Did you know that 90% of venture capitalist investors are men? On this episode of Period Story, I talk to Marina Gerner, the journalist and author of The Vagina Business about innovation in femtech and the vagina-centric space.
In this episode, Marina shares:
- How a viral article in Wired magazine led to her writing her book The Vagina Business
- The pushback she received about the title of the book
- How investor squeamishness and embarrassment is holding femtech and vagina-centric businesses back from being able to effectively raise money
- Why a data-centric approach is helpful when raising money
- The questions you need to ask when choosing a period tracking app to ensure your data is being protected
- And of course, the story of her first period
Marina says we need to have more conversations about women’s health and that we’re in a collective learning experience as a society.
Get in touch with Marina:
Her book: The Vagina Business
Her Wired article: We need to talk about investors’ problem with vaginas
Marina’s Bio:
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.”
She has won several journalism 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.”
As an academic, 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.
Her media appearances include TV shows and radio programmes at France 24, PBS, the BBC World Service and podcast interviews with The Financial Feminist, Trail Blazers and many others.
She has spoken at universities including NYU, Columbia University, and Rice University, and at professional networks like the National Association of Women Business Owners, AthenaDAO, Ladies Who Crunch, Novi Awards, MentorMe NGO, Leaders in Health.
She is a frequent speaker and panel chair at femtech conferences like Women’s Health Week, as well as bigger tech festivals like SXSW, VivaTech, Mindvalley and The Fix.
Born in Kyiv during the Soviet Union, Marina was a toddler, when her brave single mother moved them to the West as political refugees.
She grew up in Frankfurt, has briefly lived in New York and has mainly lived in London, where she can be found drinking cappuccinos with friends and taking her baby to bars.
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SHOW TRANSCRIPT
Marina Gerner Recording
Le’Nise Brothers: Hi Marina. Thank you so much for coming onto the show today. I’m really excited to speak to you. Talk about your book, but let’s get into the question that I start each conversation with, which is tell us the story of your first period.
Marina Gerner: Thank you so much for having me, first of all.
So I knew you were going to ask this question, and my first reaction was to think, well, I don’t really have much of a story to tell, but then I dwelled on that and I thought maybe there’s something in that as well that I need to explain further. Because, so when my period arrived, it was a very natural kind of, it was something I expected, something I knew would arrive soon.
And when it got there, I just, welcomed it. And I thought, oh, well, great. Here’s my period, you know, I’ve been waiting for you. And I think the reason it was not an event that was shocking or surprising was because my mother has always been very open about female bodies, women’s health, female orgasms, all of these things.
So I was brought up in a way that has always made me feel very comfortable in my own body. So when I got my period, I, yeah, I just thought, oh, great, here it is. And I have always felt about it like that since that’s still my reaction nowadays. Whereas I have one friend who when she got her period, her mother actually celebrated it with her and took her on a trip.
And I think that’s also very nice to embrace it to an extent where you’re celebrating it, where you are having something to mark that occasion, which is not something we, we typically do nowadays, right? When somebody enters menopause or so on. And even after giving birth, we don’t have that many rituals left nowadays, but I think those are very powerful.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah, I think the I idea of ritual is really powerful, especially in a world where everything feels a bit ephemeral and things move really quickly. So having that ritual or that moment to mark an occasion, whether it’s first period, birth even I, I always say I wish people knew when their last period was so they could actually mark that occasion because you know, you only know when you haven’t had a period for a year.
Oh, that’s menopause and that’s it. So that idea of ritual is really, really interesting. And what you said about your mother being very matter of fact about periods and sex, I think that’s fantastic and I wish more of us had had that experience. I have a 12-year-old son and I’m trying to be quite matter of fact about all of this.
He asks me questions and I’m sometimes I cringe inside, but I have to really like be matter of fact about it. And he actually said to me, Mama, I like asking you these questions ’cause you give me the straight facts. And I thought, well, I try. So…
Marina Gerner: That’s fantastic.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah.
Marina Gerner: Yeah.
That’s really great. I appreciate that you do that. Um, yeah, my mother is a very unconventional, unusual woman. She’s an artist. And I told my friends that she was telling me all of these things to an extent where my friends would ask me questions and say, oh, you know, can you ask your mom about this and that?
So I think it’s, it’s a very powerful thing to do, to be that person who’s happy to talk about things.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah. And what’s really interesting is then you, you’ve written a book called The Vagina Business. So speaking about being very matter of fact. The title of your book, the Vagina Business, it says what’s what it is on the tin, as they say in the UK.
