Jessica Bennett

Jessica Bennett is an award-winning journalist who has spent her career focusing a gender lens on social issues, politics, and culture—from the persistence of workplace inequality for women to rise of stay-at-home dads. She is the bestselling author of Feminist Fight Club: A Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace and editor of This Is 18: Girls’ Lives Through Girls’ Eyes. The first ever Gender Editor at the New York Times, Bennett is now a contributing editor to the paper’s Opinion section, profiling powerful women and capturing the cultural milieu of our ever-changing now with depth, integrity, and humor.

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Bennett is an industry leader in thinking about ways that media outlets can be more representative in their coverage, in everything from bylines to sourcing to photography. In her role as Gender Editor at the Times, she led a newsroom-wide, cross-platform initiative to elevate coverage of women and gender issues. She launched “Overlooked,” a still ongoing project dedicated to writing obituaries for important historical figures, mostly women, who never received recognition in the Times at the time of their passing. She shaped the paper’s coverage of the #MeToo movement, created the “In Her Words” newsletter, and was the editor of “This is 18,” an interactive and immersive look at the lives of 18-year-old girls around the world that became a book and an international photography exhibit. She also collaborated with the Modern Love vertical on a project about sexual consent on college campuses. 

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More recently at the New York Times, she was editor of “The Primal Scream,” documenting the plight of working mothers during the pandemic and spent a year following three 13-year-old girls for “Being 13,” a project examining the impact of social media on adolescent girls’ self-esteem. She’s also written pieces on the Year of the Girl, the accusatory examinations of sexual assault victims, and the politics of lip gloss.

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In her bestselling books, Jessica offers insight into the lives of modern women. Feminist Fight Club gives credence to the frustrations many women experience in the workplace as gender-based discrimination becomes less overt and harder to prove, but just as damaging as the blatant sexism of yesteryear. Laugh-out-loud funny, but laden with hard data and historical research, this practical guide “shows women how to defeat the enemies―and men how to stop being enemies.” Based on the original interactive piece in the Times, This is 18 is a collection of 22 profiles offering a rare glimpse into what it means for girls to come of age in different cultures around the world.

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Outside of her work for the New York Times, Jessica is an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University, where she teaches a graduate-level course called “Reporting the Zeitgeist.” She co-hosts the In Retrospect podcast, revisiting major pop culture moments from the 80s and 90s with today’s eyes to understand the influence each moment had on our understanding of the world and a woman’s place in it. She also pens “Wait, Really?” on Substack, a more casual examination of culture than her op-eds allow, but still through a feminist lens.

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Prior to joining the New York Times, Jessica worked at Newsweek writing and producing multimedia projects on subjects ranging from school bullying to gay rights. She documented the history of 46 women who sued the magazine for gender discrimination in the 1970s, a story that became both a book and an Amazon series by the name of Good Girls Revolt. Bennett has written for many other outlets including Vogue, TIME, Washington Post, and Cosmopolitan and her work has been honored by GLAAD, the Newswomen’s Club of New York and the International Center of Photography, among other organizations.