Haley Swenson

Haley Swenson is the Editor of the Better Life Lab at Slate and an ACLS/Mellon Public Fellow, hosted by the Better Life Lab program at New America in Washington, D.C. She edits daily articles on the future of gender, work, and social policy. She also writes regularly on gender, work, and inequality at Slate, including “Please Stop Calling Everything That Frustrates You Emotional Labor” and “Why Simply Giving Distressed Friends Permission to Quit Breastfeeding Was a Cop Out.”
Swenson holds a PhD in Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies from The Ohio State University, where she wrote her dissertation on the gender, race, and class factors that determine how unemployed people spend their time, and what this says about the way we value unpaid and paid work. She considers it her life’s work to translate the sometimes dense and difficult language of academic and policy research into stories that everyday people can access and understand.

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