What is Life Really Like for Women and Girls Around the World?
A few years ago, I was living and reporting on women’s rights in the Middle East. In Jordan, a country I had spent six years returning to, I conducted a survey of 1,600 women across eight provinces and found that nearly a third faced restrictions on their basic mobility, such as leaving the home.
While the finding was sobering, it didn’t shock me. After years of living on and off in Jordan, I had come to understand the social and legal restrictions that shape many women’s lives. What surprised me was something else: I struggled placing that story in the mainstream media; it wasn’t considered newsworthy.
It raised a question that has guided my work ever since: how many women’s lives are invisible simply because the world has decided they aren’t newsworthy?
More to Her Story was founded to help answer that question.
For all the attention paid to geopolitics, war, elections, and economics, we know surprisingly little about how half the world’s population actually lives—even though women hold societies together and are usually the first to bear the costs when those societies fall apart.
What does it mean to need permission to leave your home?
To be told that your education ends where your brother’s begins?
To have your first period mark the beginning of a marriage to a stranger twice your age?
To be raped, forced out of school, and made a mother at 14?
To live with violence so constant the world stops calling it an emergency?
To dream of basic freedom while knowing the world will probably never know your name?
These experiences shape the lives of hundreds of millions of women and girls. Yet they are often treated as peripheral to understanding the world rather than central to it.
Figure this: one in three women will experience violence in her lifetime. Nine million girls face child marriage each year. More than 120 million girls are out of school. Nearly 700 million women and girls live within reach of deadly conflict — the highest number in decades.
At a time when authoritarianism is spreading, conflict is deepening and forced displacement is at record highs, we believe the lives of women and girls offer one of the clearest measures of where the world is headed. And while major news organizations continue to shrink foreign coverage, reduce staff, and narrow the range of stories they are able to tell, we believe that the need for trustworthy storytelling has never been more important. Neither has the need for direct access to those living these realities every day, in a way that reaches and resonates with a global audience.
That is what More to Her Story has spent the last several years building: a global reporting platform with direct access to women and girls whose lives are often discussed on global stages, but rarely heard from directly. Again and again, major news organizations have turned to us not only because of the stories we tell, but because of the access we have.
Our world is changing faster than we can keep up, and so are the ways in which we tell stories. In many ways, More to Her Story matters more today than when we began.
I often think of a young woman I met in Jordan. She lived with her mother and sisters under rules set by her father, who hadn’t allowed them to leave the house for years, backed by a legal system that sided with him. From her bedroom, she worked two full-time jobs to support her family. Her brothers, meanwhile, went to university, saw their friends, and moved freely through the world.
When I visited her, I remember her standing in the doorway, unable to step outside for fear of what might happen if she did. That image has stayed with me: a young, bright woman with talent and ambition, trapped at the threshold of her own life. Most people will never know her name. They will never understand the systems that kept her there. But her story is not marginal to understanding the world. It is the world, at least the part of it most of us will never see.
More to Her Story exists because hundreds of millions of women and girls are living lives the world does not see, their futures written long before they were born.
Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nicholas Kristof did not set out to build a career around reporting on women and girls. But the more he traveled, the harder it became to miss the pattern: across much of the world, half the population is treated cruelly, routinely, and with little to no accountability. Kristof calls the oppression of women and girls “the defining moral and economic issue of the 21st century.” He has seen both the scale of the injustice women and girls face and the extraordinary role they play in solving the world’s greatest challenges.
In order to continue this work, More to Her Story is moving to a subscription-first model on Substack. That means we are asking you to become a paid subscriber — not because we want to put our journalism behind a wall, but because we believe these stories matter too much to stop telling them. If subscribing is not possible for you today, sharing More to Her Story with a friend who might be able to would mean a great deal.
For now, our journalism will remain free. But we are asking our readers to believe in these stories enough to help us keep telling them.