Jessica Bennett (journalist)

Bennett grew up in Seattle, Washington, where she attended Garfield High School. She received a B.S. in journalism from Boston University, where she worked as a student reporter covering crime at The Boston Globe.

Bennett moved to New York City to become a research assistant to the late Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett, longtime chronicler of corrupt city politics and politicians, including Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump.[5]

She went on to become a staff writer at Newsweek, where she spent six years, 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.[6][7] In 2010, she and two colleagues wrote a cover story titled "Are We There Yet?"[8] about Newsweek's long history of sexism. It appeared on the 40th anniversary of a landmark lawsuit against the magazine,[9] in which 46 female staffers sued the company for gender discrimination. That story became a book, The Good Girls Revolt, by Lynn Povich[10] and an Amazon television series of the same name.[11]

Bennett left Newsweek after it merged with The Daily Beast and worked briefly at Tumblr[12] and Sheryl Sandberg's nonprofit Lean In,[13] where she cofounded the Lean In Collection with Getty Images, a photo initiative to change the depiction of women in stock photography.[14] She later became a columnist for Time,[15] writing on women and culture.

For The New York Times, Bennett has been a contributing writer and columnist[16] for the Style section since 2015. From 2017 to 2020, she served as the newspaper's first-ever gender editor,[17] working to expand coverage of women and gender issues across platforms. In that role, Bennett created the In Her Words newsletter,[18] launched the Overlooked obituaries project[19] and published the perspectives of young women around the world through “This is 18,”[20] a photography initiative that became an international exhibit and book. She cohosted The Times’s annual women’s conference, The New Rules Summit[21] and guided the newspaper's coverage of the centennial of the 19th amendment.[22]

Bennett has written on the #MeToo movement,[23] uncovered allegations of sexual misconduct against the playwright Israel Horovitz,[24] and has covered cultural trends such as the attempt by Playboy magazine to rebrand,[25] feminists joining sororities,[26] the rise of sexual consent training programs on college campuses[27] and the evolution of Miss America.[28] Her profiles include Monica Lewinsky,[29] Paula Broadwell,[30] Ellen Pao,[31] E. Jean Carroll,[32] Jennifer Aniston[33] and Katie Hill.[34] She once wrote a viral piece about her Resting Bitch Face.[35]

In 2016, Bennett published her first book, Feminist Fight Club: A Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace,[36] which was called "engaging, practical and hilarious" by Sheryl Sandberg[3] and "a classic f--k you feminist battle guide" by Ilana Glazer.[3]

She is editor of This Is 18: Girls Lives Through Girls’ Eyes (Abrams, 2019), an expansion of The New York Times project of the same name.[4]

Bennett has been honored by the Newswomen's Club of New York,[37] GLAAD Media Award,[38] the New York Press Club[39] and the International Center of Photography.[40]

• Jessica Bennett personal website
• Articles by Jessica Bennett for The New York Times
• Feminist Fight Club: An Office Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace