize a room and speak honestly about women’s health and innovation, I’d love to hear from you. I’m also going to be MC-ing the health tech track at SXSW London this year, which I’m really excited about.
I regularly speak on podcasts—it’s one of my favourite formats for having thoughtful, unfiltered conversations about the realities of the femtech space.
And I write a (very occasional) free Substack newsletter—that’s the best way to keep up with what I’m working on, from new projects to fresh ideas about the future of femtech.
Is the #WomenInTech movement important to you and if yes, why?
Absolutely. One of the things I love most about the femtech space is how collaborative it is. I’d love to see more spaces where women work together to solve real problems—and that's what I appreciate about WOW, too. It fosters that spirit of shared progress.
Someone said to me recently, “You’re unusual because you celebrate other people’s success!”—but I don’t think that should be unusual. I’d like to live in a world where we all do that.
I believe femtech—and the broader #WomenInTech movement—has the power to reshape healthcare and build a future that’s healthier, fairer, and more inclusive for everyone.
What will be the key trends in the femtech industry in the next five years and where do you see them heading?
We’re seeing powerful, opposing forces shaping femtech: growing momentum on one side and political resistance on the other.
On the positive side, there’s a clear upward trend in VC investment, research, and mainstream awareness. Femtech is no longer seen as a “niche”—it's an emerging force. But at the same time, we’re seeing increasing political headwinds, from abortion restrictions to rollbacks in healthcare access. These dynamics shape not just where innovation happens but who it reaches.
AI is another big trend—it's already being used in everything from embryo selection during IVF to clinical trial analysis. But there’s a real risk: if we don’t fix the data gaps and gender biases that already exist, AI will only amplify them.
A simple example: type “ovaries” into Canva’s image generator, and it flags it as violating community guidelines. Type “uterus” and it shows a completely fake organ. That’s not just frustrating—it’s censorship and misinformation. If we want to harness AI for good in femtech, we have to start by fixing the foundations.
What is the most important piece of advice you could give to anyone who wants to start a career in this industry?
Read The Vagina Business!
It’s the most comprehensive overview of the femtech industry—covering everything from funding gaps to product innovation, market challenges, and community building. Even some of the most established founders and investors tell me they’ve learned a lot from it because while most people have deep expertise in one area of femtech, the book gives a broad, accessible overview of the whole ecosystem.
One reader put it best in her Amazon review: “I felt inspired, mentored, and captivated without having to spend the plane or conference ticket to get to meet all these amazing women. Everyone should buy this and gift it to their friends. I know I will.”
The Vagina Business has been called “the answer to Invisible Women”—because it focuses on solutions—and several leaders in the space refer to it as the textbook for femtech.
Who are inspirational women in your respective industry you admire?
There are so many! I’m constantly inspired by bold feminist thinkers and storytellers who challenge the status quo. Ariel Levy’s fearless writing on gender and sexuality, Sayaka Murata’s surreal take on womanhood, and Esther Perel’s insights on intimacy and human connection—all shape how I think about our physicality, identity, and power.
As a journalist, I tend to interview people whose work I appreciate in some way. In The Vagina Business, I write about entrepreneurs, investors, community leaders and researchers who are pushing boundaries every day. It’s their persistence, creativity, and refusal to accept the status quo that drive women’s health forward.
About the book:
Women make over 80% of healthcare decisions, yet only 4% of medical research and development focuses on women's health. From periods and childbirth to menopause, female pain has been normalized, as society shrugs and says, "Welcome to being a woman" instead of coming up with better solutions. But it doesn't have to be this way. In The Vagina Business, award-winning journalist Marina Gerner PhD explores the innovators challenging the status quo in women’s health. With interviews from 100 entrepreneurs, researchers and investors across 15 countries, Gerner delves into femtech—an industry where companies develop groundbreaking products to support women at every stage of life. This is the future of women’s health, and it’s finally getting the attention it deserves.
As Kirkus Reviews puts it: “Energetic, thoroughly engaging reading! Gerner's highly readable book offers hope for positive new ways of not only thinking and talking about female bodies but also improving health outcomes for women worldwide.”
Get your copy of Marina’s book here:
UK version, US version, Audiobook, German translation.
Connect with Marina on LinkedIn.
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