Perhaps no place in Japanese society encapsulates the country’s gender imbalance more powerfully than its imperial household, steeped in two millennia of tradition as the world’s longest-running monarchy. Under Japanese imperial law, women cannot be emperors.

Brazil’s 2006 domestic violence law, named for Maria da Penha — a pharmacist who became the voice for women suffering domestic abuse when two attacks by her husband left her a paraplegic — is considered one of the best in the world. Properly implementing it, however, is still a struggle.

“We are pushing ourselves and our guests to do better and to be better. We are taking deliberate steps to develop a festival culture that is safe and inclusive for everyone,” Coachella organizers wrote in a statement announcing the initiative. The festival's website noted that those found committing “any form of assault or harassment, be it sexual, physical or verbal,” are “subject to immediate removal from the festival site and law enforcement may be notified.”

California’s new NDA law applies to both public and private employees and expands on an existing law that bars settlement provisions that would prevent the disclosure of felony sex offenses. The new law bans the use of a confidentiality clause to suppress factual information in sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation claims.

Some Congolese women are fighting to change the level of female representation in politics. But the fight is slow and they face significant barriers: a society that frowns on women in leadership positions, financial hurdles and the government’s failure to enforce gender parity laws.

“I’m part of a portion of society that is greatly affected by the types of things [Bolsonaro] says and thinks,” said Camila Ferreira, a 37-year-old psychoanalyst and art educator. “This conservative wave, which has really always existed in Brazil, needs to come to an end. Feminism needs to become more prominent in our society. Women need to be seen and treated as complete and equal people.”

“It makes a huge difference when a girl sees someone who they can personally relate to doing something they thought they could never do,” says Mireya Mayor. “I hope that my story is ... inspiration for girls and women.” In a few weeks, Mayor will meet the other Indiana Jones. “I’ll finally get a picture with the real Indiana Jones,” Mayor quipped, “but I am going to tell him that I am the real Indiana Jones. He’s the male Mireya Mayor.”

Seattle, like Portland, now has a black female chief of police, a significant fact as the two cities are among America’s most liberal, and whitest, big cities — Seattle is 70% white; Portland, 76%. But to hire the chiefs they wanted, the two cities’ new mayors used some unorthodox arm twisting to break through century-old racial and gender barriers.

“Getting hired doesn’t end the fact that we have to prove ourselves every single day, every single minute that we’re on the set,” she said Saturday to a packed room at a Comic-Con panel on female directors. In an off-the-cuff moment, she recalled being questioned and doubted by a male colleague. “He’s like, ‘You’re here because you’re a woman.’”

“If I were commissioning the interior of any kind of store and someone brought me blueprints including glass staircases, I’d tell him to take a hike. I wouldn’t give him a second shot. If he’s not intuitive enough to grasp that women in skirts will be uncomfortable walking upstairs, clouded glass or not, then what other errors has he made in his design?”

“From the beginning, there was a spirit of making sure we were sort of giving everyone in the movie their due, particularly Evangeline as the Wasp. It was [director Peyton Reed’s] thing from the very beginning that this is not a sidekick. This is an equal partner. I think that sort of spirit of inclusiveness led to certain decisions — like, ‘Why can’t a supervillain be a woman?’” explained co-writers Gabriel Ferrari and Andrew Barrer,

#MeToo may have begun as a discussion about how powerful men exploit women sexually in the workplace, but it very quickly evolved into a chance for women and some men to unburden themselves (finally) of all the incidents of abuse, objectification, discrimination and harassment they have endured — and kept to themselves for fear of reprisals. Now it is a more important, far-ranging debate about the uneven power and sexual dynamics between men and women and the ensuing mistreatment, which ranges from discrimination and inappropriate advances in the workplace to rape and assault in private.