gender + women

The throughline of my decade-plus in journalism and academia has been a focus on the stories and perspectives of women.

For The New Yorker:

– Abortion Without Borders is a network of six activist groups of different sizes and types: anarchist collectives, traditional nonprofits, virtual helplines. Together, they take advantage of Europe’s patchwork of abortion laws to help people from Poland and elsewhere access the abortion care they need.
– A new breed of entrepreneurs, backed by a flood of venture capital and private equity funds, is transforming the fertility industry, marking a shift from treating infertility to “selling fertility” in the form of preemptive procedures such as egg and sperm freezing.
– The development of human research protections for people participating in clinical trials has left pregnant women out in the cold. This has been particularly problematic for the millions of reproductive-age essential and frontline workers who need a Covid-19 vaccine.
– For decades, a group of staunchly pro-choice, staunchly Republican activists fought to keep their party from adopting its absolutist stance on abortion. This is their story.
– When Poland changed its IVF law to ban single women from accessing it, a number of women who had already begun treatment were caught in limbo. What happens when the government seizes your embryos?
– The question of whether the definition of infertility should be expanded to included the “socially infertile” — single women and queer couples, for example — opens up the larger question: Is there a right to have a baby?

For The New York Times:

– Why aren’t more people getting married? It’s not a mystery if you stop and ask single women what dating is like.
– New Zealand’s radical, subversive approach to closing the gender pay gap relies on the idea of “comparable worth,” which means asking — what is women’s work really worth? And how do we decide?
– Around the world, people aren’t having the families they desire. What is behind “the end of babies”?
– The city of Boston wants to prove it can close the gender pay gap entirely with a multi-pronged approach. Here’s how it’s going about it.

For The Atlantic:

– Why aren’t South Koreans having babies? Behind South Korea’s plummeting birth rate lies a dramatic gender war.
– Procreation, says philosopher Mara van der Lugt, might be “the greatest philosophical problem of our time.” I examine her inquiry into what it means to have a child.
– Egg freezing was never really about careers, a new book argues. The problem is men.
– When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, it ruptured the supply chain for vital sexual health commodities like condoms and IUDs.
– How the Polish government’s authoritarian Law and Justice Party married “family values” with cash handouts
– A look at how the Turkish government has steadily rolled back of women’s rights
– Is rape is “inevitable” in conflict situations?
– After the Arab Spring, Egyptian women swiftly disappeared from the public sphere. Why?
– In Lebanon, personal status laws discriminate against women, while keeping the country fractured along sectarian lines.
– There are deeper meanings one can take from the “bunga bunga” scandal around former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi .

For The Cut:

– In South Korea, a new generation of Korean feminists are creating a world without men. A deep dive into the “Four No’s” movement of women swearing off heterosexual dating, sex, marriage, and babies.
– Leila was violently raped as a 22-year-old college student. Her rape kit sat unexamined for decades, and in 2022, she watched him walk free.
– Patients of size are being told by fertility doctors that they’re too fat to freeze their eggs. I looked at what’s behind BMI limits for egg-freezing patients, and whether these patients are being needlessly turned away.
– Abortion-rights activist Justyna Wydrzyńska faces jail time in Poland for sending abortion pills to a woman who needed them. Is this the future for the pro-choice movement in America?
– Would you share your frozen eggs? Inside the ethical questions raised by a small but growing number of “freeze and share” programs, in which fertility clinics offer women free egg freezing, in exchange for giving away half of their eggs to an infertile patient.

For The New Republic:

– In “Holding It Together,” the sociologist Jessica Calarco shows how women stand in for America’s lack of a social safety net, and the human costs this exacts on them: a girl in high school looking after her brother’s baby, a divorced single mom supporting her family of five and covering her ex-husband’s car payments so he can visit the kids, the underpaid care workers staffing nurseries so other women can work. I ask what it would look like to have a safety net designed for women, not of women.
– The debate around climate and reproduction has often focused on Millennials who worry about having kids on a burning planet. But three new books focused on the experiences of communities of color show how climate change has already transformed family life and parenting for those on the margins, and what their commitment to survival can teach others.
– As enthusiastic as politicians are about controlling wombs, they, and quite frankly the rest of us, know shockingly little about these organs from whence we all sprung. A new crop of books unpacks the history of uterine misunderstanding, medical mysteries, and misogyny to teach us more about this extraordinary organ.

