What my mother taught me that the Supreme Court never will — When I was about eight years old, my mother tucked me into bed one night and told me this story: When she was about my age (at the time of the story), a man in her small Wisconsin town — a friend of her father’s — took her into the…

This is a story about how one man’s vision has changed the way the world perceives safety, the dangers of gender-biased data, and the surprising history of car alarms. In the early 1970s, American architect and city planner Oscar Newman published his book, Design Guidelines for Creating Defensible Space. A…

Did you know that icky feeling you get is actually a self defense tool? — The last article I published on Medium was a bit unhinged. I was ashamed of it, so I deleted it. Shame is a funny thing: we classify it as an emotion, and it feels so heavy, so toxic, so burning, so awful that we would do anything to avoid feeling…

What It’s Like Hosting A Refugee from Ukraine — On International Women’s Day, I went to Berlin’s Hauptbahnhof (central train station) to meet M., a young woman from Kharkiv, Ukraine. As the first waves of refugees from Ukraine arrived in Berlin, the city’s volunteer organizations mobilized. They very quickly organized chat groups, Telegram channels and Facebook teams to set…

Women supporting women supporting women — When I moved to Berlin in 2016, I was not aware of the start up scene here. I wasn’t in the technology world or the start-up world, and I was not aware that most start ups followed a specific formula when they launched a new product or business. …

We’re Working with Movmi to improve gender equity in transportation spaces — An idea our team has been working on for a while now is to create self defense safety cards (like the safety procedure cards you find in airplanes) into existing ride-hailing apps like Uber, as well as municipal metro ticketing apps, to give female commuters tools that help disrupt and…

This legend won’t die, and it’s harmful to women — Update: At the time of writing, I was unaware of the recent case in Philadelphia, where a woman was raped on the subway while passengers on the train failed to intervene, but several did record it on their smart phones. Thanks to a kind reader, I’ve updated this article to include it. CNN and several other news outlets have probed deeper about the story that’s now gone viral: that no one intervened, and no one called 911. CCTV cameras show people getting on and off the train during the incident, mostly unaware of what was happening. But the footage does show that…

Because you still don’t seem to get it — Last week I wrote an article about violence against women. This is also sometimes referred to as “gender-based violence,” meaning: people who feel entitled to enact violence on others purely because of their target’s gender. …

It’s not because we’re the “weaker” sex — Last week I was at a screening for a short documentary I participated in, called On the Use of Self Defense, directed by Hannah Kugel (and with an incredible soundtrack by Georgia Johnston). …