Neha Thirani Bagri

In Japan, a man earning an average wage get of 30.4 weeks of fully paid paternity leave, the most of any country in the world, according to a new analysis by the Economist. By comparison, the average across the countries in the OECD—a post-World War II-era economic development group that stands in roughly for “developed markets” around the world—is 4.3 weeks of paid paternity leave.

While Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election, leaving one of the world’s highest and hardest of glass ceilings intact, 77 women in other countries have been elected president or prime minister in the modern era.

Research has shown companies with more female leaders are more profitable. Yet it’s notoriously hard for women to make it to the highest post in large corporations. In fact, it seems to be getting harder. As of 2016, only 4.2% of the 500 largest US companies by revenue were led by female CEOs. That is a mere 21 women, down from 24 the previous year. And when companies hire female CEOs, and receive lots of media coverage for it, they are more likely to experience a negative market reaction.

A series of attacks against Americans of South Asian descent fuelled by racism in Kansas, South Carolina, and Washington State have scared and rattled communities there. And US president Donald Trump’s prolonged silence about these incidents has created further uncertainty and anger.

Over one century ago, on Feb. 5, 1917 Congress passed a bill that placed a ban on immigrants from almost the entire Asian continent from entering the United States.

While many Indian migrants move to far-flung, wealthy countries like the US, Canada, and the UK, a large number of them ends up right next door in Pakistan. According to a new study by Pew Research, in 2015, Pakistan was home to the second-largest number of Indian migrants after the United Arab Emirates.

Georgette Dickey Chapelle, a freelance photojournalist and the first American female war correspondent to be killed in action, was a trailblazer. She overcame gender discrimination in her personal and professional life to become one of the very first women on the front lines of war, and one of the most important war photographers of the 20th century.

On Feb. 28, 53 major US companies signed a “friend of the court” brief supporting Gavin Grimm, a transgender high school student from Virginia who sued the board of his school after his district denied him access to the restroom corresponding to his chosen gender. Grimm has argued the policy violates Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the case on March 28.

Forget Lego Batman. The best new minifigures of 2017 are female NASA heroes.

In 1991, Los Angeles police officers were videotaped as they brutally beat a black man named Rodney King after a high-speed car chase. The officers were tried for assault and when they were acquitted a year later, a week of riots left left 55 people dead. An independent commission found a significant pattern: of the 120 police officers with the most use-of-force reports, not one was female. “The statistics indicate that female officers are not reluctant to use force, but they are not nearly as likely to be involved in use of excessive force,” the report noted.

In the US, drivers stick vanity license plates on their cars to express support for everything from national parks and veterans to breast cancer awareness—and anti-abortion clinics. Twenty-nine states offer “Choose Life” license plates that cost anywhere from $25 to $70, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Today, US president Donald Trump and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau participated in a roundtable discussion about women in the workforce, where they announced a new task force called the United States Canada Council for the Advancement of Women Business Leaders-Female Entrepreneurs.

With a new administration in Washington, DC, the US State Department is bracing for change.

Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, has positioned herself as a champion of women’s empowerment since taking office in 2009. She’s been recognized internationally for her efforts: In September Hasina was awarded the United Nation Women’s “Agents of Change” award, for creating opportunities for women in the workplace, improving access to education for girls, and instating the National Women’s Development Policy in 2011, which guaranteed equal opportunity and entitlement for women in Bangladesh.

On Feb. 2, Congress voted to overturn regulations designed to keep people who suffer from severe mental illness from buying firearms in the US.

The impact of US president Donald Trump’s recent immigration ban has been deeply felt in one very international community: scientists.

Since he has taken office, US president Donald Trump’s anti-science and anti-women rhetoric has turned into action. He’s proposed an attorney general with a terrible record on women’s rights, selected a health secretary who doesn’t believe birth control should be free, and placed a gag order on the Environmental Protection Agency and has frozen all grants and contracts from the agency.

In Donald Trump’s first few days in office, American journalists have been surprised at how rapidly the new US presidential administration began to curb their access to government. For Indian journalists, the Trump White House’s efforts to control how members of the media can engage with government sources is eerily familiar. In the weeks after the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi was elected in 2014, his administration took similar steps to reduce access to ministers and bureaucrats of various departments for members of the press and centralize communications through the office of the prime minister.

The gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) manifests itself in many ways: in the number of women with degrees in STEM, the number of women with jobs in STEM, and the wage disparity between men and women who work in STEM. Another facet is the gender gap in the peer review process. A new comment piece in Nature finds that women serve as peer reviewers less frequently than men.

Melinda Gates has become such a feminist hero that she now stars in her own comic book. It’s a graphic re-telling of her work heading the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, part of a Female Force series that also features Hillary Clinton, Michelle Obama and Ellen DeGeneres. Now, using her unique position as head of one of the world’s largest philanthropic organizations and her personal experience working in male-dominated technology companies, Gates is working to help women in tech.

On Saturday, as many as 200,000 are expected to join the Women’s March organized in protest of Donald Trump’s victory in November’s US presidential election. This symbolic act is meant to signal solidarity and a united response, but there’s one plank of the protest platform that is proving to be a source of discord among American women: abortion.

During the fraught US presidential election of 2016, anxiety triggered by politics was a very real thing; therapists across the country were faced with patients’ nervous breakdowns. In the months after, post-election stress disorder plagued many. For many across the US, Donald Trump’s inauguration is dredging up new and discomfiting feelings. Psychology and sociology have a word for what’s going on: collective trauma.

Men can be sympathetic, empathetic, and caring. But they seem to not want to identify that way.