Grantee highlight: UltraViolet fights and wins for gender justice — and this benefits everyone

Note from the CREDO Mobile team: This May, UltraViolet is among three amazing groups that will receive a share of our monthly grant. Funding from the CREDO Mobile community will support UltraViolet in its work to fight sexism and create a more inclusive world that accurately represents all women in all places, from politics and government to media and pop culture.

 Read this important blog post about UltraViolet’s critical work, then visit CREDODonations.com and cast your vote to help send funding to the group to assist its efforts — and the efforts of our other outstanding May grantees.

How we treat women and gender-expansive people is a bellwether for how we treat everyone and it has an impact on our collective prosperity. Case in point: eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion and placing limits on reproductive freedoms like contraception and in-vitro fertilization have increased maternal and infant mortality rates, discouraged people from entering medical fields like gynecology and weakened our healthcare system as a whole. Result: we all lose.

Similarly, attacks on gender-affirming care, efforts to perpetrate sexual violence and failures to eradicate it, along with failures to disrupt disinformation campaigns against women and LGBTQ+ leaders, keep a significant part of our population from fully participating in our workplaces, institutions and democracy. Again, we all lose.

That’s why we at UltraViolet center gender justice in our mission and in everything that we do.

UltraViolet is a 12-year-old multiracial and multigender digital feminist organization with a million members across all 50 states and D.C. We leverage the power of our grassroots base to fuel cutting-edge campaigns that promote gender-equitable policies, defend gender justice, disrupt patriarchy and create a cost for sexism.

We do this by hitting our target — decision-makers — from every angle possible. And since we have so many passionate members everywhere, we’re able to break through the traditional media and social media noise and keep our campaigns in the news for extended periods of time. Keeping our issue areas in the news is a key way to control the media and public narrative and, ultimately, achieve political and cultural change.

In the last year, we were the first organization out of the gate to hold Walgreens accountable for waffling over dispensing the abortion pill mifepristone in states where abortion is legal, like Kansas. Tens of thousands of our members signed a petition, emailed and called corporate headquarters, and posted on Walgreens’ social media pages. We also heard from hundreds of our members who pulled their prescriptions or stopped shopping at Walgreens. We know our campaign worked, as Walgreens’ stock took a nosedive.

In addition, we commissioned a billboard by Walgreens headquarters in Deerfield, Illinois, pointing out that most Americans support mifepristone access. We also commissioned a mobile billboard at the pharmacists’ trade conference in Phoenix, Arizona.

We never let up — and we won. Last month, both Walgreens and CVS said they would begin dispensing mifepristone in select states. But our campaign for justice won’t end until all pharmacies dispense this vital medication.

Here are a couple more wins from the last six months that we’re proud of.

• Washington and Virginia became the 11th and 12th states to ban child marriage. It’s hard to believe that this is even an issue in 2024 but we continue to fight to end the archaic and abusive practice of child marriage.

Children under the age of 18, including emancipated minors, have limited legal rights. Child marriage is a get-out-of-jail-free card for adults who sexually abuse children and limits the education, economic stability and health of children who enter into marital contracts.

We are pleased to announce that Washington recently became the 11th state and Virginia the 12th to end this form of child abuse. We now have major momentum going into California to end this immoral practice.

• Thanks to our advocacy, the Apple app store dropped misogynist Andrew Tate. We have a long-running campaign against the so-called manosphere behind disinformation campaigns and violent incitements against women online, in politics, on social media and in video gaming communities.

Thanks to the 15,000-plus UltraViolet members who demanded that Apple drop Tate’s “Real World” platform from its App Store, we successfully pressured Apple to remove Tate and his hate.

We are now calling on YouTube and video gaming platform Stream to protect Black women gamers from online harassment and violence by removing key misogynists from their platforms.

We will not stop until we are all free. Thank you to the CREDO Mobile community for supporting our common cause for freedom and justice!