Women and Power

Despite the strides women have made toward equality in the past 50 years, they remain underrepresented in a variety of professions. Today we salute ten female pioneers in traditionally male-dominated fields: 1. Irina Krush (Chess Master): Unlike most competitive pursuits, chess allows women to ... Read More

Republicans are expected to make huge gains in the Senate and House of Representatives today, and this could be very damaging for women's rights, says feminist icon Gloria Steinem. Gone is the old Republican party of Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller, two prominent conservatives from the ... Read More

As female leaders have reached the highest echelons of government and business, it's become apparent that they exercise their authority differently than men do.  Research by Alice Eagly, a professor of social psychology at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, has identified ... Read More

With greater educational opportunities yielding better jobs for women than ever before, female spending power has become a central engine of the economy—and is changing the world for the better. While male incomes have remained rather flat over the past 30 years, adjusted for inflation, women ... Read More

Sexual violence against women occurs everywhere in the world, yet a strife-torn pocket of the Democratic Republic of Congo has recently become a global focal point for such attacks as incidents of rape, violence and brutality have skyrocketed. The scale of sexual violence in the Congo right now ... Read More

There is popular narrative in the West that Islam is sexist. Brutal accounts of honor killings and public stonings of women accused of adultery have permeated the Western media. But these heinous acts affect a small minority of the world's 1.5 billion Muslims, particularly those in fundamentalist ... Read More

While in many parts of the world today women enjoy greater power and opportunity than ever before, there are also places where women remain essentially powerless, lacking access to even basic education or human rights.  In consultation with leading universities and research groups, Big Think ... Read More

As notable women have reached the highest echelons of business, and as women have surpassed men in higher education, it's tempting to think that the idea of a "glass ceiling" is becoming outdated. But research indicates that prejudice still persists in the workforce in the form of wage, employment ... Read More

Ideas that one sex has an inherent genetic advantage over the other have long been held as taboo, lest low-level biological variance be unfairly and unscientifically used to prop up gender stereotypes.  But new research finds that baseline genetic differences in the brain do affect a person's ... Read More

Even as high-profile, high-profit professions like medicine and the law have edged toward gender parity, the financial firms on Wall Street continue to be dominated by men. But research indicates that women may be better suited than men, biochemically, to succeed as traders and fund managers ... Read More

Ninety years after the 19th Amendment guaranteed their participation in American politics, women are still greatly underrepresented in elected office—even though new research shows they may be more effective politicians than their male counterparts. According to the Center for American Women and ... Read More