‘Whatever your gender, if you are in the halls of power in these companies, WIRED will cover you with an accountability mindset.’
Katie Drummond “can’t remember working with a single female editor during [her] first stint at WIRED.” The magazine’s global editorial director put out one of the most relatable and heartbreaking editor’s letters in a long time, to commemorate the magazine’s first “Women Issue.” In it, she describes not only the cultural need (yes, still) for a women’s issue in the publication, but also calls out her experience with gender discrimination—including some frankly gross comments made by her very own bosses and teammates—over the past 17 years.
She writes:
“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. … 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.”
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 Drummond and her team decided that it was more necessary than ever to talk about women in tech—and that they would need an entire issue of the magazine to do so. In an interview with Ms., Drummond explains how the issue came to be.
“[WIRED Women] did start at a team happy hour in San Francisco. Really, it was we were talking about how WIRED’s been around for 33 years. It started as a tech utopian publication that really championed technology, and that—whether intentionally or not—championed men predominantly over women,” Drummond says. WIRED began in the early 1990s—back when the internet was not fundamental to our daily existence, but rather something used by a fringe few—with monthly issues and web-exclusive content devoted to talking about technology and its role in shaping our world.
“WIRED has a history of being very ‘bro-y’ and really leaning into male tech executives, men in all shapes and sizes. I’m the second woman to run WIRED in 33 years,” Drummond says. “It was sort of ludicrous and funny, but also offensive to many of us, including the men that we work with. In the year 2026, it’s still not straightforward that women are in the positions of power that they should be in. That women still are disproportionately underrepresented in tech, in science, in innovation, in all of these spaces that we cover.”
Though of course many women work alongside and often above men in the tech industry, the issue points out that it’s almost misogynistic in itself to not hold the women of Silicon Valley equally accountable for the many harms the industry causes. WIRED isn’t asking why we aren’t celebrating these women—rather, the magazine wonders, why aren’t we talking about them at all?
I asked Drummond how her team navigated the delicate balance of bringing powerful women in tech to the forefront while not letting their power be forgotten as their companies cause harm.
“We made a very deliberate decision not to champion women in the C-suite at these companies. They exist. [WIRED Women] did this great story on who’s the most powerful woman in Silicon Valley, and why is that still such a hard question to answer?” Drummond says. “We didn’t like to ascribe any sort of specific value to that, other than the idea of representation being important and trying to understand why men were still so dominant. The reality is, whatever your gender, if you are in the halls of power in these companies, WIRED will cover you with an accountability mindset.”
In the article she’s referring to, writer Lauren Goode asks, “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?”
Drummond says, “Whether you’re Lisa Su at AMD or Jensen Huang at Nvidia, you’ll get the same treatment from us journalistically. We want to figure out, why are there so few Lisa Sus? Why are there so many Jensen Huangs? Why are there still so few women running some of these big companies? But we’re going to cover them with the same rigor that we would otherwise.”
The piece also brings up an important point: We know less about the women in these roles, good or bad, because they wouldn’t be respected—or even able to ascend that high—if they acted in some of the ways their male counterparts do. “[Women in Silicon Valley are] also complex examples of power,” Goode writes. “I thought about the powerful figures now schlepping to D.C. on a regular basis to try to bend the ear of a man and his army of acolytes who regularly minimize and degrade women. … Significantly more women told me it’s not worth it to post their politics on X or to say the spicy truth in interviews or to try to be a podcast bro.”
Is it, as Drummond’s letter hypothetically poses, potentially a mark of progress that nobody wants to talk about women in tech anymore? She doesn’t think so.
“I think so many people sort of think that the conversation around gender is over, and that’s for a few reasons. There are so many important conversations to be having right now about diversity of all stripes, but there’s also this idea that it’s been solved. We think that could not be further from the truth,” Drummond says. “The worst thing we could do is put out a women’s issue and have it be really perfunctory, or do-goodery, or noble, or virtuous. We just wanted it to feel fun. We wanted it to be punchy. We wanted to get people’s attention.”
At this point, the implications of the intersection of tech and gender extend far beyond Silicon Valley and how CEOs behave on X. Whether we like it or not, the tech industry is involved in every aspect of daily life, from phones to the devices and apps that track our health, to our traffic tickets, our music and entertainment, our backyards and our very own bodies. To neglect talking about gender and tech is to neglect talking about women more generally.
WIRED’s issue dives into these stories—from the effect of the manosphere and the victims of exploitative online pornography, to menopause and profit-extracting egg-freezing startups. The issue highlights how women are neglected, harmed or taken advantage of by an industry that is using their fears, health and basic needs to profit. “We felt like women’s health is so underrepresented in so many ways,” Drummond tells Ms. “Even in the field of medicine or medical research, it doesn’t get enough attention, and this felt like an opportunity for us to shine a light on some of those stories.”
“We wanted to really get into some of these much more personal and intimate—but still societally pervasive issues—around health, around sexual assault,” she says. “We wanted it to feel like it encompassed as much as possible what women experience beyond just the work. We didn’t want it to just be all about women in tech. We wanted it to be about women, so [we looked] at it from a variety of angles.”
This means WIRED’s issue spans beyond the women at the top of tech who are making decisions that affect all of us without us knowing their names: It also explores the intricacies about talking about gender in the first place. The balance of knowing whether it is worth it, if it is even effective, to talk about gender in a place and time when those conversations are shuttered over and over. For many companies in Silicon Valley, the answer is no. For Drummond and her staff, the answer was yes.
I asked Drummond if there was anything that shocked her or her team after investigating women and tech from the inside, and how she felt after spending more time with the weight of gender in this industry specifically. “I feel naive to have been surprised at this, but when we did this survey, we surveyed more than 600 women in tech… It was the percentage of them who had experienced some form of workplace harassment,” she says. “I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s always surprising and dismaying to realize how pervasive that still is. That combined with the fact that the majority of those women also said that they were satisfied with their jobs.”
“Those two statistics together paint to me a really dismaying picture: women are so used to it. We’re so used to not being treated the way we should at work, that we’re happy enough with our jobs, despite the fact that we experience all varieties of harassment in the workplace,” she says. “Even though maybe it shouldn’t be surprising, [it] was surprising and disappointing.”
WIRED‘s women issue shows: people are ready to talk about women in tech. Drummond finds this validating: “It feels like people are really hungry to have these conversations, and the fact that they’re happening less often only makes people hungrier for someone to actually just say something.”
