Technology

War on Women Report: Antiabortion Extremism Makes Its Way to the White House; 28th Woman Accuses Donald Trump of Rape; Arizona Man Wins $68K Settlement After Ex-Wife’s Abortion

PUBLISHED 10/30/2026 by and

MAGA Republicans are back in the White House, and Project 2025 is their guide: the right-wing plan to turn back the clock on women’s rights, remove abortion access, and force women into roles as wives and mothers in the “ideal, natural family structure.”

We know an empowered female electorate is essential to democracy. That’s why day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.

Since our last report:
—Dolores Huerta, the labor organizer at the helm of United Farm Workers and one of the most powerful women in the movement, passed away on Oct. 28. She was 96. Huerta was also a board member of the Feminist Majority Foundation, the publisher of Ms. In March of this year, at the age of 95, she revealed that in the 1960s, Cesar Chavez sexually assaulted her.
—Abortion bans may be linked to approximately 135 excess homicides among women of reproductive age between 2023 and 2024, a new study suggests.
—Federal agents searched the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in the last few weeks of her reelection bid. Omar called the search an “attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.”
—Bernadette Greene-Placentia, the Democratic candidate challenging Republican Rep. Abe Hamadeh in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, says she was raped while repairing a campaign sign in Sun City on Aug. 14. According to her account, Greene-Placentia was struck in the head and lost consciousness, later waking to discover evidence of a sexual assault.
—A University of Arizona sorority member has reported being sexually assaulted by two men at a Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity house on Aug. 26.
—During Trump’s second term, the U.S. Department of Education has drastically reduced its investigations of sexual assault and other civil rights violations at schools and colleges, even though the number of complaints has not slowed.
—A new report from House Judiciary Democrats includes an allegation from Beatrice Keul, former Miss Switzerland. Keul says that in 1983, Trump offered to help her secure a U.S. visa and admission to New York University, and invited her to a meeting at the Plaza hotel.

When she arrived at his hotel room, Trump allegedly raped her in an attack she describes as “brutal.” According to Keul, the assault tore her clothing and caused bleeding and bruising across her body, and Trump told her not to tell anyone about the rape.

… and more.

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

PUBLISHED 10/16/2026 by

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 women’s issues 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.”

Drummond and her team decided 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 first-ever dedicated WIRED Women Issue came to be.

Offline and Overlooked: Why Girls’ Internet Access Is a Feminist Issue

PUBLISHED 10/9/2026 by and

Last summer, our Girls Learn International chapter set out with a mission to support girls in finding their own voices to lead their communities on issues they cared about. We organized an international public speaking webinar with Sierra Leone Rising, which helped us reach 40 girls in villages in Sierra Leone.

Even with nonprofit backing, internet barriers strained our capacity to communicate regularly, blurring the vision that had seemed so “doable” in writing. As students in well-resourced suburban towns, we had taken reliable internet access for granted.

Our surprise turned to anger: How could something so basic, so essential to daily life in the modern world, remain out of reach for so many school-aged children around the globe? In what world could a student in a small, remote village be promised equal opportunity without access to the digital tools other students take for granted?

Decades of Male-Focused Medical Research Could Bias Healthcare AI

PUBLISHED 9/21/2026 by and

Many people will learn CPR using a flat-chested manikin. A 2024 study of 20 models of CPR manikins sold worldwide found that three-quarters were described as male or had no sex specified. Of the 20, only one offered a breast overlay.

The manikins reflect a wider tendency in medical teaching and research to treat the male body as standard. The terms “male and female” and “men and women” in this article reflect the sources, which often fail to distinguish sex from gender or say whether gender-diverse people were included.

The lack of female representation can have consequences. In a U.S. study of 19,331 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, 39 percent of women who collapsed in public received bystander CPR, compared with 45 percent of men.

Medical research is becoming more representative, but much of today’s evidence was collected when male bodies were more often treated as standard. Careful design could help AI identify patterns that older research missed.

As tomorrow’s healthcare is built from yesterday’s records, researchers must ask whether an apparent difference reflects biology or the way patients encountered healthcare. Otherwise old assumptions could become embedded in new technology.

Care Robots, Health Chatbots and the False Promise of Feminist AI

PUBLISHED 9/16/2026 by

Despite the fact that AI seems to be everywhere these days, a surprising recent poll from NBC News found that AI is even less popular among the US public than ICE. So it is no wonder the same industry that is developing AI for corporate gain and warfare is moving into the seemingly benevolent fields of reproductive health, elder care, emotional support, education, therapy chatbots and intimacy. 

AI may promise solutions, but artificial feminist intelligence can’t replace the relationships, care and systemic change in demand.

