‘No One Wants to Talk About Women in Tech’: Why WIRED Made an Issue All About Women

PUBLISHED 10/16/2026 by

As we talk about technology, AI and a world reimagined by both, it appears harder and harder to recognize the names of the women who both exist within and shape this sector. 

There is a palpable “testosterone culture” in tech, which is most obvious in the discourse surrounding it. Many of the powerful roles in the industry are held by women, yet they often play more shadowy roles—you likely don’t even know their names. 

That is why Katie Drummond and the team at WIRED decided that it was so necessary to talk about women in tech that they would need an entire issue to do so. In an interview with Ms., Drummond tells about how it all came to be.

Though women remain working alongside and often above men in technology, it is misogynistic in itself to not hold the women of Silicon Valley equally accountable for the harm it causes. To not even get to share the blame is in its own way misogyny. WIRED isn’t asking why we aren’t celebrating these women, but why aren’t we talking about them at all?

The Trump Administration is Targeting Ilhan Omar to Send a Message to Immigrants

PUBLISHED 10/16/2026 by

When ICE agents raided Representative Ilhan Omar’s (D-MN) home in Washington, D.C. this week, they didn’t just invade her privacy to further a politically motivated attack on one of Donald Trump’s staunchest critics. They were also sending a message to immigrants: when a high profile, elected official who came to the U.S. as a child and naturalized more than 25 years ago can be threatened with deportation, no one is safe. Immigrant women, Muslim immigrants, refugees and even naturalized citizens can’t help but wonder who will be next.

A Farewell to L7, the Band That Rocked for Choice and Refused to Play Nice

PUBLISHED 10/15/2026 by

No band has been louder about its feminism—and braver in putting their bodies where their mouths are—than L7, the Los Angeles rock band who recently launched their farewell world tour, despite a year marked by tragic loss.

L7’s farewell tour plans almost came crashing to a halt in July, when bassist Jennifer Finch was diagnosed with brain cancer. Mere days after the announcement of her illness with a GoFundMe campaign, Finch died at age 59.

Jennifer Finch’s death was widely mourned in feminist and music circles. But Sparks doesn’t want to—can’t, really—talk much about it. The show has gone on: Janis Tanaka, who played bass in L7 in the late ‘90s, has rejoined the group.

An ‘Old Boy’s Network’: Groundbreaking Report Exposes Decades of Catholic Clergy Abuse and Ongoing Protection of Abusers

PUBLISHED 10/14/2026 by and

Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell released a 203-page report on Sept. 30 showing more than 270 Catholic priests abused at least 1,000 children over several decades in the dioceses of Fall River, Springfield and Worcester.

The report focuses on how church leadership, including bishops, perpetuated this abuse by failing to report crimes to the police, obstructing investigations into these crimes and repeatedly reassigning perpetrators to new parishes, where they abused even more children. The report also details the ways current Catholic leadership continues to circumvent policies and procedures designed to protect children.

“For decades, survivors of clergy sexual abuse, including those who are no longer alive, have carried the devastating consequences of abuse, while the institutions entrusted with their care too often failed to protect them,” said AG Campbell. “This report provides for the first time a public accounting of the unimaginable harms afflicted on children in the Fall River, Springfield and Worcester dioceses.”

This report is the latest of many revealing widespread clergy sexual abuse and institutional coverups in the Catholic Church and other male-dominated patriarchal religions.

The Massachusetts attorney general’s report catalogs testimony from several survivors of abuse, including Frank Fitzpatrick, who was repeatedly gang-raped by James Porter and other priests beginning when he was a 9-year-old altar boy.

“I am that boy. I carry him with me, always,” wrote Fitzpatrick. “He took your violence, you shameful enablers who do nothing but cover up and perpetuate the cycle of systemic abuse. You call yourselves representatives of God. God has no place in anything you stand for. God is safety; God is nurturing; God is protection; God is Love.”

Is the Cornell Rape Case a Turning Point for Men?

PUBLISHED 10/14/2026 by

What allegedly took place at Cornell was a preventable tragedy. One young man with the guts to say, “This is wrong!” might have stopped it from happening.

It’s a crying shame that didn’t happen. But a silver lining in this sorry tale is that a growing number of men seem to grasp that their silence has contributed to the problem.

