Reflections on Sexism in Media, Tech, and the Creation of WIRED Women

It didn’t take more than a few sessions for my new therapist to ask me a delicate question.

“Katie … do you have a problem with men?”

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’t think twice about confiding in.

But if I’m being honest with myself, my therapist, and you? I do have a problem with some 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—yes, four—that celebrate women for their professional accomplishments. I can’t remember working with a single female editor during my first stint at WIRED. I do, however, remember a 40-something male editor asking “where’d the legs go?” when I opted to wear pants instead of a skirt to the office.

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 “too cold” 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’s 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’s previous editor in chief (also male) with the magazine’s successes during my tenure. Let’s not forget the cofounder of this very publication, who suggested via email following the 2024 election that I might “seppuku” myself because he disagreed with an editor’s letter I’d written. And in 2023, The New York Times published a story about my appointment as WIRED’s global editorial director—then 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.

It’s 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—it 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’ve often felt the need to behave more like a stereotypical one: meaner, louder, less empathetic. I hate that. And I’ve 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.

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’s rag, complete with over-the-top pink design and outrageous cover lines—a tongue-in-cheek way to highlight the sorry state of women’s 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 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—and plenty in tech—are happy to wave off the notion that gender is still “a thing” to contend with.

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 “masculine energy” in his workforce, and Pete Hegseth says that the military is too “effeminate,” and Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts impact Black female civil servants above all other groups—it can seem like they want to erase women altogether. And it’s infuriating. The world deserves better heroes, women deserve better colleagues, and my daughter—who sleeps in a bed, not a locked closet—deserves to be less furious than I am when she’s 40. My therapist, God bless him, was onto something.