Many of these essays are about trying to work in dangerous circumstances, doubly so for women. As Zaina Erhaim writes in her essay: “I am a Syrian; a woman who lived in the most masculine of spaces; a journalist in a land of warlords; a secularist living among different kinds of extremists.” She adds: “I would be a great target, someone a fighter would be proud to have killed.”

There are accounts here of reporting from war zones and, for example, of being embedded with the United States military during the Iraq War. When these journalists were unable to be on the scene, they became skilled at scanning social media, especially YouTube videos, and gleaning information from those sources. Another kind of silence this book charts is the one that arrives when a source goes dark, because they’ve keen killed or forced out of their homes.

There are places these journalists can go that men cannot: kitchens and hair salons, to name two. In her essay, Hannah Allam, an NPR national security reporter who worked for McClatchy newspapers during the Iraq war, suggests that reporters ignore so-called women’s stories at their peril.

Noting that on an average day at the height of the Iraq war, it was common for 80 men to die from car bombs, Allam writes: “Consider those numbers for a moment: 80 dead men meant 80 new widows and dozens of newly fatherless children. Every day.” These women needed to become providers.

There is a good deal of gallows humor in “Our Women on the Ground.” There are high spirits; several romances are recounted. There are many, many stories of frightening and unwanted attention from men. Yet in her essay, Donna Abu-Nasr, Bloomberg’s Saudi Arabia bureau chief, catches some of the absurdity that can be in the air, too.

“Often, while I was stuck in traffic, young men would slam Post-its or papers with their mobile phone numbers scribbled on them on the window of my car,” she writes. “That was one way to pick up women. Another was to go to the mall and throw the little slips of paper at the feet of women covered head to toe in black.”