Programming with boys and young men should go beyond awareness-raising and behavior-change messaging, to address the gender norms, power relations and social structures that sustain violence.

This means giving young men the opportunity to talk with each other, as well as with their female peers, about what it means to be a man.

This means allowing them to ask and answer the following sorts of questions:

—If you’re a guy, what does it mean to be one of the guys?
—Are you willing to compromise your values for the sake of fitting in?
—What is the price of being part of the brotherhood?
—Is other men’s approval more important than treating women with respect and dignity?

Keeping Score: Women Marines Pass Tougher Fitness Standards; Congressional Candidate Hopes Rape Survivors ‘Have the Baby’; Sotomayor Questions Colleagues’ Understanding of First Amendment

PUBLISHED 10/14/2026 by

In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too, in this biweekly roundup.

This week:
—”That is my greatest fear: that people don’t understand our system of government. They don’t understand what the First Amendment means. Some of my colleagues don’t either, by the way. And I’m not joking about that,” said Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
—A congressional candidate hopes rape survivors “have the baby.”
—Almost 70 percent of American women have experienced sexual violence, and 61 percent reported intimate partner violence (IPV).
—California passes new law finally banning child marriage.
—Mothers of young children remain dramatically underrepresented in government: Only 7.2 percent of Congress members are moms with minor children, compared to 18 percent of the adult population.
—Harvey Weinstein is resentenced to 15 years in prison in New York.
—Amazon accused of discriminating against pregnant employees using reasonable accommodations or medical leave.
—Public pressure led a district attorney to reopen cases against the “Cornell 7” fraternity members accused of gang raping a fellow student.
—Trump flip-flops opinion on mail voting ahead of the November election.
—Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear calls for Democrats to be a “party of compassion and empathy” towards trans students.

… and more.

New Poll: Four in Five Voters Fear Their Rights Are Being Taken Away. They’re Also Determined to Vote.

PUBLISHED 10/14/2026 by

Voters are increasingly concerned about threats to their rights, democracy and the 2026 elections, a new national poll from the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights shows.

The 2026 Civil Rights Monitor found 82 percent of voters are concerned that rights and freedoms are being taken away or rolled back—the highest level recorded in the five-year history of the poll.

After a Long Campaign, California Finally Banned Child Marriage. Survivors Made It Happen.

PUBLISHED 10/14/2026 by

I grew up around women who were wed while they were still children. My grandmother was married at just 10 years old and my aunt at 16. At school, friends of mine married. I watched their schooling stop, pregnancies that came too soon, choices made for them rather than by them. Relatives would ask, gently but pointedly, when I intended to do the same, as though delaying it only put off something inevitable.

What haunted me then still haunts me now is how ordinary everyone around us made it seem.

That ordinariness is how child marriage has survived for so long in the United States. California has now banned it.

On Sept. 30, Governor Gavin Newsom signed bill AB 1267, setting 18 as the minimum age for marriage with no exceptions.

California has just shown that what was once treated as ordinary does not have to remain inevitable. Eighteen states have now drawn a clear line.The rest of the country should follow. No child’s right to safety, freedom and a future of their own choosing should depend on the state in which they happens to live.

Where Are Men’s Voices in the Conversation About Jane Doe and the Cornell 7?

PUBLISHED 10/13/2026 by

Imagine a 4-year-old boy scraping his knee and starting to cry. What if his caregiver scolded, “Big boys don’t cry.” It still happens.

We must intervene before boys get the message to toughen up and harden their hearts.

Cornell fraternity men were once 4 years old. What were they taught about expressing their feelings, about bullies, about respecting girls—and themselves?

We spend billions responding to men’s violence and almost nothing studying where it starts.

Former Arkansas Farmer Hallie Shoffner Lost Her Family Farm. Now She’s Running to Unseat Sen. Tom Cotton.

PUBLISHED 10/13/2026 by

Hallie Shoffner grew up in the Arkansas Delta, left to earn a bachelor’s degree at Vanderbilt, then came home to become a farmer. She followed her parents into a business that had been in the family for 150 years.

In 2025, she was forced to close the farm.

Now Shoffner, 38, is the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, mounting a long-shot bid to unseat two-term Republican Tom Cotton. Her experience in agriculture is central to a campaign focused on rural economic distress and on her argument that federal policy is failing families like hers.