BRINGING GENDER EQUALITY INTO FOCUS
2023 IMPACT REPORT
LAURIE HAYS
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF/CEO
Global Impact
As the only nonprofit investigative news organization covering women globally, The Fuller Project offers a unique perspective, bringing untold stories to light. We work with journalists who are from the countries or regions where they report, and we center the experience of the women who tell us their stories, amplifying the authentic voices of those affected by systemic injustice. Rather than reporting from a Western point of view, as is often the case in traditional outlets, we dig deep to reveal stories and issues from the most vulnerable communities around the world. Our work with on-the-ground, local reporters, who provide deep regional expertise, enables us to offer unparalleled authenticity and nuance as we expose the challenges, battles, and successes of women from communities across the globe whose stories may otherwise never be heard. Throughout this report, you’ll see excerpts and summaries of stories we’ve covered this year.
FEATURED STORIES
Authority Areas
The Fuller Project focuses on four “authority” issue areas, revealing how these issues interact in the lives of women, often exposing compounding challenges. We arrived at these four areas through an analysis of the largest structural barriers women face, areas of coverage that are largely underreported, and issues where the policy environment and other conditions promote our potential to spur impact. We call these issues areas our “authority areas” because our editorial work in these areas is backed by expertise built up through the course of our long-term reporting.
CLIMATE/ENVIRONMENT
ECONOMY/LABOR
HEALTH
MOVEMENTS
Climate & Environment
Climate change doesn’t just affect our planet, it affects every aspect of human life on its surface, from public health to economic mobility – and those impacts fall first and fall hardest on women. With the first climate and gender beat of any global nonprofit newsroom, we pinpoint the ways in which climate change is entwined in women’s lived experience: in hunger and food production, in labor, in health, and more. This year, our investigation into the U.S. green economy found that women continue to be under-represented by more than two to one, while in the Global South, decades of progress in maternal health may be at risk from climate change–induced extreme weather – and extreme weather events themselves, as our original reporting discovered, are linked to violence against women.
But we also highlight innovative solutions from across the globe, which often not only protect our environment, but also empower women. This was the case in India, where our reporter found that solar technologies are enabling rural women to independently earn money, gain confidence, and build better lives for their children, demonstrating the inextricable link between a sustainable world and an equitable one.
Economy & Labor
Even as women’s participation in the global labor force has begun to recover post-pandemic, women workers around the world face unique challenges. In 2023, our investigations found that women are disproportionately suffering the drawbacks of the rapidly evolving global economy while not sharing equally in its benefits – and spotlighted efforts to change that. We documented how women tea pickers in Kenya and garment workers in Bangladesh are losing their jobs to automation, while in California, a new law will force venture capital firms to be transparent about the founders they fund, only 2% of whom are women. A slate of stories examined the economic precarity of working women in the U.S. – mothers, undocumented immigrants, and those who rely on benefits to afford basic necessities – and we exposed the ways in which women are suffering financial exploitation and economic abuse, whether the perpetrators be domestic partners or unscrupulous financial apps.
The global economy cannot thrive without half the world’s population. Future prosperity and economic stability depend on women having equal labor participation, wages, and access to economic opportunity. Through our reporting, The Fuller Project aims to hold accountable those who perpetrate workplace injustice and to expose the barriers that still remain to economic gender equality.
FEATURED STORIES
“Even if it’s in tiny, inscrutable ways, we’re all so connected. So much so that what happens in one large country, such as the U.S., can dramatically impact – or devastate – the lives of women thousands of miles away.”
LOUISE DONOVAN
REPORTER
Health
In our health reporting, The Fuller Project documents the deep-seated obstacles to reliable health care for women and chronicles the ongoing struggle against a rising tide of gender-based violence. The stakes are high: when it comes to health, the lack of gender equality is literally killing women. Our 2023 reporting tracked an epidemic of domestic violence in Ukraine and the fight for reproductive rights in the U.S. and abroad. Our dogged coverage of uterine cancer among 9/11 first responders led to a major policy victory, and our story on how women are systemically left out of medical research struck a nerve in the medical community, with professionals and organizations amplifying the story on social media and beyond.
We also partnered with Afghanistan’s Zan Times and, together, the reporters spent eight months assembling original data demonstrating that women’s rates of suicide and suicide attempts have skyrocketed since the Taliban’s takeover. Those rates now surpass that of men in nine of the 11 Afghan provinces for which we could obtain data – a global anomaly that experts say is a reaction to unrelenting and widespread domestic abuse, forced marriage, and an almost complete lack of autonomy, as women show their defiance in the only way left to them.
FEATURED STORIES
“At The Fuller Project, we understand that women around the world face problems that men do not, that discrimination still exists and, despite the gains of the past half century, that women have a long way to go in order to obtain economic, political and social equality. Until that happens, we need a place like The Fuller Project. We have a lot of work to do.”
JODI ENDA
Washington Bureau Chief & Senior Correspondent
Movements
Women are shaping the political currents of our world, leading unprecedented calls for change – from protests in Iran to resistance in Ukraine. Despite setbacks, the reproductive rights movement is driving action across the globe, from the U.S. to Poland to El Salvador. Our reporting this year investigated women’s role in changing the face of politics in Peru, Turkey, and Sudan, and we took a wide-angle view of women’s political representation worldwide in our story about the effectiveness of election gender quotas.