For Romper:

– The cost of having a child today is so onerous that even middle-class professionals are using spreadsheets to calculate whether and how they can afford to grow their families.
– Amidst an American loneliness epidemic, books that argue for (or against) marriage are missing the point: what if we made friendship, an enduring and widespread form of companionship, a more central component of our lives?

For MIT Technology Review:

– As more and more people seek fertility care overseas, often for costs or legal reasons, the business of IVF courier services has grown. I took an international flight with a batch of my frozen eggs to learn more about these couriers, and how and why they ferry eggs, sperms, and embryos around the globe.
– The coronavirus caused a schism in the fertility sector between its professional body and an alliance of investor-backed clinics, with implications for the field that will long outlast the pandemic.

For The New York Review of Books:

– What is the relationship between human reproduction and the environment? This essay, reviewing three very different books, explores questions of population, fertility health, and the psychology of bringing new life into the world as the climate crisis intensifies around us.

For The Nation:

– The parenting guru Emily Oster has promoted a Darwinistic, data-driven approach to parenting that, I argue in a review of her oeuvre, ultimately lets all families down.

For Harper’s Bazaar:

– In Poland, where abortion is all but banned, a group of activists are training women to obtain and self-manage medication abortion. Meet the Abortion Dream Team, working to “Make Abortion Great Again.”

For The Guardian:

– New Zealand treats sex work as any other form of labor, an approach that has ensured they “don’t have to fight for pennies” during the coronavirus pandemic.
– In vitro fertilization in the U.S., at over $20,000 per round, is more expensive than anywhere else in the world. Fertility “scholarships” for reproductive technologies raise the question: Who can afford to have a baby in America?
 

For Bloomberg Businessweek:

– In the U.S., in-vitro fertilization (IVF) can run $23,000 a cycle. This London clinic has found a way to offer it for one-seventh that amount, offering the first commercially available low-cost IVF.
 

For The Helm:

– The future of fertility treatments might include artificial wombs, a drug to pause ovarian aging, or human eggs grown in a lab. What does this mean for who will be able to have children in the future, and how?

For BBC Capital:

– Women often freeze their eggs in their mid-30s, just as they enter prime wealth-building years. For some women, that means going into debt or delaying goals such as homeownership in order to make an investment in their reproductive future.
 

For Apolitical:

– In 2017, New Zealand recognized that caregivers were paid less because they’re women. Now the country is rectifying historical bias by raising women’s pay, one female-dominated industry at a time.
– How to value women’s unpaid care work? That’s a $10 trillion question governments are just beginning to answer.
–Thanks to Norway’s mandatory paternal leave, or “daddy quota” as it’s known, 90% of fathers take paid leave to care for a new child. The EU is consider implementing a similar policy, but does it lead to true gender equality?

For Foreign Policy and The New York Times Magazine:

– An investigation into how the twin forces of social conservatism and urban development, both pushed by the ruling Justice and Development Party, are punishing sex workers.

For The Wall Street Journal:

– Rising hurdles to economic mobility are cropping up in the female-dominated nursing profession.
– A growing share of women in the labor movement could change what unions bargain for.
– In a global comparison of paid family leave policies, even the least generous European countries put the U.S. to shame.

For Artsy:

– I crunched the numbers on whether female art dealers show more female artists (spoiler alert: yes).
– In the last few years, the art market has witnessed the rise of older women. Here’s why.
– Women’s stories of the sexism and misogyny have plagued the art industry for decades.
– New research on the gender pay gap among Yale art school graduates found women whose art makes it to auction tend to outperform men.

For the Women in the World Foundation:

– This program to educate Bangladeshi garment workers about their sexual and reproductive health meets them where they are: on the factory floor
– Why the reproductive justice movement is becoming the alternative to “choice.”  

For Salon:

– A dive into the murky bioethics of breast milk ice cream.

For Women’s eNews:

– Rio launched women-only subway cars, and women really seemed to like them.
– Meet the activists using arguments from the Quran to promote family planning in Yemen.
– In places where humans live in close contact with animals, scientists are focusing on the linkages between population, health and environmental preservation.

Books:

– “Fast Forward,” researched and co-written with Melanne Verveer, the first U.S. Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues, and Kim Azzarelli. The book, with a foreword by Hillary Clinton, makes the business and moral case for empowering women and accelerating their rise in the economy.