Marina Gerner: Yes.
Le’Nise Brothers: And you’ve shared some really interesting stories in your book. One story you wrote about was how many femtech entrepreneurs have shared with you that they’ve encountered a fear of vaginas, um, when they, you know, are pitching or speaking about their businesses. And you’ve also shared this squeamishness that many female femtech entrepreneurs have encountered.
Just talking about this idea of being a matter of fact, why do you think there’s still this squeamishness when it comes to femtech and, being in this space?
Marina Gerner: Yeah, so, so let me take a step back actually. So Femtech for those of you who haven’t heard the term before, it refers to female technology and it’s technology focused on female bodies, women’s health.
It can be anything from periods to menopause, but also going beyond the uterus. Because when we talk about women’s health, it’s important to remember, we don’t just talk about reproductive health, but all aspects of our health, including heart health and bone health and so on. And I’ve been a journalist for over 15 years, and I first started writing about technology focused on health in I think 2019, 2020.
So I got into this space in my early thirties. And at the time I knew that I wanted to have a child soon. So that was part of my own, you know, part of my own motivation for being interested in this space. And I also learned that nine in ten first time mothers experience a birth injury. So 90% of mothers experience a birth injury.
And I thought, that’s a statistic that really shouldn’t be allowed to exist. And is there a way we can prevent that? And I came across a company called Materna Medical in California. They are a femtech company, so they’re developing new technology focused on women’s health. And what they’re creating is a dilator, a very simple device that in the first stage of labour.
So when your cervix dilates at that same time, the dilator pre-stretches the muscles of the vaginal canal and the ideas that by the time the baby comes through, those muscles have been pre-stretch, just like you would stretch your muscles when you are working out, before a workout. In that same way, the muscles have been pre-stretched so by the time the baby comes through, they’re elastic and you’re less likely to experience a birth injury, less likely to have pelvic organ prolapse later down the line. So I thought, this is a really interesting device. It’s not on the market yet, and it’s being developed. It’s the first of its kind to be regulated as a medical device in the United States.
And I looked into the space and I learned that the last big innovation in the standard of care of birth was the epidural, which was popularised in the 1950s and sixties. And I thought, you know, that’s incredible. If you go into a hospital right now to give birth, you’ll be offered the epidural as this incredible thing.
And I thought, there’s no other area of society or technology where we give people something that was popularised in the 1950s and sixties and we say, Hey, look, this is a cutting edge floppy disc. You know, there’s no other area where innovation really hasn’t caught up with the present moment. Um, there’s another device, the forceps, which is many, many centuries old, and it’s basically a set of salad forks.
There’s also vacuum delivery, which is basically a toilet plunger.
Le’Nise Brothers: Mm-hmm.
Marina Gerner: So we’re using these devices that are really not high tech at all for something that is, you know, one of the most memorable experiences in any mother’s life. Something that is the most common reason for why we go to hospital.
Hospitals have whole wings dedicated to childbirth, and yet we haven’t seen the level of innovation in the space that we see in other areas. So I wondered why that’s the case. And I interviewed people in what I describe as the vagina centric space. So not just childbirth, but also menopause symptoms and so on.
And they told me again and again and again that it’s really hard to raise money in this space because VC investors, those are venture capital investors, those who invest in innovative companies, they are too embarrassed to talk about vaginas in a business setting. I have this quote from one VC investor who says, I don’t want to talk about vaginas in my Monday morning partner meeting.
You know, that kind of tells you the attitude that exists out there. That was so shocking to me to learn that the reason we don’t get the innovation that we clearly deserve and need and want is because there’s a bunch of guys. And something like 90% of VC investors are men. So there’s a bunch of guys sitting in a boardroom somewhere and they don’t want to talk about vaginas in a business setting, and therefore they don’t invest in these companies.
That was really shocking to me. And because I’m a journalist, I decided to write a story, and the story was called, We Need to Talk About Investors’ Problem with Vaginas. That story came out in Wired Magazine . It went viral. So it really hit a nerve with people. And then I took it from there and I interviewed many, many, many more people in the space to figure out what the solution is.
And I think, so you asked me why there’s the squeamishness, and it’s interesting, the squeamishness does not just exist among male VC investors, as I’m sure you know, but also female VC investors and also people everywhere else in the nonprofit world. In the academic world, whenever I’ve interviewed somebody who focuses on vaginas or on women’s health, each person, no matter what kind of industry or sector they’re in, they’ve all encountered some form of doubt and resistance and squeamishness.
