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Who do communities trust when making decisions about their bodies?
Speaking at an event co-hosted by The Fuller Project and MSI Choices, Ogechi Onuoha, Programme Director at MSI Nigeria, highlighted how misinformation around sexual and reproductive health creates uncertainty for women and girls, particularly when narratives from health providers compete with content pushed by online influencers.
Onuoha outlined the real-world consequences of this confusion: increased unplanned pregnancies, unsafe abortion services, girls dropping out of school, and diminished life outcomes.
“When girls drop out of school,” she noted, “most times they don’t get the chance to go back.”
#ReproductiveHealth #GenderEquality #GirlsEducation #PublicHealth #SRHR
It has been four years since the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan. Since then, Afghan women have faced sweeping restrictions on daily life, including bans on education, many forms of work, and limits on speaking and singing in public.
Now, our conflict editor Nuria Teson reports that Afghan women refugees who fled for safety are being deported back from neighbouring countries.
She spoke with Khadija Amin, a former anchor in Kabul, about what women returning from Pakistan and Iran are facing — and what forced return can mean for their rights and security.
Online violence against women journalists has tangible, real-world consequences.
Our labour correspondent Qadri Inzamam spoke with Indian journalist Srishti Jaswal, who faced sustained online abuse after a tweet in 2020. The harassment escalated into offline threats, job loss, intimidation of her family, and pressure to publicly apologise to her abusers.
Her case reflects a broader global pattern. According to a UN Women study covering 119 countries, 41% of women journalists surveyed reported that threats they faced in real life were directly connected to online violence – in every case linked to their professional work.
For decades, space exploration was designed around male bodies and basic questions about women’s health were under-researched, including how menstruation is affected by microgravity.
That is starting to change. Our health correspondent Ester Pinheiro spoke with scientist Lígia Coelho, who is leading research testing menstrual cups in orbit through the AstroCup project, using miniature sensors to generate data on physiology during long-duration missions.
Astronaut and physician Shawna Pandya has argued that studying women’s health in space can also strengthen women’s health outcomes on Earth. She is also advocating for this research to be tested in real spaceflight conditions.
Expanding space medicine beyond a male default isn’t just about inclusion, it determines who can participate in future missions, and what kinds of science get done.
#WomenInSTEM #SpaceMedicine #MenstrualHealth
Have you heard of ‘AI Nudifiers’? They’re apps or websites that let users ‘undress’ people using AI, or paste their faces onto naked bodies in videos. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 99% of the victims are women and girls.
This year, these sites surged in popularity, largely because of search engines. But this shouldn’t have happened. Back in 2024, Google pledged to remove links to nudifiers from its search ‘at scale’, or bury the search results altogether. It failed. According to research carried out by Danish NGO Digitalt Ansvar, Google is lagging behind in the fight against AI nudifiers.
There is one piece of good news: earlier this year, Denmark passed a law giving citizens copyright over AI-generated images of them. It’s a novel way of holding deepfake sites accountable and shut down, no matter what Google does.
As more aspects of our lives are translated into data, the consequences are becoming harder to ignore.
Speaking at an event co-hosted by The Fuller Project and MSI Reproductive Choices, Rajat Khosla, Executive Director at the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, highlighted how the “datification” of human bodies — through search histories, apps, and wearable devices — is increasingly used both to deliver services and to exercise power over individuals.
Khosla argued that advocates working on health, gender, and human rights cannot treat data governance as a separate issue. Without partnerships between civil society, technology experts, and those working on regulation, efforts to create meaningful impact risk being undermined.
His message was clear: collaboration across disciplines is no longer optional if rights-based work is to keep pace with digital systems.
#DataGovernance #DigitalHealth #HumanRights #GenderEquality
Remember when Trump called a woman journalist a “piggy”? How did that make you feel? Angry?
You’re not alone, especially if you’re a woman. Dr Pragya Agarwal says women’s anger has been rising over the past decade, with research suggesting the “emotion gap” between men and women is widening too.
Women’s anger, she argues, is not a personal failing but a response to very specific pressures – from rights being rolled back, to unpaid care work, to everyday harassment.
Yet in public debate, that anger is still more likely to be reframed as “burnout”, “stress” or “being difficult” than taken seriously as a sign something is wrong.
So what do we do with it? Agarwal points to community and turning anger into collective action, not just private coping.
#WomensAnger #WomensHealth #GenderJustice #MentalHealth
Women working outdoors – as construction labourers, street vendors, domestic workers, and waste pickers – breathe hazardous air all day. The Fuller Project’s labor correspondent, Qadri Inzamam, explains why they’re at risk.
This week, Australia became the first country in the world to ban social media for under-16s. The country argues that social media does more harm than good for kids. But our tech correspondent wondered, is that true for girls?
Access to water in Gaza is a gendered crisis.
With some families surviving on just three to four litres of water a day, women and girls are losing their privacy, dignity, and basic health.
Recent storms have flooded camps, destroyed thousands of tents, and turned sanitation into a daily risk.
This isn’t a side issue. When water and sanitation systems collapse or are destroyed, evidence shows women pay the highest price.
#WaterIsARight #Gaza #GenderJustice #HumanRights
2025 is not yet over, but what a year it has been!
