Rutgers University is to announce on Monday that it is endowing a chair named for Gloria Steinem, a symbol of modern American feminism.
The chair will be endowed by grants from the Ford, Knight, and Revson Foundations, as well as by individual gifts, including one from Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook and the author of “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” and one from Mort Zuckerman, the owner and publisher of The Daily News and U.S. News and World Report.

Elementary school students, retirees, elite athletes, surgeons, politicians, victims of bullying and sexual assault, beleaguered refugees, people dealing with mental illness or physical limitations (including a quadriplegic): they have all written to say that adopting a confident pose — or simply visualizing one, as in that last case — delivers almost instant self-assurance.

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — A coastal fog hung over the Old Course for much of the day Thursday, forcing golfers to strain to follow their shots. But clarity of a historic nature emerged just a few yards from the first tee, where the Royal and Ancient Golf Club voted overwhelmingly to admit its first female members.
As evening descended here, on the same day Scots voted on whether to declare independence from the United Kingdom, Peter Dawson, the secretary of the club, announced the results of a postal balloting of the club’s 2,400 male members, many of whom were on site in matching blue jackets and patterned blue ties. About three-quarters of the members participated in the voting, he said, with 85 percent of them opting to accept women.

In August, Lego began selling a set called “Research Institute” that features three female scientist minifigures: a paleontologist, an astronomer and a chemist. I am well qualified in two of those fields, and I am here to say that playing with a different set of dolls will not adequately prepare your daughters for a career in science. You must teach them, rather, to manage their dreams. They need to know that daring to act upon their dreams of science can be both a beautiful and a dangerous thing.

Officials say legislation will begin a paradigm shift in how college campuses in California prevent and investigate sexual assaults

The governor of California, Jerry Brown, has signed a bill that makes the state the first in the United States to define when “yes means yes” and adopt requirements for colleges to follow when investigating sexual assault reports.

For many Syrians stuck in Jordan’s squalid and sometimes dangerous refugee camps, marrying girls off at younger and younger ages is increasingly being seen as a necessity — a way of easing the financial burden on families with little or no income and allaying fears of rape and sexual harassment in makeshift living spaces where it is harder to enforce the rule of law. As a result, Unicef says, the number of marriages involving girls younger than 18 has ballooned since the war in Syria started.

According to GovernanceMetrics International, a research company based in New York that monitors corporate behavior, women make up less than 1 percent of the board members in Japanese corporations, ranking the country at the bottom of advanced economies. By comparison, women make up 11.4 percent of corporate boards in the United States and 9 percent in Germany.
It is a similar story in politics. The United Nations says 8.1 percent of Japan’s national lawmakers are women, less than half of the 18.3 percent in the United States.

We’re entering another election season in which women’s issues loom large. (In North Carolina, one recent poll showed the gender gap between Tillis and his Democratic opponent, Senator Kay Hagan, is 32 percent.) The Republicans are trying to avoid the disastrous tone-deafness that cropped up two years ago when a leading Senate candidate suggested that a gal could not get pregnant if she was raped.

La Barbe, meaning “beard” in French, is a French feminist direct action group that interrupts high-level meetings to draw attention to the lack of women in decision-making positions in every sector of society. On that Wednesday afternoon, they were calling attention to gender inequality among psychoanalysis experts. Organizers estimate that the group has staged about 150 interruptions since its creation in 2008. Started in Paris, it now has chapters in cities throughout France, as well as in countries including Australia, Denmark and Mexico.

Women today inhabit a transitional historical moment. We have tremendous new freedoms and new opportunities, but the legacy of a very different past is around us and inside us. Learning to respond to praise and criticism — without getting hooked by it — is for most of us, a necessary rite of passage.