Jessica Bennett is an American journalist who writes on gender issues, politics and culture. She was the first gender editor for The New York Times and a former columnist at Time. She is the author of and editor of .
Bennett began her career at Newsweek, where she was a staff writer, and won a NY Press Club award for the story on the Nikki Catsouras photographs controversy, about a family's struggle to remove their daughter's gruesome death photos from the internet. In 2010, she and two colleagues wrote a cover story titled "Are We There Yet?" about Newsweek's long history of sexism. It appeared on the 40th anniversary of a landmark lawsuit against the magazine, in which 46 female staffers sued the company for gender discrimination. That story became a book, The Good Girls Revolt, by Lynn Povich and an Amazon television series of the same name. Bennett left Newsweek after it merged with The Daily Beast and worked briefly at Tumblr and Sheryl Sandberg's nonprofit Lean In, where she cofounded the Lean In Collection with Getty Images, a photo initiative to change the depiction of women in stock photography. For The New York Times, Bennett was a contributing writer and columnist for the Style section before becoming gender editor. She has written on the #MeToo movement, uncovered allegations of sexual misconduct against the playwright Israel Horovitz, and has covered cultural trends such as the attempt by Playboy magazine to rebrand, feminists joining sororities, and the rise of sexual consent training programs on college campuses. Her profiles include Monica Lewinsky, Paula Broadwell, Whitney Wolfe of Bumble, E. Jean Carroll, Alyssa Milano and Jennifer Aniston. She once wrote a viral piece about her Resting Bitch Face. In 2016, Bennett published her first book, Feminist Fight Club: A Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace, which was called "engaging, practical and hilarious" by Sheryl Sandberg and "a classic f--k you feminist battle guide" by Broad City's Ilana Glazer. In 2017, The New York Times announced that Bennett would serve as its first-ever gender editor. In that role, Bennett was responsible for expanding coverage of women and gender issues across platforms and better engaging women readers. She created the In Her Words newsletter, launched the Overlooked obituaries project, a series of long-overdue obituaries for notable women whose deaths were never covered in the paper, and published the perspectives of young women around the world through “This is 18,” a photography initiative that became an international exhibit and a book. She is cohost of The New York Times’s annual women’s conference, The New Rules Summit.
