At Newsweek and Time

She went on to become a staff writer at Newsweek, where she spent six years. She won a New York Press Club award for her story on the Nikki Catsouras photographs controversy about a family's struggle to remove their daughter's gruesome death photos from the internet.^[6] She also wrote on LGBTQ issues, earning a GLAAD Award. In 2010, she and two colleagues wrote a cover story titled "Are We There Yet?"^[7] about the state of feminist progress for women journalists. The article appeared on the 40th anniversary of a landmark lawsuit against Newsweek,^[8] in which 46 female staffers had sued the company for gender discrimination in the first lawsuit of its kind, paving the way for women journalists. That story became a book, The Good Girls Revolt, by Lynn Povich^[9] and an Amazon TV series of the same name.^[10]

Bennett left Newsweek after it merged with The Daily Beast to become the executive editor of Tumblr^[11] and later worked briefly as an editor at Sheryl Sandberg's nonprofit foundation, Lean In,^[12] where she created the “Lean In Collection with Getty Images,” a photo initiative to change the depiction of women and LGBTQ families in stock photography.^[13] She later became a columnist for Time.^[14]

At New York Times

For The New York Times, Bennett has been a writer and columnist^[15] for the Style section and a contributing editor for the News and Opinion sections. In 2017, she was appointed the newspaper's first gender editor.^[16]

In addition to her reporting, Bennett uses gender as a lens for buzzy projects that explore larger social issues. She launched the Times Overlooked obituaries project^[17] and published the perspectives of young women around the world through "This is 18",^[18] a photography project that became an international exhibit.

In the aftermath of #MeToo, she explored how college students were navigating Sexual consent on campus sexual consent on campus, and, in the pandemic, documented the plight of working mothers, for which she created a Primal Scream phone line. Bennett headlined The Times's women’s conference, The New Rules Summit,^[19] in 2019, and guided the newspaper's coverage of the centennial of the 19th amendment.^[20]

Subjects

Bennett has written extensively on the #MeToo movement,^[21] including investigating allegations of sexual misconduct against the playwright Israel Horovitz,^[22] and reporting from the civil rape and defamation trial brought by E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump.^[23]

She also reports on cultural trends. Among them: An attempt by Playboy to “rebrand” for millennials^[24] (and a similar effort by the Miss America pageant^[25]); a class at Smith college, led by the scholar Loretta Ross, to teach students to “call in” instead of calling each other out;^[26] columns on TikTok trauma; going to see the Barbie movie with the feminist scholar Susan Faludi,^[27] and her quest to find “fun” in a time of darkness ^[28]

Bennett has profiled celebrities and public figures including Pamela Anderson,^[29] Amanda Knox,^[30] Monica Lewinsky,^[31][32] E. Jean Carroll,^[33] Jennifer Aniston^[34] and Katie Hill.^[35] She once wrote a viral piece about her Resting Bitch Face.^[36]