# Helen Lewis (journalist)

Helen Alexandra Lewis (born 30 September 1983) is an English journalist, women's activist, and a staff writer at The Atlantic. She is a former deputy editor of the New Statesman, and has also written for The Guardian and The Sunday Times.

## Early life

Lewis was born in Worcester, England. She attended St Mary's School, Worcester until 2001 and completed a Bachelor of Arts with honours in English at St Peter's College, Oxford in 2004. In 2011, Lewis completed a Master of Arts in English at the Open University.

## Career

After graduating from Oxford, Lewis gained a post-graduate diploma in newspaper journalism from London's City University. Subsequently, she was accepted on the Daily Mail's programme for trainee sub-editors, working in the job for a few years, and later joining the team responsible for commissioning features for the newspaper. She was appointed the Women in the Humanities Honorary Writing Fellow at Oxford University for 2018/2019, and since 2019 has been on the steering committee for the Reuters Institute for Journalism at Oxford University, where she delivered a lecture on "The Failures of Political Journalism", subsequently adapted as a New Statesman cover story.
Lewis was appointed as deputy editor of the New Statesman in 2012, after becoming assistant editor in 2010. Since July 2019, she has been a staff writer at The Atlantic.
In 2018, Lewis interviewed Jordan Peterson for GQ, in a video which has been viewed over 70 million times. In 2019, April 2020, October 2020, April 2021, November 2021, June 2023, October 2023, May 2024, and October 2024, Lewis was a panellist on BBC's Have I Got News for You.

## Difficult Women

Lewis's first book Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights, a history of the battles for women's rights, was published by Jonathan Cape on 27 February 2020. Difficult Women was featured in the New Statesman under "Books to Read in 2020", and in the Observer list of "Non-fiction Books to Look Out for in 2020".

## Broadcasting

In 2019, Lewis launched her Radio 4 series, The Spark, a longform interview series with each episode dedicated to a single guest (or, in one case, two co-authors). The first four series have been collected by Penguin as an audiobook. In 2021, the BBC aired her comedy documentary series Great Wives. In 2022, Helen Lewis's eight-part podcast called The New Gurus aired on BBC Radio 4. In it, she investigated the popularity and influence of charismatic individuals from Russell Brand to Jordan Peterson.
Lewis presents the current affairs podcasts Page 94: The Private Eye Podcast, with Ian Hislop, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Adam Macqueen, and Strong Message Here with Armando Iannucci.

## Views on feminism and transgender issues

In 2012, Lewis coined what she herself referred to as "Lewis's Law": "the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism." In January 2013, Lewis edited a week of articles dedicated to transgender issues in the New Statesman, featuring articles by transgender and non-binary writers including Juliet Jacques, Jane Fae and Sky Yarlett. In the introduction, she wrote: "For anyone interested in equality, it should be obvious that trans people are subject to harassment simply for the way they express their gender identity."
While supporting transgender people's right to freedom from harassment and abuse, in July 2017, Lewis wrote about her concerns that gender self-identification would make rape shelters unsafe for women and would lead to an increase in sexual assaults in women's changing rooms, writing: "In this climate, who would challenge someone with a beard exposing their penis in a women's changing room?"
In response to criticism for those comments, Lewis said "I've had two tedious years of being abused online as a transphobe and a 'TERF' or 'trans-exclusionary radical feminist'—despite my belief that trans women are women, and trans men are men—because I have expressed concerns about self-ID and its impact on single-sex spaces". In November 2020, due to her statements, game developer Ubisoft removed from Watch Dogs: Legion two in-game political podcasts featuring Lewis's voice.

## Personal life

Lewis married Guardian journalist Jonathan Haynes in 2015. She was previously married in 2010 and divorced her first husband in 2013.