Le’Nise Brothers: Hmm. And that’s really interesting because often I speak to women who have gone to their doctor and their expectation before is that if they have a female doctor, that they will have a better experience. And I would say 50% of the time they come away saying you know, my doctor told me this is normal.
I had to deal with, many of my patients have to deal with this. This is normal. We’re talking about heavy periods or painful periods where, we’ve set this expectation that these things are normal when they’re not. And then you have women who come to me and they’ll say, well, I actually had a male doctor and he was so helpful.
So it’s interesting that when you get into the more medical space there’s a lot of women who have these expectations. But then when you go into, you know, the VC space where, you know, there’s these situations that you’ve just described. And then I wonder, just talking about the inspiration for the book, you talked about this article that you wrote for Wired that went viral and after it went viral, were you then approached by publishers?
I’m always curious about, having written a book myself, I’m always curious about this side of it, like did you get approached to say like, we think you should write a book about this. Tell us we wanna know more.
Marina Gerner: Sure. So let me answer the first part
Le’Nise Brothers: Okay.
Marina Gerner: About female doctors and male doctors, because I think that’s really fascinating.
So female investors have similar biases to male investors, and sometimes that’s surprising to people. But you know, women are not inherently better or more moral. We’re all raised in the same society, right? So it’s more about changing how everyone thinks. And the same goes for doctors. They’re all trained in the same way.
But then there was a really fascinating large scale study by Professor Greenwood. They analysed heart attack patients at hospitals in Florida, and they found that women actually have higher odds of surviving a heart attack if their emergency department doctor is also a woman.
Le’Nise Brothers: Oh,
Marina Gerner: so statistically in some cases, having a female doctor does help.
But they also had another hopeful insight in the study, which is that if your doctor is male, they are also good at treating female patients if they’ve previously worked with lots of female patients before, and if they have lots of female colleagues. So it really depends. And I think it’s important to say if you feel gaslit by a doctor or if you feel dismissed, then find someone else.
Because unfortunately that’s still very common in the UK and everywhere else. But there are people who have more insights and are more willing to listen. And so at this point in time, I think there is more awareness and things are changing, but oftentimes we still have to advocate for ourselves.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah, absolutely.
Marina Gerner: And the other question, so I wrote the article, it went viral, and no, nobody approached me. I don’t think that’s how it works in the publishing world. I think it’s the kind of world that you have to fight your way into. At least in my experience, I was never really approached by anyone or given anything on a platter.
No. I, I found an agent by messaging people on Twitter as it was called back then. And then I put together a book proposal and we went out and we pitched it to multiple publishers, and then I managed to get a an international book deal. But it was a huge amount of work. And, you know, for this book, I interviewed over 100 people across 15 countries.
And so again, that was a multi-year project with deep investigative research. It’s a really long term project, that kind of a book. And people often underappreciate that I think people have this romantic idea of like, oh, you’re sitting in a coffee shop and you know, you’re looking into the sky, you know, you’re writing down your thoughts.
And at least with my book, that’s not the case. It’s a lot of research, a long bibliography with lots of studies. I have a PhD, so I look at academic research a lot. And then going out into the world and, and talking about this book has also taken a year and a half at this point. So overall it’s a five to seven year project.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah I completely relate to that, that romantic notion, oh, you’re writing a book, you’ll be staring out the sky, you’ll be inspired. But really it’s a lot of agonising over research papers and like doubting yourself and like, does this make sense? I often say to authors, it’s putting your book out in the world that launch day is the second step.
First step is writing the book. Second step is that launch day and then it’s out in the world and then you have to promote it and we talked about this ephemeral world that we live in, and now it’s this, you’ve got this concrete thing that I wrote this book, and I just think that’s just so fantastic for authors and writers to have something to hold onto.
Let’s get back to the book. And all of the interesting stories and research that you high highlighted. One thing you talked about earlier was this definition of the word femtech. It’s really interesting, this kind of, these new terms that are developing and, mompreneur and these words that some people can feel are a bit diminishing.
Why is it femtech? Why isn’t it just technology? Can you talk a little bit about whether or not you think, based on your, your experience and the work that you’ve done, that there can be a risk when potential investors and VCs hear they’re meeting with a femtech company?
Marina Gerner: Yeah, that’s a great question and an important one.
So femtech was coined, I believe in 2016 by Ida Tin, the founder of Clue, the period app. And I think it’s been a very useful term in that it has brought people together. Nowadays we have femtech communities, we have femtech conferences but of course. I think the issue really is about women’s health and innovation.
