How have female leaders in higher education shaped the state of the field today, and what broader lessons can be learned from them?

Maintaining healthy population numbers has always been seen by political leaders as a crucial element for ensuring economic and military might. Accordingly, throughout history countries have advanced a number of pronatalist strategies to encourage marriage and births.

French Gates and Scott can do more to increase philanthropy for women and girls than by giving away large portions of their own fortunes. By drawing attention to these donations, they can encourage others – both those with great wealth at their disposal and those of more modest means – to support these causes.

Targeted for being “deviants,” “sinners,” and “national security risks” in the 1940s and 1950s, some lesbians found solace, belonging and life-long love through involvement in sports. However, at the same time, sporting access for gay women was structured by racism, class hierarchies and homophobia.

Some following the #FreeBritney campaign are shocked that Spears’s family was able to maintain a conservatorship over the performer for 13 years under which the star says she was abused, exploited, medicated and controlled. But such legal arrangements have been imposed on women artists before. They reflect biased assumptions about women’s abilities to manage their lives and their professional activities.

The common perception of sex trafficking involves a young, passive woman captured by an aggressive trafficker. But this is not how sex trafficking usually occurs. Furthemore, frontline workers inconsistently define and apply the label “trafficking victim” – especially when it comes to sex trafficking. That makes it harder for these professionals to get trafficked people the help they request.

Women athletes are increasingly opposing dress codes that are based on archaic ideas of what women should look like.

At the end of the 19th century, when it was founded, the modern Olympic movement deliberately excluded women. Games patriarch Baron Pierre de Coubertin argued an Olympiad with women would be "impractical, uninteresting, unaesthetic and improper." With the postponed 2020 Tokyo Games due to start next Friday, what advances can we celebrate? And what still needs to change?

When Albert Einstein wrote an obituary for Emmy Noether in 1935, he described her as a “creative mathematical genius” who – despite “unselfish, significant work over a period of many years” – did not get the recognition she deserved.

Parliaments and other legislative bodies are responsible for creating equality legislation – but does this apply to their own members? The way political institutions accommodate elected officials with caring responsibilities says something about the economic and political priorities of the country they represent.

Originating in China, Cinderella is a story about domestic labour, female violence and friendship, and the oppression of servitude. Perhaps most significantly, it is a story about female desire in a world where women were denied any role in society.

Preparing for childbirth can be joyful and exciting, but COVID-19 restrictions disrupted many women’s prenatal care and forced some mothers to deliver their infants, without partner or family support. Others faced separation from their newborns immediately after birth.