I’m only getting paid two and a half cents per click on this story. That’s more than what 99.9% of contributors on Medium get paid. I have a $60,000 graduate journalism degree from Medill, nearly a decade of writing experience, and, let’s be honest, I’m super smart and seriously good at what I do. I can write and report a kickass story with my eyes closed and one hand tied behind my back. But the algorithm that decides how much I get paid for all that badass-ness doesn’t put any value on how good I am. It cares not at all how well written this story is or how much experience I have. All that’s important is how many times you guys click.

When you become a freelance writer you spend a good deal of your time weighing what the marketing industry calls ROI — return on investment. How much time do you put into writing a story versus how much money you’re ultimately going to make on it? Often, I am forced to turn down perfectly good writing jobs because they are so low-paying I simply can’t justify the investment of my time. And while I’m all in favor of this new world of media startups, where truly well-intentioned people are trying to figure out how the heck to make money from journalism on the Internet, I just need to step up right now and call bullshit on pretty much all the algorithms. Cause you guys just aren’t understanding the importance of a good writer.

Granted, I’m totally biased. Of course *I* think I’m hugely valuable. But I’m also really comfortable assuming the editors I work with on a regular basis—at publications that pay me a living wage— who keep coming back to me time and again for work based on my talent, critical thinking, ability to ask the right questions, and skill in explaining super complex topics would agree. There is huge value in a good reporter. And there is a huge difference between a well-written, well-reported story and one that’s merely OK.

I love the idea of a new world of media that exists solely on the Internet. And I really, really want to be part of it. But I also want to pay my rent and feed my cat. I don’t think that’s a lot to ask. In fact, I’m gonna go ahead and say I’m pretty irritated that I have to ask at all. Actually, screw that, I’m INSULTED by how much you’re trying to pay me. Or not pay me.

Until you guys coming up with newfangled ways to bring journalism online start valuing writers, I’m going to have to keep on dedicating the majority of my time and brainpower to traditional media organizations. They might not always be able to quantify the value of my contribution to their business by counting clicks, but they know they’re benefiting from being associated with me. And, mostly, they assign a reasonable value to that benefit (that’s debatable, but it’s rarely an insulting number). They understand that sometimes great stories aren’t always the most popular ones. They understand that EVEN A STORY WITH A LIMITED AUDIENCE CAN BE WORTH PUBLISHING. The alternative is having a world of journalism written entirely by amateurs with no experience, no education, and limited talent. Or a world in which great writers bypass fantastic stories because not everybody in the universe is going to read it. And that’s a pretty lame world, frankly.

Now, can you all please click the shit out of this story so I can make a few bucks on it? My cat really appreciates it.

Erin Biba is a talented, experienced, smart science writer with a few degrees whose writing and reporting ability is valued by publications like WIRED, Scientific American, Newsweek, Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, and The Mythbusters’ Tested.com.

Your Newfangled Media Algorithms are Bullshit was originally published in LadyBits on Medium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Men and beer have gone together for ages. Beer is crafted by men in factories owned by men, sold to men, and consumed by men.

But women love beer, too. They make up one-quarter of U.S. beer consumption by volume, according to the Beverage Media Group. And the number of women who love beer is slowly growing. The craft brewing industry has allowed them to find new brands and flavors. According to a consumer survey called the Alcoholic Beverage DemandTracker, the percent of women who name beer as their favorite beverage grew from 26 percent in 2012 to 28 percent in 2013. That stat may seem low, but it’s kind of remarkable considering that beer is only ever marketed to men.

And women love brewing too. For a long time, the only way they’ve been able to show it is through small-batch home brewing in their kitchens. Women who have wanted to turn their craft into a career say they’ve had their male counterparts literally laugh in their faces. In the last ten years or so, however, a few female pioneers have pushed their way onto brewery floors to prove that making beer is anything but men’s work.

The movement of women into the industry has happened incredibly slowly. A male-dominated industry is generally considered to be one that has 25 percent or fewer women. While other men-centric businesses have started accepting women over the years (even mining, for example, was 13 percent women in the U.S. in 2011), the brewing industry doesn’t even bother to track how many women it employs. The generally accepted estimate is that less than 1 percent of all brewers in the U.S. are female. Whitney Burnside, who became the first female head brewer at Pelican Brewery in Oregon in January, says that when it came to her entering the industry, “there was a lot of resistance. I felt like I had to work extra hard to show them that I could do it. I never felt like it was acceptable. Now, even being the head brewer here, I still get the looks and the weird responses.”

