CNN has significantly fewer women serving in visible on-air roles than either Fox News or MSNBC, according to an analysis of weekday programming by TheWrap. In fact, the Time Warner-owned network has half as many female solo anchors on weekdays as its cable news competitors — three compared to six each for Fox News and MSNBC — and none during the highly visible primetime hours from 8 p.m to 11 p.m.

“Oprah’s narrative – this triumphant narrative of coming from a hardscrabble, traumatic, abusive [background] – and becoming one of the wealthiest women, the wealthiest black women, and creating her own empire is the quintessential American story as we envision it,” says Leah Wright Rigueur, assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and author of The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Pragmatic Politics and the Pursuit of Power.

Putting a new spin on the classic crime series, Hulu Japan and HBO Asia have launched Miss Sherlock, which sees a woman play the lead detective. ADVERTISING inRead invented by Teads The eight-part drama will pay homage to the classic novels by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but will be set in modern-day Tokyo with both lead characters played by Japanese women – Yuko Takeuchi as Sherlock and Shihori Kanjiya as Watson (or Dr Wato Tachibana).

It’s hard to imagine the Today show would have broken with its gendered tradition if Lauer had gone out under different circumstances. For the past 55 years, the show has featured a male-female anchor duo, with men replacing men and women replacing women. Lauer replaced Bryant Gumbel as Katie Couric’s co-host in 1997, before she was replaced by Meredith Vieira, and so on. While Kotb is a fantastic host, it’s likely the decision to give the role to a talented, charismatic woman instead of a talented, charismatic man has as much to do with Lauer’s sexual misconduct as it does with Kotb’s capabilities.

The main character of “Doctor Who” is a member of an alien race called the Time Lords whose members must periodically take on a new form. This process, called regeneration in the show, results in a change in appearance and personality. Ms. Whittaker is the first woman to play the Doctor since the series began in 1963.

"You could really tell that she played the game and is so curious about basketball," Nets forward Rondae Hollis-Jefferson says. But there was more behind the respect she earned among Hollis-Jefferson and his teammates. "Something that always stood out with Sarah was just, kind of like, she has this natural energy," he adds. "She just cares about people—you can tell."

Despite the countless number of Marias, Consuelos and Guadalupes that Hispanic characters always seem to be named, Jane Villanueva is the perfect example of how you can be a Latina and still not fall into the stereotypical mold. There's nothing wrong with having a Hispanic name, but more often than not television caters more to the idea of what a Latina should be, rather than the idea that a Latina can be just about anything, with just about any name, occupation, appearance, orientation, etcetera.

Certain men considered it "their right," West said, to "look you up and down and make a comment about your appearance or say ‘Oh, gee, Betsy, I love it when you wear a skirt,’ always reminding you there was a sexual aspect to all of this and the way they were considering you." These days when she recalls these events to her 23-year-old daughter, "she looks at me in horror like ‘Why would you put up with that?' The answer is we didn’t know what else to do," West says. "We thought it was the price of having these great jobs, of having opportunities to work in a business which had been closed to women to a large extent until the 70s."

“The Foxification of our look has made things completely different — it seemed to me, coming up at the time, that it was Fox that changed everything: a Victoria’s Secret ethos driving what you look like on TV,” acknowledges newswoman Jami Floyd, who used to appear regularly as a commentator on Fox News shows. “It’s a cable phenomenon. There is a whole department devoted to makeup and hair at Fox, and it didn’t matter which show you were on — the look was consistent. Their people seemed to put a lot of makeup on, and certainly a lot of eyelashes. The women wear skirts and heels.”

The Mercury 13 were a group of 13 American women who were selected to privately undergo the same battery of tests as the Mercury 7 astronauts selected by NASA on April 9, 1959, for Project Mercury. Like the men, the women (who had hopes to become the first female astronauts) were tested at the famous Lovelace Foundation, but they were not part of NASA’s astronaut program and sadly never had the chance to fly to space.

“We want to make sure that every talented individual has an equal shot, and a path forward. But for that to happen, employers must expand their hiring processes to discover the world of capable directors hiding in plain sight. Frankly, it’s hard to understand why they’re not doing more. Even if all the right reasons are not enough for them, they should at least be motivated by the bottom line – inclusion just makes good business sense.”

Female characters make up just 43% of series regulars on broadcast this season, a decrease of 1%. Of those, 155 are women of color (down 2% from last year), while the numbers of bisexual and transgender women also dropped by 4% and 3%, respectively.