Marry Young, Skip the Career Ladder: Conservatives’ Pitch to Gen Z Women

PUBLISHED 9/14/2026 by

Conservative influencers and campus networks are urging Gen Z women to prioritize early marriage and motherhood over education and professional ambition.

Conservative groups now host several events and conferences aimed at young women, including Live Action’s Young Leaders Summit, Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit and the Conservative Political Action Conference’s Women Warriors Summit.

In the speeches and sessions I reviewed from these gatherings, speakers offered little encouragement for career-building or financial independence. Instead, they focused on chastity, marriage, traditional gender roles and what they described as God’s design for women’s lives. Their message was clear: The most important decision facing women in their twenties is not which major to choose or which job offer to accept, but whom to marry, and how soon.

Proponents of this narrative often skip over the practical risks of marrying young. Young age and economic stress are both associated with a heightened risk of intimate partner violence, while financial dependence can make an abusive relationship far more difficult to leave.

I’m a Gen Z woman and college student pursuing a career, financial independence and a life shaped by my own ambitions. After spending the summer researching conservative media, I found its messages unsettling: reminiscent of a past when women faced legal and social barriers to employment, property ownership and independent access to credit, and were valued primarily for their roles as wives and mothers.

Although I do not believe this narrative is widely accepted across Gen Z, I worry that without greater scrutiny, more young women may begin to internalize the idea that their ambitions matter less than those of their male peers.

Girls Have Always Had ADHD. We Just Weren’t Looking.

PUBLISHED 8/24/2026 by

A teenage girl watches a 30-second TikTok video by @Clairebear describing “a day in hell” in her life, “ADD edition”:

“I get up and go to work and realize I don’t have gas in my car. I get to the gas station and reach for my credit card and remember that I don’t in fact have my card because I keep thinking it will turn up at some point.”

She continues explaining her day and reveals that these are all symptoms and signs of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

The teenage girl in question sees much of herself in that scenario, goes to the doctor and is evaluated and diagnosed.

Welcome to modern medicine.

Don’t Let AI Become the New Sex Educator for Adolescents

PUBLISHED 8/20/2026 by

“Why would I Google it when I can just ask ChatGPT for exactly what I am looking for?” 

A 16-year-old asked me this during a recent conversation with Black adolescents about where they turn for health information. Her answer was striking, but hardly surprising.

As traditional sex education faces cuts in schools and reproductive health services become harder to access—particularly for young people of color in underserved communities—adolescents are increasingly looking elsewhere for answers. AI chatbots offer something schools, clinics and even trusted adults often do not: information that feels immediate, private and judgment-free.

The Grok Generation: The Consent Crisis No One Is Stopping

PUBLISHED 3/10/2026 by

Grok, the AI chatbot used on Musk’s platform X, has been under fire for generating nude or sexualized images of real people, including individuals who are minors. In one estimate, Grok produced one nonconsensual sexual image per minute over a 24-hour period. Prompts such as “put her in a transparent bikini” produced altered images that were then circulated publicly, some accumulating thousands of likes. The targets are real women and underage girls whose images were manipulated without their knowledge or permission.

Elon Musk responded by making a joke, requesting a Grok-generated image of himself in a bikini and reacting with laughing emojis. When the platform’s most powerful figure and one of the country’s most powerful men treats the abuse as a punchline, it sends a message about what is actually harmful versus what he thinks should be considered humor—and provides a tacit granting of consent to young men on the platform to keep making these images.

Much of the public conversation about young people and AI has focused on cheating in school or declining literacy. Far less attention has been paid to what it means when a middle school boy can type a sentence and produce a sexualized image of a female classmate in seconds as a joke or for attention—or to pretend he received it from her for status.

For girls growing up in this online environment, the message is unmistakable: Your image is not protected as yours. Your body can be altered, distributed and consumed for entertainment. Its violation can be dismissed as a joke. 

Teachers, parents, lawmakers and platform leaders are behind. The question is not whether this will shape the next generation’s understanding of power and intimacy—but what we will step in to do about it. 

From DM’s to I Do’s: Five Ways Social Media Is Reshaping Child Marriage

PUBLISHED 3/4/2026 by

As the world goes digital, so does the ancient practice of child marriage. 

More than half a billion women and girls living today are, or were, child brides. Among young adult women aged 20 to 24, one in five was married before age 18.

But that doesn’t mean that child marriage has stayed the same. There has been gradual progress in ending child marriage (around a decade ago, one in four women was married under 18). And technology is playing a growing role, both in cases where girls say “I do” and in cases where they say “I don’t.”