Marissa Fayer

CEO, DeepLook Medical. Founder, HERhealthEQ. Author of Undervalued to Unavoidable: Women's Health as Infrastructure (June 2026).

The investment case for treating women's health as economic infrastructure.

05/24/2026

11 days from book release day! Final manuscript is loaded for print, cover and interior design are locked, and I’m excited and nervous to get this labor of love out into the world!! (And still rereading chapters to prep for speaking about it!)

05/14/2026

Advocacy is a tool for everyone to use your voice, your influence, and your $ to stand up for what you believe and your values. And also for people who don’t have that access. Thank you for having me speak at the Whole Health Summit today in NYC.

05/04/2026

Your HRT coverage isn’t the answer.

Companies are finally talking about menopause. They’re covering HRT. They’re offering coaching and expanded leave. That’s progress, but it’s solving the wrong problem.

The cost of menopause to companies isn’t sick days. Mayo Clinic puts that at $1.8 billion a year in the U.S. The bigger cost is the 50-year-old VP who quietly stops raising her hand for the next role. The operator who opts out of the C-suite track. None of that shows up in exit data. It gets coded as “burnout” or “timing,” and the company moves on.

Most of these women aren’t leaving. They’re staying. They’re just playing smaller. From the outside it looks like stability. From the inside it’s a slow erosion of leadership capacity, and no benefits package is going to fix it.

Menopause isn’t a benefits question. It’s an infrastructure question. And most companies are failing the test.

Full piece in bio.

05/03/2026

Hero’s. Real ones.!!!!! This week, I had one of the greatest honors of my life—meeting the four astronauts who just traveled around the moon and made it back safely on the Artemis II mission. I don’t get star-struck by celebrities. But this was different. These are the people who move humanity forward.

I was crying. My knees actually buckled. And yes—Astronaut Christina Koch fist bumped me. I’m still not over it!!!

It’s taken me a few days to even process what this meant. Because this wasn’t just a moment. It was personal.

I was that little girl who never grew out of the “I want to be an astronaut” phase. I went to school for it. I interned in aerospace companies. I was all in—until the industry collapsed around 1999/2000, right when I was trying to enter it.

Life took me in a different direction. And I’m deeply grateful it did. I’ve found my life’s work in women’s health, and I love what I get to build every day.
But if I’m being honest—the dream never left.

🚀 I still watch rocket launches live.
🚀 I follow every mission.
🚀 I’ve put deposits down for commercial space flight.
🚀 I go to dark-sky retreats just to sit and look up.

I’m still that girl, just in a different role. So standing there, face-to-face with people who have actually left this planet… it hit something deeper than I expected.

What stayed with me most wasn’t just what they accomplished—but how they talked about it. Not ego. Not individual achievement. Team. Every single one of them made it clear: they didn’t go alone. The mission, the success, the return—it was built by thousands of people most of us will never see.

That level of humility, at that level of achievement, is rare. And needed.
Because in a world that celebrates individuals, it’s a reminder that the biggest things we do—whether it’s going to space or building companies or changing healthcare—are never done alone.

🚀 Some dreams evolve. Some just wait for you to catch back up to them.

This is one of those moments I know I’ll carry with me for a long time.

05/02/2026

The World Economic Forum published State of Women’s Health in Numbers last month. Go find it.

Then notice what I noticed. Every one of those numbers has been published before. Not a decade ago and then forgotten. Every year. By McKinsey, by the Lancet, by the World Bank, by Rock Health. The $1 trillion cost isn’t new. The $9 return isn’t new. Venture funding under 2% isn’t new.

We’ve known. We’ve been knowing.

If your reaction to reading the WEF piece was “we need more awareness,” I’d push back. We don’t have an awareness problem. We have a courage problem. The data is everywhere. What’s missing is anyone with capital authority who’s willing to act on it.

That’s what the book is about. Out June 4. Preorder in bio.

04/13/2026

This is the story I tell when people ask how HERhealthEQ started.
I was living in Costa Rica, working for the largest mammography equipment company in the world. A friend who ran the country's biggest breast cancer charity told me women in an entire region had stopped getting screened because the only mammography machine was broken. Had been broken for years.
I knew, because it was my job to know, that there were functional machines sitting in U.S. warehouses. Equipment I had watched go into dumpsters to make room for newer models.
So we got one there. It took months of negotiations with the Costa Rican government and the U.S. Embassy. After it was installed, the regional mortality rate dropped by approximately tenfold over five years.
That was one machine in one region. That's where all of this started.

04/10/2026

If you've ever raised women's health in a corporate meeting and watched the room go quiet, I want you to know: the problem wasn't your argument. It was the framing.

Executives listen for financial impact. When you walk in with retention data, absenteeism costs, and downstream healthcare spending, the conversation changes completely.

Replacing a mid-career employee costs 1.5 to 2 times their salary. Women in their 30s to 50s are at peak leadership trajectory while navigating health transitions that go completely unsupported in most organizations. That's not a wellness issue. That's a P&L issue.

More on this on the site. Link in comments.

04/07/2026

Today is World Health Day, and the conversation will be about access. It should be.

But here's the part that usually gets skipped.

The system women are accessing was built around a default patient who was male. Clinical trials, diagnostic thresholds, drug dosing: women were added later, and the foundation was rarely recalibrated. That's not ancient history. Women weren't even required to be included in clinical trials in the U.S. until 1993.

Equal access to that system isn't equity. It's giving everyone the same door into a building that was designed for someone else.

04/04/2026

Here's something that should be in every economic forecast but isn't: what happens when half the population's health conditions go underdiagnosed, undertreated, and underfunded?

McKinsey put a number on it last year: $1 trillion a year. That's what the global economy loses annually from underinvesting in women's health.

Women weren't even included in most clinical trials until 1993. Venture funding for the sector is still below 2%. Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer of women globally, and it's underdiagnosed because symptoms look different than in men.

These aren't niche problems. They're structural inefficiencies hiding in plain sight in every economy on the planet.

04/03/2026

For years I called women's health a cause. I fundraised for it. I argued for it in rooms where it was treated as secondary.

Then I realized the language was the problem.

When you call something a cause, you make it easy to cut. Causes depend on who's holding the flag this year. Infrastructure doesn't work that way. Nobody debates whether roads deserve funding.

Women aren't a special interest group. They're the foundation economies are built on. I started using the word infrastructure and the conversations changed. That's the lens behind everything I do now, from DeepLook to HERhealthEQ to my book Undervalued to Unavoidable.

Address

New York, NY

Website

https://marissafayer.com/

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