Join The Fuller Project and three incredible writers, thinkers and feminist talkers to unpack the past 11 months.
Are you craving perspectives to help you see some of the main global events of 2025 in fresh ways?
Or curious to discover what has been, or could be, consequential but few people are talking about?
Maybe you just want to know what books or podcasts from the past 12 months you really ought to read or listen to as the year draws to a close?
If you are aching for not just an informative and considered conversation, but also a sense of community, compassion, and creativity, this virtual panel discussion is for you!
The Fuller Project is a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on the global stories disproportionately affecting women and gender minorities.
Join Fuller’s editor-in-chief, Eliza Anyangwe, Angela Saini, author of books including The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, and author, journalist, and filmmaker Rokhaya Diallo for a conversation that will inform, enlighten and inspire.
A growing number of women here on LinkedIn are running a collective experiment: switching their profile gender and pronouns to male.
The results? A significant jump in profile views and post impressions. They’re not doing it for visibility, but to expose how algorithmic bias works on a platform meant to create economic opportunity.
Here’s what’s happening. Women have less access to the internet globally, which means algorithms are trained on fewer data points from them. These systems then replicate real-world inequalities by making women less visible online, including on LinkedIn.
The implications are serious. If women’s posts and profiles are systematically suppressed, they lose out on networking, recruitment and leadership opportunities that the platform is designed to enable.
As Cindy Gallop, founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn Academy, who co-led the experiment earlier this year, puts it: “Algorithmic suppression equals economic oppression.”
At an event in Amsterdam, writer Roxane Gay and our editor-in-chief Eliza Anyangwe discussed how fatphobia shapes women’s experiences, socially, professionally, and within health systems.
Gay described the “hypervisibility” of living in a body that attracts constant judgment, recalling medical visits where her symptoms were ignored in favour of weight-based assumptions. “I’ve gone to the doctor for a sore throat and the first thing written on my chart is ‘obese,’” she said.
Anyangwe noted that despite their different body types, both face scrutiny under Western standards that narrowly define which bodies are considered “acceptable”. Their exchange points to a broader pattern: appearance continues to influence credibility, care, and opportunity.
The conversation raises a critical question for institutions: how do we build systems that recognise women’s full humanity rather than reducing them to body size?
Gender-based violence can change the brain, even without direct physical damage.
In our new video for #16DaysofActivism, health correspondent Ester Pinheiro and neurologist Dr Faye Begeti break down what happens in the amygdala and hippocampus, why survivors may struggle with memory loss, and how neuroplasticity helps the brain heal.
Watch, save, and share to help push awareness of trauma-informed responses to gender-based violence.
#TraumaInformed #GenderBasedViolence
In Portugal, a new labor bill could turn miscarriage leave into “just another family day” and make breastfeeding at work even harder.
As unions call fresh protests for 11 December, one question remains: will lawmakers prioritise employers’ needs, or women seeking the basic right to grieve and recover?
#MiscarriageLeave #PregnancyLoss #MaternalRights #BreastfeedingRights #GenderEquality
In Sudan, reports of sexual violence are mounting, but justice could still be decades away.
While lawyers race to preserve evidence, survivors of the current conflict know what history tells them: it took over 20 years for the International Criminal Court to convict a Sudanese militia leader for gender-based persecution, including rape as a war crime.
That conviction came just last month, for crimes committed in the early 2000s during the Darfur conflict.
Now, as fighting escalates again in El Fasher, the question is: will survivors today have to wait another generation for justice?
#Darfur #SudanCrisis #GenderJustice #ConflictZones #SudanWar #ICC
How many people do you think you have the capacity to care about in a story?
Nicholas Kristof has an answer: we stop caring when the story is about more than one person!
At an event in New York, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof shared research that explains just how challenging it is for storytellers to engage audiences on issues that often don’t affect them directly.
According to Kristof, compassion doesn’t scale. Turns out we tune out when a story involves two or more people. Not two million, not two thousand. Just two. Our brains connect to individual human experiences, not statistics. Whether it’s about reproductive justice, climate displacement, or gender-based violence, it seems one story may break your heart but a hundred will numb you.
So what should we do? Kristof says journalists should start with one life, then add the bigger picture. But if you’ve ever wondered why a single story stays with you while headlines about “thousands affected” don’t, this may well be why. What do you think? Does it sound about right to you?
It seems the question for all of us is this: how do we stay connected to the scale of human suffering without losing our ability to feel it?
Kristof was speaking at an event co-hosted by The Fuller Project and MSI Reproductive Choices.
As world leaders gather in Pará, Brazil, for COP30, Indigenous people in the same state are dealing with the health effects of mercury contamination from illegal gold mining. Maria Leusa Munduruku, an Indigenous woman and leader in her community, has been fighting who she calls “invaders” — those in the illegal trade releasing the toxic substance that can cause neurological disorders.
For Munduruku families, this pollution enters the body through food and water, and researchers warn that mercury exposure especially affects pregnant women and infants, including through the placenta and breast milk. Leusa Munduruku shares that adults are also suffering from malformations and neurological symptoms linked to mercury contamination.
Despite the long-awaited recognition of the Munduruku territory Sawré Muybu in 2024, the damage caused by years of mining persists, and the health impacts continue to be felt.
#COP30 #Mundurukuwomen #illegalmining #mercury