{"id":7403,"date":"2026-09-21T16:34:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T16:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=7403"},"modified":"2026-09-21T16:34:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T16:34:12","slug":"wired-women-editors-letter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=7403","title":{"rendered":"Women Still Face Too Much Bullshit\u2014in Silicon Valley and Beyond"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It didn\u2019t take<\/span> more than a few sessions for my new therapist to ask me a delicate question.<\/p>\n
\u201cKatie \u2026 do you have a problem with men?\u201d<\/p>\n
I wanted to say no. After all, brilliant, kind, fantastic men have long surrounded me at home and at work. The therapist in question was himself a man, and one I didn\u2019t think twice about confiding in.<\/p>\n
But if I\u2019m being honest with myself, my therapist, and you? I do have a problem with some<\/em> men. And it started with WIRED. In 2009, I got my first job interning and later reporting for WIRED.com. The publication in that era was enthusiastic about technology, and about the innovators and visionaries defining the future. For decades, WIRED eagerly reinforced the narrative that the vast majority of those geniuses were men: One 2010 analysis found that since its founding in 1993, WIRED had published 70 covers featuring at least one man. In that same span, the magazine published four covers\u2014yes, four<\/em>\u2014that celebrate women for their professional accomplishments. I can\u2019t remember working with a single female editor during my first stint at WIRED. I do, however, remember a 40-something male editor asking \u201cwhere\u2019d the legs go?\u201d when I opted to wear pants instead of a skirt to the office.<\/p>\n
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Photo-illustration: WIRED Staff; Vincent Tullo<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
It turned out to be just a preview. Off the top of my head, and across a 17-year career: There was the boss who, upon learning that I wanted kids, said that I seemed \u201ctoo cold\u201d to be a parent. I held my tears long enough to make it to the bathroom. A few years later, I remember being visibly pregnant in another employer\u2019s office, as he joked that a woman as intense as me would probably keep her baby locked in a closet. One boss tried to pay me exponentially less than my male predecessor, because, he said, I was younger and less authoritative. A highly regarded media company enrolled me in its internal program for promising female leaders, which was being run by two male executives. I stood last year among a crowd of my peers at a packed event, listening to a prominent think-tank leader (male) credit WIRED\u2019s previous editor in chief (also male) with the magazine\u2019s successes during my tenure. Let\u2019s not forget the cofounder of this very publication, who suggested via email following the 2024 election that I might \u201cseppuku\u201d myself because he disagreed with an editor\u2019s letter I\u2019d written. And in 2023, The New York Times published a story about my appointment as WIRED\u2019s global editorial director\u2014then had to issue a correction for inaccurately stating that I was the first woman to run the magazine. In fact, Katrina Heron ran WIRED from 1997 to 2001.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s gotten easier to be an ambitious woman, but if my own personal experience is any indication, not by nearly enough. The steady reminders of sexism and deeply ingrained gender dynamics have had consequences: I wonder, often, if I was granted certain jobs or opportunities for less-than-professional reasons; on the flip side, I also wonder if I got them to fulfill some kind of quota. I second-guess my decisions. I apologize endlessly. For years, I dressed as sloppily as possible\u2014it was easier to show up unprofessionally than risk attracting any attention. In a bid to command the respect at work that a man would, I\u2019ve often felt the need to behave more like a stereotypical one: meaner, louder, less empathetic. I hate that. And I\u2019ve got it relatively easy: If a white, straight woman working in media and technology deals with this much bullshit, imagine the experience of a woman who happens to be a person of color, or gay, or transgender.<\/p>\n
WIRED Women started as a joke at our weekly San Francisco happy hour; we laughed at the idea of turning a historically dude-loving publication into a women\u2019s rag, complete with over-the-top pink design and outrageous cover lines\u2014a tongue-in-cheek way to highlight the sorry state of women\u2019s advancement in fields like tech and science. We soon found ourselves inspired, full of ideas, and ultimately pretty damn angry. But could we do it? Should<\/em> we? Deciding in 2026 to commit an entire issue to all things women might seem regressive, or too obvious, or even unnecessary in an era where many people\u2014and plenty in tech\u2014are happy to wave off the notion that gender is still \u201ca thing\u201d to contend with.<\/p>\n
I disagree. A convicted sex predator, after all, is in the White House; the tech industry executives in his ear are virtually all men. Women do wield power in Silicon Valley, but far too many still serve at the pleasure of a man above them. When Mark Zuckerberg bemoans the loss of \u201cmasculine energy\u201d in his workforce, and Pete Hegseth says that the military is too \u201ceffeminate,\u201d and Elon Musk\u2019s DOGE cuts impact Black female civil servants above all other groups\u2014it can seem like they want to erase women altogether. And it\u2019s infuriating. The world deserves better heroes, women deserve better colleagues, and my daughter\u2014who sleeps in a bed, not a locked closet\u2014deserves to be less furious than I am when she\u2019s 40. My therapist, God bless him, was onto something.<\/p>\n
![\"Katie](\"https:\/\/media.wired.com\/photos\/6aaecbd75ca6cefcd93ed8a0\/master\/w_1600%2Cc_limit\/katie-drummond-web-purple.jpg\"\/)
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