Giving Women the Last Word Since 2024

Those who follow me on LinkedIn may know that I often refer to myself as the reluctant entrepreneur. 

I didn’t think much about those two words the first time I wrote them, but I know why I hung on to them. It’s a simple reason: They’re just so true. 

I launched The Persistent in 2024 not because I was longing to start a media company, but because I felt a need for this media company to exist. In the months leading up to launch, I gathered a few good people around me and we gave this thing a name. We talked strategy. We talked design. We wrote a business plan. 

Some of our consultants completed projects and moved on. New faces joined. We were scrappy; that’s how startups are.

Josie Cox (who has been here from the start, and every day since), and I came up with stories too many to count: We called up writers. We began assigning art. 

We published our first piece on April 16, 2024 under the achingly prescient headline, Misogyny is the Hardest Word. Why don’t we call out misogyny when we see it, our (now) managing editor Emma Haslett opined. I agreed with her then, and eight months later, I agree with her now. 

My years working in newsrooms have taught me that mainstream news still doesn’t do a great job covering women. Issues of tremendous importance about and concerning women are still offered up—if they’re offered up at all—as something cute, a side dish, a nice-to-have, something you’ll get around to reading eventually.

The subtle (and often not subtle) quieting of women’s voices and muffling of women’s stories has damaging ramifications. That’s how you end up with a U.S. Congress that’s still little more than one-quarter women, or a Fortune 500 CEOs list that’s stuck at around 10% women. That’s why women’s presence in peace processes remains so low. Or around 2% of venture funding goes to women-run initiatives. 

Our job at The Persistent is to put these kinds of issues front and center. We do it by working with a multiplicity of writers, inviting them to bring their perspectives to the table. We do it by working with a multiplicity of illustrators inviting them to bring color and depth to our writers' words. It’s hard work. A story that takes, say, six minutes to read, still takes many, many, many hours to edit. Some stories take days to write. Some take months to report. Everything has to be refined and polished and checked for accuracy. We do it all ourselves—of course we do, we’re a startup. 

Since we launched all those months ago, we have published over 80 stories. Naturally, I love them all. 

It’s a cliché—but in this context, one I kind of love—that a mother doesn’t have favorites, so I’ll leave you with this: A list, not of my favorites exactly, but of stories that are good reads today just as they were a few months ago. Have a look through this list; read one, share one, tell us which ones you enjoyed. 

Always,

Francesca

A List of Goodies

Josie Cox queried the lack of pockets in women’s clothing in How Everyday Sexism Is Sewn Into Our Clothes. “Pockets should be a given—as essential as elastic in our underwear or buttons on our coats.”

Emma Haslett explored the boundaries of what it means to be feminist in The Day I Walked Out of the Kitchen. “My choice is to leave all planning, preparation and worrying about food to my husband. That feels like a radical feminist act.”

Holly Baxter examined what it means to be a #boymom in When Did Boy Mom Culture Become So Problematic? “There’s science to back up the idea that parenting boys is different—but social media has made it weird.” 

Suchandrika Chakrabarti took on the topic of why people still perceive women as less funny than men in Not Ladylike to Laugh? Oh, Please. “For men to be funny, women don’t have to be unfunny. Both may chuckle.” Touché, Suchandrika!

Ruchi Kumar looked at the story of Afghan women we don’t normally hear about in, ‘If We Don’t, Who Will?’—How Women in Afghanistan Are Speaking Out. “It is dangerous to protest in Afghanistan. But it is also dangerous to be a woman. That’s what keeps Afghan women speaking out in whatever ways they can.”

Anne Quito brought her art critic’s eye to Below the Surface of Women’s Art, Centuries of #MeToo, Misogyny. “Viewers who take the time to look closely at Tate Britain's "Now You See Us" will uncover a great deal about the plight of professional women artists over the last 400 years.” 

Josie Cox wrote our first obituary, Remembering Lilly Ledbetter: A Life of Grit and Persistence. “When I heard the news, I was crushed: The world had lost a trailblazer, someone who was truly selfless in her pursuit of justice.”

Aubrey Hirsch inked our first cartoon with 'It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.' Wait, Is It? “Women take on almost all of the additional responsibilities during the holidays.”

Ebony Reed wrote about the disastrous economic headwinds confronted by widowed Black women in My Fiancé Died Young. Thank God We’d Planned Ahead. “Black women are more likely than any other group to lose a partner. Without proper financial planning, grief can turn very quickly into poverty.”

Deborah Copaken wrote about how hard it was to get her story as a war photographer told in the way she wanted it told in Lee and Me. “I wanted to be the objectifier of men and their wars, quirks, and shortcomings, not the objectified. Why was this so hard?”

Julia Craven looked at America’s maternal mortality problem in Two Years On, The Biden-Harris Effort To Reduce Maternal Mortality Remains—A Start “Maternal mortality is shockingly high in the U.S. What exactly is being done about it?”

Mara Altman wrote of her obsession with boob trinkets and tchotchkes in What Is It About Boobs? “Some people like flowers on their homewares. Some like cute animals. I like boobs.”

Brittany Jones-Cooper covered yet another gender gap in The Relentless Art of Salary Negotiation. “Execs at a TV station promised to "do better" on women's salaries. Why was it so hard for one woman to close the $30,000 gap?”

Ginanne Brownell covered the artists who are covering infertility in When Words Fail On Infertility, There is Art. “Infertility, so long hidden from view, is finally finding a spotlight in various contemporary art forms.”

Anmol Irfan rode a bus for us for Inside Karachi’s Women-Only Pink Bus. “A new women-only bus route is designed to combat the sexual harassment prevalent on Karachi’s public transit system. The bus is clean, spacious—and unreliable.”

Lucy Webster put sex ed in its place in School Sex Ed Left Me Feeling Isolated. That’s a Safety Issue. “The sexual disempowerment of disabled women crops up again and again. It starts with non-inclusive sex ed in school.”

Stephanie Gorton gave us a good dose of history in ‘Women Should Have Children Instead of Poodles’—When Birth Control Came to Washington “The idea of birth control entered the national conversation in 1919, when an artist, activist, and single mother named Mary Ware Dennett brought the (quite shocking!) idea to Congress.”