So whether you want to call it femtech or not, doesn’t actually matter. You could just say women’s health innovation, you could call it something else. And I think these terms come and go, but we will always require innovation focused on female bodies and conversations around female bodies. so, if people find the term helpful, they should use it.
If it doesn’t speak to them, don’t use it. And in some cases it might be better to say you’re a health tech company focused on women. In some cases it might be better to use that term because femtech, the way I’ve defined it is to say it’s companies, nonprofits, and research projects that move women’s health forward.
So you can see it’s not just focused on companies, it’s also focused on researchers and, and other people. And I’ve defined it in an optimistic, in an idealistic way, but people also abuse the term. I’ve seen plastic surgery companies advertise themselves as femtech. I’ve seen, I think bras and yoga pants claim that they’re femtech.
So obviously people use it in all sorts of ways, even though I would say that’s absolutely nothing to do with femtech, and it’s quite the opposite. For now it continues to be a helpful term because people can find each other.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah. You wrote that taking a more data-centric approach is one way to pitch vagina centric businesses as a way of getting over that squeamishness and just focusing on pure numbers.
Among the entrepreneurs that you interviewed, have you seen them had any success from actually, instead of focusing on the numbers, focusing more on personal experiences?
Marina Gerner: I think it always has to be a combination of the two, because as an entrepreneur, you’re presenting people with a business case, right?
So you always have to have some kind of metrics, even if you’re very early stages, you still have to show them the number of customers, potential customers, you know, the market size and so on. So you would never only talk about your personal story. That might be good for a TED Talk, but it’s not good for an investor pitch, you know?
Um, you always need some kind of data, whatever that may be. The difficulty is that with femtech companies, oftentimes they are very early stage companies, so they don’t have that much data to show yet. And in that case, investors have to rely more on their gut feeling or recommendations by other people.
So bias can creep in that way. And we know that female founders are more likely to raise money in industries that are seen as gender congruent. So women are more likely to raise in fashion or the so-called beauty industry, which I always think we should call something else rather than in engineering and technology.
And then in femtech you have the added obstacle of stigma. So on the one, if you are, for example, if you’re creating a new kind of condom you are in a male dominated industry. So you’re not in a gender congruent space. You might be a product designer, engineer, and you’re also dealing with something that’s stigmatised.
So I think you are facing some quite unique obstacles in that space compared to other spaces.
Le’Nise Brothers: Thinking about all of the interviews that you did for your book. You interviewed over a hundred entrepreneurs and researchers and investors. We’ve talked about obstacles, we’ve talked about stigma.
We’ve talked about biases. Were there any interviews that surprised you?
Marina Gerner: So I usually do a lot of research before I interview people. I already have quite a good idea of, you know, who they are what they’re doing. So I wouldn’t say anyone surprised me, but every single person I’ve spoken to has inspired me in some way.
So I’ve probably met over a thousand people in this space, you know, come across hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. And then the ones I’ve chosen to interview and to include in the book are those who’ve inspired me the most in some way where I thought they’re doing something really special, something that needs to exist in the world and something that more people need to know about.
Le’Nise Brothers: Were there any biases that you had prior to these interviews and writing the book that through the interviews that you did, you were, you had to confront or change?
Marina Gerner: Hmm, that’s an interesting question. I think what I’m drawn to intuitively are people from minority backgrounds with unusual stories ’cause that’s my story too.
I was always going to interview people across many countries. I think somebody else may have just focused on the UK, you know, another author may have just found five companies in London. But I, that was never going to be me. You know, I’ve interviewed people in India and in Nigeria and in Japan, and that was, that was always something I was going to do.
And I found entrepreneurs with working class backgrounds and, you know, single mothers and, you know, I grew up with a single mother, so that’s probably another, um, kind of person I, I’m drawn to. So I think I became, oftentimes I became more and more aware as I was interviewing someone. And as I learned more about them, I thought, ah, okay, you know, they’re doing something great and that’s what got my attention first.
But now that I’m talking to them, I can understand like why maybe on a gut level I was drawn to this person.
Le’Nise Brothers: That’s really interesting, that process of doing the research, but then actually connecting with the person, hearing their story and connections that we can make through, you know, meeting people face to face.
That’s really interesting. I want to just move on to talk a little bit about period apps, because you’ve shared that this is a particular interest of yours. The app space is growing rapidly and I see this from working with my clients and you know, as a person who has to keep on top of what’s going on in this market.
I want to talk firstly about this latent need that you’ve written about where there’s a bit of education required before consumers will be fully on board with a product or technology. Do you think that’s still the case with period apps?
