The director of the latest Star Wars movie has said it's time an episode in the series was entrusted to a female and/or non-white film-maker. "Hell yes it's time," said Rian Johnson at a press conference for Star Wars: The Last Jedi in central London. "There are so many incredibly talented female directors, directors of colour out there, and so many that I would love to see play in this universe."

Terry—who’s now an exceedingly polite and energetic 11-year-old—told her mother, Nakia Bowling, about an idea she had: to give out dolls of color to other black and brown girls who were less fortunate than she was, so they could feel beautiful and less alone.

In 2015’s “The Force Awakens,” the amount of female-driven dialogue more than tripled from 6.3% in “A New Hope” to nearly 28%. Moreover, the dialogue in the “Force Awakens” passed the Bechdel test, which asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women speaking to each other about something other than a man, a test “Force Awakens” passed. “A New Hope” did not.

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.

Women and people of color were picked for a majority of open S&P 500 board seats this year for the first time, due in part to pressure from investors to improve gender and racial disparities. “It’s a step in the right direction, for sure, and it’s the first time we’ve gone over 50 percent,” said Julie Daum, who heads the North American board practice for executive recruiter Spencer Stuart, which did the survey. “Boards are looking for people who are younger and with different skill sets and that does open the boardroom for more women and minorities.”

Today, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, a dispute over whether a Colorado baker can refuse to sell a cake to a same-sex couple for their wedding simply because their union offends his religious beliefs. A ruling against the couple would not only mark a major setback in the fight for LGBT equality, it would threaten to unravel hard-won legal protections for women.

The class-action complaint filed in September provided the most detailed formal accounts to date of gender discrimination at Google, alleging that the company denies promotions and career opportunities to qualified women and “segregates” them into lower-paying positions. Google’s latest efforts to thwart the lawsuit and avoid disclosures come at a time when the tech industry is reeling over allegations of misogyny, sexual harassment and an overall lack of diversity.

"It really hit us that there wasn’t rigorous data on the business itself," says Smith, whose team is interviewing dozens of executives while analyzing charts, song lyrics and music videos "in order to really understand and counter implicit and explicit bias," she says, aiming to release the initial findings in early 2018. Smith says that she hopes to create "targeted solutions" for both the live and recorded music sectors, such as encouraging music companies to put language into their employment contracts that incentivizes the promotion and retention of women and minorities in bigger roles. It’s an idea that borrows from Smith’s years of research on the film industry, in which "all an A-list financier has to stipulate [before funding a movie] are inclusion criteria," says Smith.

"We need to invite more people into the decision making: young people, black, Latino, female, LGBT and others who aren't necessarily part of the obvious majority. If we surround ourselves with a more diverse set of experiences, perhaps we will then also prioritize a more diverse set of things."

For male CEOs and managers, it isn’t sufficient to point to formal diversity programs and say that you’ve done enough. Your talented female employees certainly don’t think so. A recent survey conducted by McKinsey and Sheryl Sandberg’s organization Lean In reports that 63% of men said their companies are taking adequate steps to improve gender diversity. Only 49% of women agreed. “It’s a pure blind spot,” Lareina Yee, a senior partner at McKinsey, told the Washington Post.

The Redmond company made slight progress in its efforts to increase racial and gender diversity within its workforce in 2017, boosted in part by its acquisition last December of LinkedIn. The combined companies’ global employee base was 27.3 percent female at the end of September, compared with 25.8 percent at Microsoft alone last year.