What we’ve consistently found is that, despite the forces stacked against them, women everywhere are undertaking courageous and cutting-edge work in the fight for rights, equity, justice, and positive change. And they are winning victories – ousting dictators, overturning tyrannical regimes, obtaining human rights. But rarely does victory mean crossing the finish line. The work goes on, and women continue to grind the gears of justice toward equality. Previous generations have built these movements, won concessions, made hard and slow progress. Now, we stand on their shoulders as the next generation takes on the mantle of building toward gender equality around the world.
FEATURED STORIES
“BBC contacted me…after seeing the article you did in the Guardian. This is what that article did.”
SUSAN CHOMBA
Fuller Impact
The U.S. essential oils company doTERRA used to source most of its frankincense oil from Somaliland, but workers told us the company did not practice the ethical approach it preached. More than a dozen women working for doTERRA’s frankincense supplier, a company called Asli Maydi, said the company routinely underpaid its workers, required them to work in harsh conditions that are linked to health problems and was led by a politically powerful man whom multiple women accused of sexual harassment and assault.
“We can build our future… and the future of other women.”
Fatima Mohamoud
Mohamed, frankincense harvester
In October 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law making the Golden State the first in the nation to require venture capitalists to disclose the gender and race of the founders they fund.
“The way that we engage with the issues we are writing about goes beyond just highlighting a problem — this is journalism as a public service.”
Hanisha harjani,
reporter
Following dogged reporting by Fuller Project reporter Hanisha Harjani, the Biden administration has started tracking how often women and people of color get hired to work on federally-funded construction projects each month — for the first time in 30 years.
Hanisha’s reporting followed a Fuller Project expose co-published with The Guardian in December, which found women account for less than a third of people employed in the burgeoning green energy field, a sector where the Biden administration is investing hundreds of billions of dollars of public funds.
In May 2023, we reported on the Earned Wage Access industry, a $9.5 billion, fast-growing sector that was almost entirely unregulated. The story showed how paycheck apps, including those backed by billionaire investor Mark Cuban, NBA star Kevin Durant and actor Ashton Kutcher, offer high cost cash advances, which like payday loans, are disproportionately used by women of color.
“If I hadn’t been at the Fuller Project, I don’t know that I would have the support to stay on the story until we got the results that women all around the world deserve.”
AARON GLANTZ,
California Bureau Chief
& Senior Editor
For the last decade, every survivor and first responder of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City who later developed cancer has been eligible to receive health benefits from the U.S. government. Everyone except women with uterine cancer.
“I always try to approach storytelling with empathy and curiosity, meeting people where they are. Our sources don’t owe us their stories, we have to earn them. That means spending time in communities, earning trust and listening, rather than parachuting in and extracting – not only is that approach the right thing to do to respect people’s autonomy and lived reality, it makes for better storytelling.”
ERICA HENSLEY, REPORTER
The work we do…
resulting in…
creating pathways…
to impact…
Rigorous, data-driven reporting and investigative series
Exclusive stories centered on women that otherwise would not be told
Persistent follow up on stories to drive impact and accountability
Partnership with renowned outlets and local journalists
Groundbreaking journalism in each of our focus areas:
Health
Economy & Labor
Climate & Environment
Movements
Decision makers are equipped with evidence on the issues we cover
Academics, advocates, and funders use Fuller’s reporting in their work advancing gender equality
Unjust or negligent policies and behaviors are exposed
Unjust and unequal government, corporate, and institutional policies are improved
Unjust and unequal government, corporate, and institutional practices are stopped or changed
Partners
Partnership is at the heart of The Fuller Project. The exclusive in-depth stories reported by our journalists are published in renowned global outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Guardian, and Foreign Policy, and in partnership with leading outlets around the world, from India to Afghanistan to Kenya. Through these partnerships, our work reaches the biggest digital and print news audiences in the world. Our reporters are from the countries or regions where they report, and they bring deep gender and regional expertise to our partner organizations. Deeply rooted in their regions, they can report authentically and from a place of trust when dealing with vulnerable populations, offering our partner outlets a nuanced perspective on stories that they may otherwise be unable to tell. Our publishing partnerships are not only mutually beneficial for outlets, reporters, and readers; they also shift newsroom practice worldwide toward a more equal representation of women’s perspectives.
Support Us
Our vision is to catalyze positive change for women and their communities through groundbreaking reporting that exposes injustice, changes policies, and shifts practices. If you share our goal, we ask you to consider making a gift to The Fuller Project to support our work.
or send a check made out to:
Fuller Project for International Reporting
7920 Norfolk Avenue, #310
Bethesda, MD 20814.
The Fuller Project is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization and all contributions are fully deductible within the limits of the law. For questions about supporting our work, please email Leslie Bernard at lbernard@fullerproject.org.
As more than half the population consists of women and girls, it is vital to address and highlight the challenges, successes, and innovations of women facing inequities around the world through investigative reporting. The Fuller Project, as a global newsroom, is an essential resource, giving me the full story about these issues. I am grateful for its significant role in driving change towards a world with greater dignity and equity for all of us. – GINA MAYA, BOARD MEMBER
We are proud and happy to support The Fuller Project, both because of their commitment to deeply researched, high-quality investigative journalism, and because of the real and meaningful positive impact their work has on some of the most vulnerable and marginalized communities in the world. – JOE SLAUGHTER, MANAGING DIRECTOR, THE HORACE W. GOLDSMITH FOUNDATION
