Jessica Bennett on Becoming the First Gender Editor of The New York Times & How Failure Furthered Her Career

Jessica Bennett is an award-winning journalist and author who covers social issues and culture through a gender lens. She was recently appointed the first-ever Gender Editor of the New York Times.

Jessica is the author of the bestselling book, Feminist Fight Club: A Survival Manual for a Sexist Workplace (HarperCollins), which has been translated into 10 languages, a podcast, and is being adapted for television.

Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, where she began her career; Time, where she was a columnist; as well as Vogue, Cosmopolitan, the Washington Post and The New York Times.

Jessica has spoken about sexism and gender bias at a variety of institutions, including the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Harvard Business School, Facebook, Google, Thomson Reuters and others.

Yes, she's in a real-life feminist fight club.

You can keep in touch with Jessica by signing up for her newsletter, The Gender Letter, at nytimes.com/genderletter.

In the interview, we talk about a wide array of topics: Jessica’s decision to write a major New York Times piece on failure on university campuses; why minorities disproportionately suffer from the imposter syndrome (and what to do about it); how she quickly bounced back after being laid off from Tumblr; how she ended up as the first gender editor of the New York Times; her writing process and failures in writing; and so much more.

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