Racial and gender imbalances persist. But education leaders said the data show a significant advance in a quest to banish the stereotype that computer science is mainly for coding geeks who tend to be white or Asian American boys. “We’re trying to diversify a field that for whatever reason has remained not so for generations,” said David Coleman, president of the College Board, which oversees the AP program. “Really, what this is about is computer science breaking out of its narrow role.”

TEQuitable is among a wave of businesses emerging in the wake of widespread revelations of sexual misconduct in workplaces. The startups, many of which have female founders or co-founders, want to disrupt a costly and persistent problem. A Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll this fall reported that nearly half of women say they have been sexually harassed at work, and the financial stakes for employers are substantial.

H. Brandt Ayers, the former publisher of the Anniston Star and current chairman of the company that owns the Star and five other newspapers, on Tuesday admitted that he spanked at least one female reporter decades ago, claiming he was simply following a doctor’s advice.

Their candidacies are testing long-held attitudes about women and leadership. Voters tended to see women as “well suited for legislatures, where it’s collaborative,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the center. “It runs up against the stereotype to see women as the chief decider, the place where the buck stops."

At a time when so much attention focuses on efforts to tear down Confederate memorials and other markers, some universities and students are commissioning and creating new testaments to the past, challenging people to view the institution’s history through a more complicated and nuanced lens. “There are,” Akca said, “so many stories that aren’t told here.”

Between October 2016 and October 2017, women who worked in the country’s stores lost 160,300 jobs, while 106,000 men found new work in the field, the analysis from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found. Economy & Business Alerts Breaking news about economic and business issues. Sign up “We’ve seen many news reports of the decline in retail jobs, but few have noted that the picture in retail is much different for women and men,” researchers at the Washington think tank wrote. Over the past year, they added, “women’s share of all retail trade jobs fell from 50.4 to 49.6 percent.”

Instead of having their voices amplified, Italian women supporting the #MeToo movement are constantly mocked online by men and even other women who see them as uptight feminists.

In the original Star Wars series, Leia (Carrie Fisher) was often the token female fighter surrounded by male humans, male droid voices and male “walking carpets.” Since then, the theatrical films have added Padmé Amidala (Natalie Portman, portraying one female senator who could not be silenced), Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) as the leading female figures in their own films. With “The Last Jedi” (opening Friday), however, Disney, Lucasfilm and writer-director Rian Johnson give us at least four Resistance characters who receive featured prominence as fierce women warriors.

Historians and economists will likely debate whether she was unfairly pushed aside because of her gender. But few can argue that she is exiting on a high. “She deserves to go out on a standing ovation,” Swonk said.

The letter also cites the number of women Amazon has in senior executive roles, compared with other tech companies, and asserts that could have an impact on how the company addresses allegations. It cited numbers from a recent New York Times story, which reported that just one of the top 16 executives (6 percent) at Amazon, known as the “S-team,” is a woman. At Apple, five of the top 19 executives listed on its website (26 percent) are women. Six of the 13 people (46 percent) on Google chief executive Sundar Pichai’s team are women, and three of the 16 executives listed on Microsoft’s website (19 percent) are female.

No American woman has won Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” by herself in more than eight decades. Over the course of the 91 years that the magazine has proffered the title, in fact, only one has done so: Wallis Simpson, who earned the title in 1936 thanks to her relationship with King Edward VIII, a relationship which eventually led to his giving up his throne. The next time an American woman was named “Person of the Year” (or, at that time, “Man of the Year”) to the exclusion of any man was in 1975, when the winner of the title was … “American Women.”