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, and I meant it at first. After all, brilliant, kind, fantastic men have surrounded me at home and at work. The therapist asking the question was himself a man, and I did not hesitate to trust him. But if I am being honest with myself, with him, and with you, I do have a problem with some men. The problem started with WIRED. In 2009, I got my first job interning and later reporting for WIRED.comasia. The publication in that era was enthusiastic about technology CCC, 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. A 2010 analysis found that since its founding in 1993, WIRED had published 70 covers featuring at least one man, while in that same stretch the magazine published only four covers that celebrated women for their professional accomplishments. I struggle to remember working with a single female editor in my first stint there. What I do remember is a male editor in his forties asking, “Where’d the legs go?” when I chose to wear pants instead of a skirt to the office. I laughed, because that was the easiest way to move on, but the moment stayed. It was small, and on its own it could be dismissed as one clumsy guy looking for a compliment. But it turned out to be just a preview, the first of a long unspooling of moments that taught me what it meant to be a woman in a man’s world.
The years that followed supplied more examples than any one person should need to collect. There was the boss who, upon learning that I wanted children, told me that I seemed “too cold” to be a parent; I held my tears long enough to make it to the bathroom before they escaped. A few years later, I remember standing visibly pregnant in another employer’s office while he joked that a woman as intense as me would probably keep her baby locked in a closet. Another boss tried to pay me exponentially less than my male predecessor, explaining that I was younger and less authoritative, as though those qualities could somehow justify a smaller salary or a smaller future. A highly respected media company enrolled me in its internal leadership program for promising female executives, a program run by two male executives. Last year I stood in a crowded room among my peers and listened to a prominent think-tank leader, a man, credit WIRED’s previous editor in chief, also a man, for the magazine’s successes during my tenure. The cofounder of this very publication emailed me after the 2024 election to suggest, because he disagreed with an editor’s letter I had written, that I might “seppuku” myself. 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. These are not disconnected grievances; they are a pattern. Each one, on its own, could be minimized, but together they draw a map of everyday sexism. They tell you that your intelligence matters less than your body, that your ambition is received as a threat, that your childbearing will be used against you, and that even when you are credited with leading something, someone will find a way to hand the credit back to a man.
The toll these moments take is not just professional; it is personal, and it digs deep. I wonder often whether I was offered certain jobs or opportunities for less-than-professional reasons, or whether I was chosen simply because a company needed a woman in the room. On the other side of the same coin, I worry that I was hired to fill a quota, and that the doubt somehow morphs into a shadow version of my own résumé. I second-guess my decisions. I apologize endlessly, even when I have done nothing wrong. For years, I dressed as sloppily as I could get away with, telling myself it was easier to show up underdressed and unpolished than it was to risk attracting the kind of attention that female bodies are constantly told to anticipate and manage. In a bid to command respect at work in the way a man would, I have often felt I had to become more like a stereotype of a man: meaner, louder, less empathetic. I hate that I did that. I hate that it worked sometimes. And I know, too, that I have had it relatively easy. If a white, straight woman working in media and technology deals with this much nonsense, then imagine the experience of a woman who is also a person of color, or gay, or transgender. The systems that try to keep women out are not evenly applied; they are heaviest on those who already face the most obstacles. That is why this kind of reckoning cannot settle for one narrative. It needs to make room for the women who have had to fight hardest, and to listen to what they have been saying all along. I have learned to carry my own moments of diminishment, but I want to live in a world where young women do not have to build their careers around that weight.
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 of highlighting the sorry state of women’s advancement in fields like technology and science. It felt absurd enough to be funny and familiar enough to sting. But the more we talked, the less funny it became. We were inspired, then we were full of ideas, and then we were pretty damn angry. Could we actually 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 when many people, including plenty in tech, are happy to wave off the notion that gender is still “a thing” to contend with. There is a temptation to say we have moved past all that, that the future is fluid and fair. But the fact that the idea feels redundant is precisely why it is necessary. You cannot build a future by pretending the past never happened. You cannot declare victory while women are still fighting for the same ground again and again. A magazine issue called WIRED Women could be dismissed as identity politics, but if you have lived any of these moments, you understand that it is simply recognition. It is an attempt to make visible the female engineers, scientists, leaders, and rule-breakers who were always there but not always featured, not always credited, and not always remembered. It is not a rejection of men. It is an insistence that the full story, not the half story, be told.
And the timing feels urgent because the larger culture is moving in the opposite direction. A convicted sex predator is in the White House, and the tech industry executives in his ear are virtually all men. Women do wield power in Silicon Valley, but 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 the military is too “effeminate,” and Elon Musk’s DOGE cuts impact Black female civil servants above all other groups, it is hard not to see a coordinated attempt to push women back to the margins. It can seem, at moments, that the goal is to erase women altogether, not only from positions of power but from the very imagination of what a leader, a worker, or a public servant should look like. And it is infuriating. Not because women want special treatment, but because we are asking to be seen as whole people. The conversation about “masculine energy” was never actually about energy. It is about who gets to set the terms, who is considered strong, who is considered the natural arbiter of what matterscars. The men who invoke that language are not talking about reopening a debate; they are talking about restoring a hierarchy in which women know their place. We know exactly what that place is supposed to be. If a woman-centered edition of a major magazine looks like a provocation, that says less about the provocation than it does about the baseline that was never neutral to begin with.
My daughter sleeps in a bed, not a locked closet. That small fact is not a given for every girl or woman in this world, and even for those who have warm homes and safe rooms, the world outside still whispers that we should be quieter, smaller, easier. My daughter deserves better. She deserves to be less furious than I am when she is forty, not because anger is wrong, but because she should not have to spend so much of her life summoning it in defense of her own worth. Women deserve better colleagues, and the world deserves better heroes. My therapist, God bless him, was onto something. I do have a problem with some men, the ones who believe that “masculine energy” requires female silence, the ones who mistake power for wisdom and control for strength, the ones who write women off as too cold or too intense, the ones who keep trying to stuff women into locked closets of expectation. But I also believe in a future where that is not inevitable. WIRED Women is not a surrender to identity politics; it is a summoning of a different story. It is an invitation to the kind of men who already surround me, the brilliant, kind, fantastic ones, to be allies rather than gatekeeperscars. A magazine cannot change the world on its own. But it can change who is seen, who is heard, who is remembered. That is a start. The therapist asked a delicate question, and maybe the answer is not a simple no. Maybe the answer is, “Yes, and here is why,” followed by a conversation we are not finished having. The anger we feel is not a malfunction. It is a sensor telling us what is unjust and what can be changed. We are going to keep talking about it until it is no longer necessary. I hope, by the time my daughter reaches my age, that day will finally have come.