Marina Gerner: Hmm. I think that’s probably the space that got destigmatised the most to an extent.
Not fully. But compared to pelvic organ prolapse or incontinence for example, I think those are still more stigmatised areas that will need a lot of education for people to, uh, realise that they’re not the only ones who are suffering with something. Because if you think you’re the only one, you wouldn’t even dare to think that somebody may already have come up with a solution or that somebody might be working on a solution, right? Whereas with period apps, I saw a statistic, I can’t recall it right now, but quite a large proportion of women use period apps now in the UK. It’s very common and there are over, last time I look, there are hundreds and hundreds of period apps on the market. And it’s important to say that they’re all created by different companies.
So there are some companies that take a lot of care that make sure all of their insights are evidence-based and that the privacy of the users is protected, that the data is anonymised and so on. And then there are other companies that are gaming companies or utility companies that have created a period app without much thought just because they realised, oh, there’s an opportunity, here you go, here’s a period app.
And those may not be as helpful as some of the specialised apps. So that’s one thing that’s important to say. I do think we are reaching a level of saturation, maybe to an extent where people have so many different apps to choose from, and Flo Health, which is one of the apps, has become a unicorn in Europe.
You know, they’ve raised a lot of money. So I think we are more educated now than we ever were, but still not on a, on a population level.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah.
Marina Gerner: Um. Yeah, I think the vast majority of women would still not know when they’re ovulating.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah. That’s really interesting that you mentioned that because I interviewed a founder of a, um, period and menstrual cycle related app a couple of weeks ago, and she said that based on their research, about 40% of women don’t know when they ovulate.
Marina Gerner: Exactly. Yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: So you also mentioned Flo Health.
Marina Gerner: Mm-hmm.
Le’Nise Brothers: And this leads to my next question about period apps around security and privacy, because they were involved in a big case around data protection.
Marina Gerner: Mm-hmm.
Le’Nise Brothers: Can you talk a little bit about, from your perspective and your research, when someone is choosing a period app and they might not be concerned about privacy, they might be concerned, but what are the basics that someone needs to just have in their mind when they’re selecting an app?
Marina Gerner: Yeah, so I would definitely read the, uh, privacy policy of that app, just see if they even have one. Some apps don’t have one. And if you read it, you know, is it user friendly? Can you understand what it says? I would also always Google the name of the app and key terms like scandal, data leak privacy concerns, and see what comes up because these things keep changing, right?
An app that may have made mistakes in the past could now have hired a new team. So things keep changing in this space. There was some academic research that was done comparing all the privacy policy apps, uh, all the privacy policies among the apps. And Clue tends to do quite well in academic research.
But I would always recommend with any app actually that concerns your your health or anything else that’s personal. I would always Google the name of the app and a key term like scandal, court case, data leak whatever else comes to mind.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah, I think, we’re giving a lot of information over to these companies and on the surface you might think, well, what does it matter that they know when my first and last day of my period is that why does it matter?
But then you overlay what’s going on in the United States.
Marina Gerner: Yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: And the changes around abortion laws and women being penalised for having miscarriages, then you know, you have to take a more considered look at, you know, who you’re choosing to give your data to.
Marina Gerner: Exactly. Even though it is quite easy to input false data into a period app.
So in some ways it’s not the most revealing data. Usually when people are prosecuted for abortions in the United States it’s not, it doesn’t tend to be period app data that is used, but it’s more likely to be text messages from other people. And Google searches browser history. So there is in the digital universe, there is data that’s actually much more revealing than period app data.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah. I want to just close off by asking you a little bit more about your book, but specifically the title, because what we’re seeing a lot at the moment is businesses and companies and people who work in this space focusing on words that might be flagged. So vagina, vulva, orgasm, these sort of words that working in this space you would just use.
And they almost not, they don’t feel anodyne, but you just say them regularly, but they get flagged and posts get taken down on Instagram or TikTok, or you have to use these kind of bizarre made up words to get around these social media filters.
Marina Gerner: Yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: Um, did you have any experiences that gave you pause when you were promoting your book, specifically around the title?
Marina Gerner: Oh, yes. Long before I started promoting the book, actually, when I came up with the title, it was an issue right away because when we pitched the book, we spoke to multiple publishers, my agent and I, and every editor we spoke to said, you know, it’s a brilliant book, but you’ll need to change the title.
