Well I sure didn't see this one coming. WIRED magazine -- the indispensable technology and science publication -- has devoted an issue to women. Women as tech workers, as AI moguls, as engineers, as inventors, as the unseen substratum of Silicon Valley. And it's doozy!
... 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.
She is certain it is time for women in tech to speak up:
It’s gotten easier to be an ambitious woman, but if my own personal experience is any indication, not by nearly enough. ... 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.
... 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. ...
This women's issue of WIRED includes two investigative features.
Lauren Goode describes her Search for Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful Women. Her essay is thoughtful and a little bemused. There are women who reach the heights of apparent power, but what's it all for?
... I realized that the real question is not who is most powerful, but why this question is still, in 2026, so difficult to answer. What’s missing from their lives or résumés? Why is there no woman Elon? Why don’t we have our own all-powerful heroine or supervillainess?
... Women now possess all kinds of capital, which is in itself remarkable. But they are choosing not to fully enter the matrix. And really, why would they? What awaits them on the other side?
Sandra Upson provide a survey and a lot of telling responses from 643 women working in various roles in tech. Not all feel alienated by Silicon Valley's futuristic fantasies and bro culture. But too many are.
... Of course, plenty of women in WIRED’s survey reported feeling satisfied with their careers, and not everyone’s been, shall we say, manhandled. But so many have.
More than a third of the women surveyed said they’d experienced gender-based harassment or bias at work.
One after another, women reported being sexually harassed by male supervisors, getting paid less than their male peers, getting passed over for promotions, getting talked over in meetings. They were denied opportunities because men can “handle the pressure better.”
Another popular trope is the man who only seems to hear a good idea when another man says it. You don’t need to listen to a three-hour podcast to find the manosphere; it’s right there in the conference room.
Few respondents are as blunt as this woman:
“I hate the right-wing CEOs marching us along to a dystopian fascist hellscape because they get a boner over escaping to Mars.” ENGINEER, AGE 45–54
Sure looks like that to many of us mere observers of the guys who aim to determine our futures ...
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