Jessica Bennett

Jessica Bennett has spent her award-winning journalism career focusing a gender lens on social issues and culture — from the persistence of workplace inequality to the ripple effects of #MeToo.

She was the first-ever gender editor of The New York Times, where she is now a Contributing Editor, and is the author of two bestselling books, Feminist Fight Club: A Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace and This Is 18: Girls’ Lives Through Girls’ Eyes. She is an adjunct professor at the Arthur L. Carter Graduate School of Journalism at NYU, where she teaches a course called “Reporting the Zeitgeist.” 

Jessica began her career at Newsweek, where she wrote features on modern-day survivalists, a polyamory enclave in her hometown of Seattle, and received an honorary degree from the nation’s first pot school, Oaksterdam. With two colleagues, she documented the story of 46 women who sued Newsweek for gender discrimination in the 1970s, which became a book, and later an Amazon series, The Good Girls Revolt.

At The Times, Jessica led an initiative to expand the coverage of women’s stories across platforms. She helped steer coverage of #MeToo, created the In Her Words newsletter, and founded the Overlooked franchise, which provides obituaries for women who never received them.

She launched “This Is 18,” a multimedia photography project to showcase the lives of 18-year-old girls around the world, which became a book, a zine, and an international photography exhibit. More recently, Jessica was editor of The Primal Scream, which documented the plight of working moms in the pandemic — in words and sound.

As a writer, Jessica has profiled figures as varied as Kathy Hochul, the first woman governor of New York, and Monica Lewinsky, E. Jean Carroll, and Pamela Anderson. She has written features on callout culture, the changing nature of sexual consent, and the politics of Kamala Harris’s history-making blended family.

She has chronicled the battle for a more “inclusive” Miss America, the attempt to rebrand Playboy for the modern era, and spent months investigating sexual assault allegations against a popular playwright, Israel Horovitz. Jessica has marinated in the power of pink lipstick, the overuse of “trauma-speak,” and once wrote a tome about her resting bitch face, which may, in fact, still be the most-read thing she’s ever written.

Jessica speaks on journalism, storytelling, and leadership around the world, and her work has been honored by GLAAD, the Newswomen’s Club of New York, and the International Center of Photography. She lives in Brooklyn, and sometimes Yucca Valley, with her spouse and dog.