It hasn’t always been this way. The idea that beer is a man’s domain would have been ludicrous to anyone alive more than 250 years ago. Before beer was taken over by industry, men had little time or care for crafting brew — they were too busy hunting or farming to waste their hours cooking. After all, making beer isn’t all that different from making dinner. Until the modern-era, women dominated everything that went on in the kitchen.

Women were also the first to turn brewing into a lucrative industry, taking beer out of their kitchens and selling it for a profit around town. In medieval Europe, women known as alewives skirted the discriminatory rules against female ownership of land and business by opening ale houses. It was one of the few ways that non-married women could work to support themselves. The government allowed them to operate because their businesses grew naturally out of brewing in their home kitchens, trading with other women in their villages, and eventually selling beer to those who didn’t have anything to trade. Very few men worked in the industry and, as water was unhealthy to drink, women provided huge amounts of beer to the community — nearly a gallon per person, per day. Back then, beer was more of a soft drink, not nearly as alcoholic as it is now and so varied in its production method that we likely wouldn’t recognize it today. In his book “Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,” Richard Unger writes: “Beer was perceived as an integral part of the diet, a source of nutrition and good health, rather than as a drug taken for recreation. … People drank at home at home and in public places, from morning throughout the day until well into the evening.”

Obviously, the female domination of brewing didn’t last forever. The tides began to turn against ladies in the mid-1500s. Social stigmas surrounding women in business began to turn towards alewives and eventually society started seeing female brewers as crooks, deviants, and disobedient to their husbands. The industrial revolution of the 1700s eliminated women from the business almost entirely. As men figured out how to commercialize and mass-produce beer, they took over the process from their wives.

Factory-dominated brewing has gone on for so long it seems that society has completely forgotten that beer was once the domain of women. Even as recently as the 1980s it wasn’t unusual to find male brewers who believed the superstition that women were bad luck on brewery floors.

“There’s a few of us old birds who came into the beer industry early on,” says Teri Fahrendorf, a retired brewmaster who got her start in the industry in 1988 at Sieben’s River North Brewpub in Chicago. “When I was first starting out, I was told no woman could do the job, it’s too physical. There was the superstition that women don’t belong on the brew deck.”

Gerri Kustelski, a chemist who works in quality control for Summit Brewing in Saint Paul, says that she was on an all-female team of quality control scientists when she got her start in the early 1960s. But the team wasn’t allowed to collect its own samples. “We did not go out into the plant at all. We still had brewers that thought if women went into an area where fermentation was taking place our hormones would affect the beer. It wasn’t until the early ‘80s that we started going out and picking up our own samples, which was much preferred,” she says.

According to the ladies of the brewing industry, it was the explosion of the craft beer industry in the mid-1990s that finally enabled women to show they could handle the challenges of brewing. Women avoided the superstitions and sexism by becoming the boss. According to Ellen Bounsall, who left academia to start a craft brewing company with her husband in the early ’80s, the industry was forced to accept women because the entire business was changing. Suppliers were having to re-learn what their customers needed by figuring out how to cater to smaller operations and not just massive, national brands. This made them more open to other types of changes — like female master brewers.

“I was a pioneer 25 years ago. It was unheard of for a woman to be involved in the brewing industry. In the big breweries they weren’t masters, they were only in quality control,” says Bounsall. “The only reason I started was because my husband and I were academic administrators at a community college and we were bored.” While Bounsall’s husband worked in funding and financing, she got the actual brewery up and running. “He was never around to start learning how to use the equipment. I have a degree in biology and brewing was more interesting than what I was doing at the time.”

Bounsall quickly fell in love with the process of beer making and since she was the boss, there was nobody around to tell her she couldn’t do it. “There I was shoveling mash and running about in rubber boots. It was a very different world. Anyone who knew me thought I had lost touch with reality. I was enjoying it.” But when it came to talking with suppliers, the sexism popped right back up. “They’d come by and ask who they could speak to and they’d want to talk to my husband. They weren’t buying into the concept that I was the head brewer. It was an old boys network.”

