Young women are ditching social media
Plus: 🎤 Chappell Roan 🎬 ageing in Hollywood 🤬 menopause fury
Welcome back to Take The Lead, the fortnightly newsletter from The Female Lead.
Here’s your roundup of our most-read and most-subscribed-to articles of the last month.
“Toxic ‘bro’ culture is driving many young women away from social media” according to a recent Amnesty International UK poll, and there are a couple of familiar names that kept cropping up as part of the problem. 👀
Chappell Roan said she’s not interested in motherhood and the internet exploded. But it left us thinking, why is it still taboo to discuss the hardships of motherhood in 2025?
In a world where ageing too fast is a crime and ageing too slow is suspicious, women basically can’t win, and nobody knows that better than Millie Bobby Brown.
And Davina McCall reminded us that anger isn’t a dirty word. Especially when it helps spark a national menopause conversation.
Enjoy, share it if you like it, and please reply directly to this email to let us know what you think.
Catch up on our most recent full newsletter, The sentence in Adolescence that broke me as a parent, if you missed it.
Young women are leaving social media - and it's not hard to guess why
Six in 10 young people think the words and actions of pol…
Chappell Roan’s comments about motherhood aren’t the problem
When pop sensation Chappell Roan candidly described motherhood as seeming like “hell” during her recent appearance on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy podc…
Millie Bobby Brown is living the paradox of ageing online in your 20s
By Nadine Shanahan Graduate Teaching Fellow, University of Liverpool
Davina McCall: ‘fury’ led me to talk about menopause
Davina McCall has said she was “furious” about the lack of knowledge around the menopause and that h…
7 ways feminism has improved the world for young women
By Hind Elhinnawy, Senior Lecturer, School of Social Sciences, Nottingham Trent University
Why the ‘endometriosis pill’ news just felt like more medical gaslighting
By Holly Francis; data, research and education leader at The Female Lead
Motherless mothers: "Our mothering and our mourning are intertwined"
Adina Belloli lost her mother at six months old, when she was killed by a drunk driver.
The sentence in Adolescence that broke me as a parent
[This article contains spoilers for the Netflix show Adolescence]
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