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A Game-Changing Approach: Providing Anonymous Hotel Check-Ins for Domestic and Sexual Violence Survivors

PUBLISHED 10/24/2025 by

Safe Stays by ReloShare partners with hotels nationwide to protect survivors’ identities and expand access to secure housing.

“When guests check in, hotel staff often insist on seeing their identification and recording their full name. Because hotel staff members are not trained advocates, she said, they probably won’t be on high alert if an abuser calls or walks through the door,” said Ruth Glenn, the former chief executive and president of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. And “leaving is often the most dangerous time for survivors of abuse,” according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline.

Paige Allmendinger, Safe Stays by ReloShare’s chief product officer, told Ms., “First, we needed the ability for a guest to check in under a fake name, with no ID required at check-in. If the survivor’s real name isn’t tied to the reservation and an abuser calls the hotel searching for them, there won’t be any record that the survivor is in-house, giving the survivor a degree of protection at the very time they need it most.

“Second, we needed hotels to forego the usual requirement for a credit card from the guest or agency at check-in. Credit-card transactions can expose location putting survivors at risk. While social service organizations may have funding to pay for hotel stays, many have limited credit lines for upfront payment or can’t send staff in person to present a card at check-in.”

One in Three U.S. Women Is Stalked. A Harvard Study Is Finally Talking About It.

PUBLISHED 10/22/2025 by

When Tammy was being stalked by her ex, she didn’t know what to do or where to go. Tammy said it was the roughest part of her life, mentally and physically. Soon after, Human Options, a nonprofit based on Orange County, Calif., became her outlet and a safe haven for her to receive legal counseling and housing.

Tammy’s case is not isolated. In a recent study out of Harvard, 66,270 women were studied over a nearly 20-year period to determine the health effects of stalking: Women become more susceptible to heart disease.

From Veterans to Caregivers—The Importance of Expanding Remote Education for Women Worldwide

PUBLISHED 9/27/2025 by

We need to continue normalizing and destigmatizing nontraditional remote learning opportunities as valid, accessible pathways toward women’s realization of their right to an education. 

This means expanding the number of hybrid and remote learning options available through well-established colleges and universities.

It means rethinking the types of technological adaptations deemed as “undue hardships” in the context of student disability.

It means investing in longitudinal research regarding best pedagogical practices—the impacts of evidence-based instructional interventions in the remote learning milieu—and in the professional development of online instructors in synchronous and asynchronous online programs to ensure impact. 

To do so is to ensure that those who fight to pursue their education in nontraditional ways are not shortchanged, but rather equipped with the social and intellectual capital needed to work against the existential threats of our time.

The Abortion Pill That Transformed Medicine Is Under Attack

PUBLISHED 9/26/2025 by | UPDATED 10/1/2025 at 12:13 P.M. PT

By approving mifepristone (the first pill in the two-step medication abortion regimen), the Food and Drug Administration gave people access to one of the safest, most effective and most studied medications in modern medicine.

Yet despite overwhelming evidence and broad public support, there are relentless attempts to restrict access to mifepristone. In 2023, a coalition led by extremist antiabortion groups filed a lawsuit seeking to roll back the FDA’s approval of the drug (which the Supreme Court ultimately dismissed). But the attacks have continued, fueled by a dangerous belief that science is optional.

We’ve seen it with COVID vaccines. We’ve seen it with birth control. We’ve seen it in lawsuits claiming Tylenol causes autism. We’ve even seen people question milk pasteurization and folic acid in prenatal vitamins—two of the most basic public health measures we have. The through line is the same: Ignore the evidence, stir up doubt and leave patients to bear the consequences.

Over a Million Women Are at Risk of a Pay Cut Under a New Trump Rule

PUBLISHED 8/20/2025 by

The Trump administration’s Department of Labor recently proposed a new rule that would directly take earnings away from the more than 1.5 million home care workers in the United States, more than 80 percent women, and their families.

Between 2019 and 2040, the population of adults ages 65 and older is expected to balloon from 54 million people to nearly 81 million people, comprising an estimated 22 percent of the U.S. population. That means that the direct care workforce is projected to grow at a faster rate than any other occupation over the next decade.

‘Care Is Baked Into a Healthy, Functioning Economy’: Economists Lenore Palladino and Rakeen Mabud on How to Advance Economic Justice

PUBLISHED 8/12/2025 by

The experts and Ms. contributors assessed the state of the U.S. care crisis and women’s economic inequality in the latest episode of the Ms. podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward—and broke down why investing in women and care workers is good policy. 

Rakeen Mabud: “We’re at a really pivotal moment and a really complicated moment. We have conservative, pronatalist voices, with more institutional power than they have ever had, at least in modern times. They are advancing an agenda of deep progressive patriarchy, whiteness—and wealth, frankly, is the third prong of that. And they are co-opting progressive policy ideas to do it.”

Lenore Palladino: “There are schools, and there are childcare centers, and there are hospitals being shut down right now. Investing in those would be a really important way to move this whole conversation forward. … Within economic policy, there’s such bifurcation. There’s tax policy over here. There’s care over here. It’s still a women’s issue.”

“Economics is still seen as a man’s game. Women actually make most financial decisions in households, but men are the ones who are seen as the experts, and our financial system is shaped around their life cycles.”

Listen to the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “Women Can’t Afford to Wait for a Feminist Economic Future (with Premilla Nadasen, Rakeen Mabud and Lenore Palladino, Aisha Nyandoro, Gaylynn Burroughs, and Dolores Huerta)” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Floods, Fear and Family Crisis: The Impact of Texas’ Natural Disasters on Domestic Violence

PUBLISHED 7/25/2025 by

Devastating floods began sweeping across Central Texas on July 4, causing the Guadalupe River to surge at an alarming rate: 20 feet in the first three hours. The disaster ranks among the deadliest and most catastrophic in the state, claiming at least 136 lives, with four individuals still missing.

The floods captured national attention and served as yet another chilling reminder of the real and rising consequences of climate change. And as climate-driven disasters only grow more frequent and intense, Texans continue to suffer the fallout—both seen and unseen.

Among these unseen and overlooked consequences: increased risk of domestic violence.

Extreme weather events—floods, heatwaves and hurricanes—not only displace families and destroy homes, but they also strain financial resources and fracture essential support systems. These stressors can intensify existing inequalities and create volatile conditions increasing the risk of violence, particularly against women and girls. 

From Reckoning to Backlash, Black Women Reflect on the Stakes of the Moment

PUBLISHED 6/11/2025 by

In 2020, the killing of George Floyd shocked Americans into action and into the streets by the millions, protesting the unrelenting killing of Black people by police. 

The moment sparked a nascent reckoning in America around systemic racism and institutional inequality—in many cases, with Black women at the center. Already the backbone of our democracy, many were called on to also be a bridge to racial healing.

Five years later, many of these same Black women find themselves at the center of a backlash, confronted with attacks on the diversity, equity and inclusion efforts that were previously championed.

Trump Is Creating Unique Problems for Gen Z

PUBLISHED 6/9/2025 by

Since November, much of the media coverage of this most recent election cycle has focused on Gen Z—especially the Gen Z gender gap, and how young men in particular seem to be swinging further and further right.

At the same time, Gen Z (born between the mid 1990s and the early 2010s, so around ages 13 to 28 in 2025) is the most diverse generation in American history… which might be why so many of the Trump administration’s recent actions, like attacks on higher ed, seem to be targeting Gen Z specifically.