Eventually, she says, the suppliers had to accept the fact that some of their customers were going to be women. “As craft brewing began to expand and develop within the US, the suppliers began to realize they’d have to start catering to a whole new world. And if there was a women there then OK.”

But that doesn’t mean the industry has fully welcomed women into the fold. Fahrendorf, who runs The Pink Boots Society — an industry organization of nearly 1,000 women who work in every aspect of brewing from brew masters to quality control to beer journalists — still can’t say for sure how many female master brewers there are in the U.S. today.

Pelican Brewery’s Burnside says that things haven’t changed all that much since the early days of women in the industry. She faced challenges breaking into the business just a few years ago. “I started knocking on brewery doors in the Seattle and Portland area. I wasn’t having any luck at all. I was actually not taken seriously. I’m really small and I’m short and I look really young. When the big burly guys opened the back door and saw me they were like: ‘You wanna work in a brewery?!’”

Even now, as the head brewer at Pelican, Burnside says it hasn’t been an easy ride. “You have to be kind of brave. I definitely am not expecting to work with women which is weird. It’s really frustrating working with just men because there’s still that bias. There are some men that have a definite problem and issue with working with women and treating them like an equal or feeling like an equal to them. I definitely have to work harder. Not only physically, but I also have to work harder to gain their respect. I’m used to it, and i’m up for it, it’s just frustrating.”

Still, women in brewing agree that the industry is changing. The fact that women are now allowed onto brewery floors at all is a step in the right direction. But it’s 2014 and women should be leaping, not stepping. The industry closely tracks the number of breweries and brewers in the U.S. (the U.S. Brewers Association says there were 2,500 breweries in June, 2013), why aren’t they tracking the number of women? It should be easy to do. If they can’t even put a number on how many women there are, then clearly they aren’t trying hard enough to include them.

Burnside says she hopes that women brewmasters like her will start to change perceptions of what it means to be a brewer. But, more than anything, “women need to drink more beer.” So, ladies, let’s all raise a frothy glass to the women brewers who are taking back beer one pint at a time.

Women Are Taking Back Beer was originally published in The Only Woman in the Room on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We need to talk about birth control. Specifically, we need to talk about what is and isn’t dangerous about it, as there’s a lot of misinformation going around lately thanks to a scathing takedown of NuvaRing in Vanity Fair (Danger in the Ring by Marie Brenner, January 2014). If you haven’t read it, the story was a heartbreaking tale of two women who died from blood clots after using the birth control device. The story wasn’t, however, a calm and considered look at the accurate science of birth control (which is why I’m not going to link to it here).

To get a better idea of whether or not the story was realistic, or unnecessarily fear-mongering, I spent almost two hours talking with Trent MacKay and Diana Blithe, respectively the Chief and Program Director of the National Institute of Health’s Contraceptive Discovery and Development Branch. Here’s what I learned: A basic understanding of how birth control works will quickly dispel any fears you might have about using NuvaRing — or any method of birth control for that matter. So. Let’s all take a deep, calming breath and talk about how uteruses work.

The first thing you need to know is that nearly all forms of birth control (except intrauterine devices (IUDs) — I’ll explain why later) have the potential to cause blood clots. This fact is not unique to any specific contraceptive method and it’s the only potentially deadly side effect of birth control. It also has very little to do with birth control. What it does have to do with is the body’s completely natural reaction to pregnancy, a state of being that birth control tricks your body into thinking it’s in.

Basically this all comes down to two hormones you’ve probably heard a lot about: progesterone and estrogen. They work together to make your period happen and their levels rise and fall throughout your cycle. Estrogen does lots of jobs in your body, but in the case of your uterus, its levels go up just before your period to make the walls thicker so a fertilized egg can stick and grow a baby. When you’re actually pregnant, increased progesterone stops your ovaries from releasing eggs. When its levels drop you go through withdrawal, which tells your body it’s time for your period.