And part of the reason was because they have, every publishing house has a sales team, and the sales team goes out and pitches the book to Amazon and to Waterstones and so on. And if the salespeople are embarrassed by the title, they’re not going to do a good job of pitching it. So after a while I managed to convince them, you know, and I said the whole point is to de-stigmatise the conversation and to speak to that scenario of investors in a boardroom, not wanting to talk about vaginas in a business setting.
So for a while I thought the issue was settled because we did sell the book to the largest women founded publishing house in the world. And then towards the end of my towards the, the end of the deadline, I got a message from my editor saying, well, we’ve had some feedback from bookstores in the US in particular saying they’re not going to display it.
They’re not going to mention it in their newsletters because the title is too much. And please, can you come up with 16 alternative titles? So I did. I called two of my good friends and we brainstormed some titles, and then they tested all of those titles on our target audience. And guess which title won.
Le’Nise Brothers: So you won in the end
Marina Gerner: The Vagina Business? Yes, exactly. It did. Yeah. So people really like it. And then when it came out, I had a venue that, that turned me down from having an event and another author who refused to write an endorsement and some, uh, reviews on Amazon were blocked because people mentioned vagina in the review.
So it keeps coming up. The book has won two awards, and in one case, the organiser was not allowed to announce the title of the book on stage, so she had to have the event somewhere else. So it keeps coming up as an issue, which I always find really interesting, um, right. To be like, oh, there it is again.
Somebody has an issue. But at the same time, I often hear from readers that they love the title, that they’re really energised by it and that they read the book in public on purpose. So I’ve had quite a few people saying to me, you know, I’m reading it on the train on my commute. I read it on the plane, I’m reading it on the beach.
Because they like that reaction.
Le’Nise Brothers: Yeah. These small acts of rebellion.
Marina Gerner: Yeah. That’s it. Yeah, exactly.
Le’Nise Brothers: We talked about the process of writing the book, getting a deal, getting an agent, and then putting the book out in the world. And you’ve said that this is a five to seven year long process so far. Dare I ask what’s coming up next for you?
Marina Gerner: So people usually expect me to say I am working on the next book which I probably will, but what I’m planning to do right now over the next few weeks is absolutely nothing. I’ve been promoting the book for, yeah, about a year and a half now. I’ve been invited to speak at, you know, conferences and events and book clubs all over the world and in the UK and I feel a little bit burnt out right now.
So I’ve decided to take a few weeks off and just do as little as possible because I, I believe that we have different phases, you know, we live in, in seasons and I haven’t done nothing for a while.
Le’Nise Brothers: I, I love that, that taking that time to rest and not rushing off to the next thing.
Marina Gerner: Yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: So thinking about our conversation today and maybe thinking about the interviews and the work that you’ve done, is there a final thought that you’d love to leave listeners with today?
Marina Gerner: Yeah.
We could all have more conversations about these topics, you know, whether it’s with your best friend or a family member. And something I often hear from readers is, you made me rethink the way I talk to my daughter. Or I finally had a conversation with my mother. And I think that’s some of the most powerful feedback I’ve been getting.
Something else, people, women especially often say is, I’m embarrassed by how much I’ve learned from your book. And I think that’s such an interesting way. It’s exactly that phrasing that I get. I’m embarrassed by how much I’ve learned. And people think it’s, it’s an individual thing to, you know, not knowing something.
But the reality is we’re all learning more about women’s health. We’re all in this collective learning experience as a society. So I think there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. And I’m happy to say that I have learned a lot by writing this book. There are many things I didn’t know before I did the research.
And so that’s, yeah, that’s something else I I’d like people to feel is that it’s completely normal to be part of this collective learning experience.
Le’Nise Brothers: There’s always something new to learn and there’s always new research to dig into. And having worked in this space for such a long time now, I’m really heartened by the fact that there is more and more research about specific areas in women’s health now.
So that makes me feel really positive.
Marina Gerner: Yeah.
Le’Nise Brothers: So if people want to buy the book and they want to find out more about the research you’ve done and this Wired article specifically, where can they find that, where can they find out more about you?
Marina Gerner: Sure. So you can find the book at your local bookstore.
If they don’t have it on display, you can always ask very loudly, where’s The Vagina Business? Um, or you can find it on Amazon, of course, I think it’s on offer there right now actually. You can also find me on Substack. I write a free newsletter on women’s health and innovation, and you can find me on Instagram as well.
Le’Nise Brothers: Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming onto the show. Please pick up Marina’s book. It’s fantastic. And yeah, enjoy your, your time of rest.
Marina Gerner: Thank you so much. It was lovely talking to you.