From the Huffington Post:  The 113th Congress will have 20 female senators, the most ever in U.S. history.

Joining the Senate will be Republican Deb Fischer (Neb.) and Democrats Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), Mazie Hirono (Hawaii) and Elizabeth Warren (Mass.).

All six Democratic women up for reelection — Sens. Maria Cantwell (Wash.), Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), Claire McCaskill (Mo.) and Debbie Stabenow (Mich.) — won their races.

Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-Nev.) lost her Senate race to incumbent Dean Heller.

Five Republican female candidates lost on Tuesday. Wendy Long ran against Gillibrand, Elizabeth Emken went up against Feinstein and Linda Lingle ran against Hirono. Linda McMahon in Connecticut and Heather Wilson in New Mexico also lost.

There are currently 17 female U.S. senators, which had also been a record number. Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) are both retiring, meaning the next Congress will have just four female Republican senators.  Read more here.

From the NYT:  It is doubly miraculous that the young woman named Gul Meena is alive. After she was struck by an ax 15 times, slashing her head and face so deeply that it exposed her brain, she held on long enough to reach medical care and then, despite the limitations of what the doctors could do, clung to life.

“We had no hope she would survive,” said Dr. Zamiruddin, a neurosurgeon at the Nangarhar Regional Medical Center in the eastern city of Jalalabad who, like many Afghans, uses only one name. After she was brought in, he worked for more than six hours in the hospital’s rudimentary operating theater, gently reinserting her brain and stitching her many wounds.

For weeks afterward, she was often unconscious, always uncommunicative and, but for the hospital staff, utterly alone, with no family members to care for her. That is because, if the accounts from her home province are true, she is an adulterer: though already married, she ran away with another man, moving south until her family caught up with them.

Locals say that the man who wielded the ax against her, and also killed the man with her, was most likely her brother.  Continue here
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From Yahoo: A 4-year-old boy’s big sister who went to bat for him by petitioning Hasbro to make a version of the classic Easy Bake Oven for boys got a surprise this holiday season when the company invited her to see the new, boy-friendly model of the timeless toy.

McKenna Pope, 13, didn’t have to go all the way to the North Pole, but simply went to YouTube to make an appeal for her 4-year-old brother, Gavin, and the one thing he wants from Santa this year.

“I want a dinosaur Easy Bake Oven,” Gavin said.

As it turns out, it’s not that easy. The pint-sized aspiring chef was hoping for a color that wasn’t just for girls. But Hasbro only makes the Easy Bake Oven in a pink and purple-floral print.

“Only girls play with it,” the 4-year-old complained.  Watch here: Gender-neutral Easy Bake Oven

From the NYT:  A federal appeals court on Thursday ruled that gay Americans are a class of people who deserve the same kinds of constitutional protections as many other victims of discrimination.

The 2-to-1 ruling, by the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York, came as the panel struck down the federal law prohibiting federal recognition of same-sex marriage. It is the first time that a federal appeals court has applied this level of constitutional protection — known as heightened scrutiny — to those unions. The case is now considered by some legal scholars to be the leading candidate for a Supreme Court review of the same-sex marriage issue.  Continue here.

From the NYT: Yale researchers found that science professors at American universities widely regard female undergraduates as less competent than male students with the same skills and accomplishments.  

As a result, the report found, the professors were less likely to offer the women mentoring or a job. And even if they were willing to offer a job, the salary was lower.

The bias was pervasive, the scientists said, and probably reflected subconscious cultural influences rather than overt or deliberate discrimination.

Female professors were just as biased against women students as their male colleagues, and biology professors just as biased as physics professors — even though more than half of biology majors are women, whereas men far outnumber women in physics.  Read more here.

From the Washington Post: Balding hipster-nerd brings his demure girlfriend to his boys’-night-out poker game. Girlfriend looks like an easy mark. But as the game unfolds, she’s not what she seems. Shedding her prim blouse and headband for a tight tank top, sunglasses and headphones, she turns out to be a smooth operator. “Bah-zing!” she says triumphantly at the end of the spot, laying down a hand that wipes the guys out.