Birth control takes charge of the rise and fall of these hormones. During the first three weeks of your cycle, your BC method of choice releases synthetic progesterone (called progestin) and high levels of estrogen into your system causing your body to respond as if it’s pregnant. When you go into the fourth week of placebo pills (or when you remove your patch or ring), your level of progestin drops, and you get your period.

Estrogen has another interesting effect. Let’s just pause and think about giving birth for a second. There is the potential for quite a bit of blood loss. A woman’s body needs a way to control this and ensure that she doesn’t lose any more blood than is necessary. So when a woman is pregnant (and for a short time after giving birth) high levels of estrogen in the body also helps the blood to coagulate. To clarify, estrogen doesn’t cause blood clots, it just makes the blood more likely to clot and prevents a pregnant woman from bleeding out when she gives birth.

Estrogen doesn’t cause blood clots, it just makes the blood more likely to clot in order to prevent a pregnant woman from bleeding out when she gives birth.

It’s because birth control mimics pregnancy that blood clots are possible when taking them. And, actually, the higher dose of estrogen in birth control is a contributing factor (at least, that’s what science suspects). It’s during the progestin-withdrawal stage that you’re at the highest risk of getting a blood clot. The Mirena IUDs, on the other hand, have no possible risk of blood clots because they deliver a constant, low dose of progestin and your body never transitions into the estrogen-only phase. But here’s the thing: you are at much, MUCH higher risk for blood clots if you are *actually* pregnant. In fact, your highest risk for getting a blood clot is after you give birth. So, in a sense, by preventing pregnancy, birth control actually protects you from the chance of having a deadly blood clot.

You are at much, MUCH higher risk for blood clots if you are *actually* pregnant.

But why aren’t women everywhere dying left and right from blood clots caused by birth control? Because blood clots are possible but highly unlikely unless you’re genetically predisposed to them. And that’s a very rare thing. Here are some numbers for you from the folks at the NIH:

- For all humans, the lifetime risk of dying in a car accident is 1 in 84. Keep that number in mind, because some perspective is important here.

- For all humans who never take any birth control and have no predisposition to blood clots, the rate of actually getting one is 1-2 people out of every 10,000.

- For women with no predisposition to blood clots, the rate of getting one while taking birth control is about 5 in 10,000. (Of those 5, only 1-5 percent actually die from said blood clot.)

- For women with no predisposition to blood clots, the rate of getting one while pregnant is about five to ten times higher than while taking birth control (depending on the study).

- For women with the genetic predisposition to blood clots, the risk of getting one while taking birth control is 1 in 500. That’s a scary number, but it’s important to know that only 5 percent of the entire human population (meaning men and women) actually have the genetic predisposition.

Here’s another thing that you should know about blood clots and birth control: if you are going to get a blood clot it will most likely happen within the first three months of taking the drug. Your risk drops off significantly after that, though there’s still a slight increased risk for about a year. So if you’ve been using your NuvaRing — or any birth control method — for many years now there’s no need at all to make a sudden, panicked change.

There’s one caveat to all this. When using the NuvaRing there is, in fact, a slightly higher risk than other methods of birth control for blood clots (about 7 people in 10,000 vs. 5 or 6 in 10,000 with other birth control). Scientists suspect, but aren’t sure, that it might have something to do with the burst of progestin in your system when you put the ring back in. Still, the slightly increased risk is negligible. And it’s much lower than the risk during and just after pregnancy (which is about 1 in 1,000). If you’re not predisposed to blood clots then it shouldn’t be a concern. And if you are, a contraceptive like the ring, the pill, or the patch aren’t your safest choice anyway. Plus, keep in mind that every birth control can have annoying, non-deadly side effects, like wacky emotions, that you should talk about with your doctor.

I should also note that there are lifestyle choices that can increase your risks for blood clots that have nothing to do with birth control or pregnancy. Smokers and obese women, for example, are at a much higher risk. And, in fact, doctors are completely divided about how to prescribe safe birth control to folks who fall into those categories.

But all those complicating factors (and Vanity Fair articles) aside, if you are healthy and not genetically predisposed to blood clots then NuvaRing, or any method of birth control, is a safe choice when it comes to the risk of clots.

Why You Shouldn’t Worry About NuvaRing was originally published in LadyBits on Medium on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.