This scenario, from a new TV spot for Ruffles Ultimate chips, amusingly busts one stereotype (women can’t beat men at poker) but subtly reinforces another familiar ad trope. The boyfriend: Ordinary looking — and Caucasian. The girlfriend: Beautiful — and Asian American.

White guy and Asian American woman. Now where have we seen this before? Actually, a number of places.  Continue here.

From the Atlantic: There are lots of statistics you could break out to illustrate the growing power of women in the economy. But if numbers don’t do it for you, then just look at what’s going on at Hooters. 

After five years of falling sales, the restaurant chain is trying to revamp its fortunes by easing up on its unreconstructed frat-boy image and appealing more to female customers, all without ditching the waitresses parading around in skimpy t-shirts and shorts. Sound like a tough sell? I think so.

But according to Bloomberg Businessweek, CEO Terry Marks believes that by tweaking the menu with more salads and fresher ingredients, lightening up the beach shack decor, and adding space for a bit of nightlife, the company can at least make its franchises an acceptable destination for more wives and girlfriends. As of now, about two-thirds of their patrons are guys.

“There’s an opportunity to broaden the net without putting wool sweaters on the Hooters girls,” Marks told the magazine. “Everything we do should appeal more to women, but nothing we will do will turn men off.”  Continue here.

From the NYT: Mammals are named after their defining characteristic, the glands capable of sustaining a life for years after birth — glands that are functional only in the female. And yet while the term “mammal” is based on an objective analysis of shared traits, the genus name for human beings, Homo, reflects an 18th-century masculine bias in science.

That bias, however, is becoming harder to sustain, as men become less relevant to both reproduction and parenting. Women aren’t just becoming men’s equals. It’s increasingly clear that “mankind” itself is a gross misnomer: an uninterrupted, intimate and essential maternal connection defines our species.

The central behaviors of mammals revolve around how we bear and raise our young, and humans are the parenting champions of the class. In the United States, for nearly 20 percent of our life span we are considered the legal responsibility of our parents.

With expanding reproductive choices, we can expect to see more women choose to reproduce without men entirely. Fortunately, the data for children raised by only females is encouraging. As the Princeton sociologist Sara S. McLanahan has shown, poverty is what hurts children, not the number or gender of parents.

That’s good, since women are both necessary and sufficient for reproduction, and men are neither. From the production of the first cell (egg) to the development of the fetus and the birth and breast-feeding of the child, fathers can be absent. They can be at work, at home, in prison or at war, living or dead.  Continue here.

From Richmond Magazine comes this profile of Longwood’s interim president, Marge Connelly.

Marge Connelly is a nationally noted businesswoman, a tireless volunteer, a world traveler and a vocal advocate for gay rights.

You might start telling someone about Marge Connelly by noting that Richmond’s highest-ranking Capital One corporate officer worked her way from a position as a customer service rep answering mail at a Delaware banking company all the way up to the vice president level in about seven years. And about five years after that, she was ranked No. 3 in a publicly traded Fortune 500 company that’s now our region’s biggest private employer. And she’s just 43. 

Or you might note that Connelly really fell into the credit-card industry after her first career — lead singer and keyboardist for an all-girl band called The Girlfriends (with a sound she calls “somewhere between Heart and the Go-Go’s, but harder than the Go-Go’s”) — didn’t take off like she had hoped.

Or maybe you’d discuss her passion for travel. If you add it up, Connelly, her partner and their two children have globe-trotted their way across more than 30 countries, including exotic locales like India (where Connelly went on a state trade mission with Gov. Mark Warner); the ghettos of Soweto, South Africa; Russia; China; and even the continent of Antarctica. Connelly’s been a certified scuba diver for about 10 years. Her family vacation this year? After she gets back from a business trip to Milan, Italy, Connelly, her partner and their daughter are trekking into the heart of the Rwandan jungle on a photo safari in search of wild gorillas. (Really.)  Continue.

Stories of Olympic women (and their hair, their clothes, and their hijabs) continue to flood out of London. 

From the NYT:  Watching the first Saudi woman compete in the Olympics, many in Riyadh expressed doubts about whether life for women would change in the Arab world.  Check it out here.

From the Washington Post: Gabby Douglas’s hair sets off Twitter debate.  Read it here.