From the NYT:  During Friday’s opening ceremony, Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, drew loud and sustained applause when he said: “For the first time in Olympic history, all the participating teams will have female athletes. This is a major boost for gender equality.”

It is true that women have come light-years from the first modern Games, held in Athens in 1896, when their presence was welcomed only as spectators. Women, too, have made significant gains even since the Atlanta Games in 1996, when 26 nations did not send female athletes.

Yet the fight for true equality is far from being won. For the first time, Saudi Arabia sent two female athletes to compete in London, along with at least one sports official. But the three women who participated in the opening ceremony walked behind the men, not among them.

For some Westerners, this has been viewed a reminder of the subordinate place of women in the conservative Islamic monarchy, where sport is forbidden for girls in schools and women are effectively not allowed to drive cars.  Continue here.

Here’s a parallel piece from the Washington Post about the fairness of Olympic clothing: “Swapping out the Olympic bikini .”

And another one from the Huffington Post: Should Male Volleyball Players Also Wear Skimpy Outfits?

From the New York Times:  Dr. Ride was the first American woman in space, flying on the shuttle Challenger on June 18, 1983, and on a second mission in 1984.

Before the first shuttle flight, Dr. Ride — chosen in part because she was known for keeping her cool under stress — politely endured reporters’ asking whether spaceflight would affect her reproductive organs, whether she planned to have children, whether she would wear a bra or makeup in space, whether she cried on the job, how she would handle menstruation in space. The CBS News reporter Diane Sawyer asked her to demonstrate a newly installed privacy curtain around the shuttle’s toilet. On “The Tonight Show,” Johnny Carson joked that the shuttle flight would be delayed because Dr. Ride had to find a purse to match her shoes.

At a NASA news conference, Dr. Ride said: “It’s too bad this is such a big deal. It’s too bad our society isn’t further along.”

The full story is here.

From the Washington Post:  Not having it all is so last week; now here comes 37-year old Marissa Mayer, who in a single day showed up for her new job running Yahoo and announced that she’s expecting her first child in October. 

Of course, Yahoo knew Mayer was pregnant when they hired her. “They showed their evolved thinking,’’ she told Fortune magazine. Which makes me want to call for the opposite of a boycott.

The decision to hire Mayer — Google’s first female engineer, who reportedly had been running about a quarter of the company — sends a great message to women (and about Yahoo, which could use some good PR.) It may even have a trickle-down effect, at a minimum inside Mayer’s new shop.

How big a deal is this? According to TechCrunch, this is a first for a CEO of a publicly-traded Fortune 500 company.  Keep reading.

UPDATE 7/23: WGS alumna, Lynne Grosso, forwarded this link to a follow-up story in USA Today.  Thanks, Lynne!

From the NYT: A study published in The Lancet, a British science journal, suggests the maternal mortality rate could drop by a full third if all needs for family planning were met.  Read here.

From the NYT: The drastic transformation of sports in recent decades, with women increasingly populating competitive arenas throughout the world, reached two significant milestones this week: Saudi Arabia agreed to send two women to compete at the London Olympics, meaning that for the first time all participating nations will have female athletes competing; and, also for the first time, the United States Olympic team will field more female athletes than male athletes.

Read the complete story here.

From the Washington Post:   The rainbow-colored Oreo graphic unveiled for LGBT Pride Month proves at least one thing: Gays are just as susceptible to clever marketing as straights. At long last! Equality under commercialization.

The graphic was posted Monday evening on Oreo’s Facebook page and drew more than 52,000 shares and 177,000 likes in 24 hours — a robust social-media response that amounts to free advertising for Oreo, which is made by Nabisco, which is a subsidiary of Kraft Foods, which, with annual revenue of $54.4 billion, is the planet’s second-largest food company and doesn’t really need your pro-bono assistance with brand expansion.  Read more.

From thestar.com:   There are female athletes who will be competing at the Olympic Games this summer after undergoing treatment to make them less masculine.

Still others are being secretly investigated for displaying overly manly characteristics, as sport’s highest medical officials attempt to quantify — and regulate — the hormonal difference between male and female athletes.

Caster Semenya, the South African runner who was so fast and muscular that many suspected she was a man, exploded onto the front pages three years ago. She was considered an outlier, a one-time anomaly.

But similar cases are emerging all over the world, and Semenya, who was banned from competition for 11 months while authorities investigated her sex, is back, vying for gold.

Semenya and other women like her face a complex question: Does a female athlete whose body naturally produces unusually high levels of male hormones, allowing them to put on more muscle mass and recover faster, have an “unfair” advantage?  Continue here.

More details to continue the discussion from the June 22 post. 

From the NYT: A magazine article by a former Obama administration official has blown up into an instant debate about a new conundrum of female success. 

Women have greater status than ever before in human history, even outpacing men in education, yet the lineup at the top of most fields is still stubbornly male. Is that new gender gap caused by women who give up too easily, unsympathetic employers or just nature itself?

The article in The Atlantic, by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor who recently left a job at the State Department, added to a renewed feminist conversation that is bringing fresh twists to bear on longstanding concerns about status, opportunity and family. Unlike earlier iterations, it is being led not by agitators who are out of power, but by elite women at the top of their fields, like the comedian Tina Fey, the Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg and now Ms. Slaughter. In contrast to some earlier barrier-breakers from Gloria Steinem to Condoleezza Rice, these women have children, along with husbands who do as much child-rearing as they do, or more.

The conversation came to life in part because of a compelling face-off of issues and personalities: Ms. Slaughter, who urged workplaces to change and women to stop blaming themselves, took on Ms. Sandberg, who has somewhat unintentionally come to epitomize the higher-harder-faster school of female achievement.  The whole piece is here.

Anne-Marie Slaughter,the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University and was formerly Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and director of policy planning at the State Department has penned a new essay in the Atlantic that begins with the following quote:

“It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.”

I think this is a good discussion to have. Read the article here and/or listen to an interview with the author on NPR’s Fresh Air  here.

From the NYT comes this very moving father/son tale: 

WHEN my son Jeff was little, he was a pain in the neck about eating. On one drive to Huntsville, Ala., he sobbed for 70 minutes (I know because I timed it) about how we were starving him to death. 

We stopped at a diner and ordered him a meal, and he proceeded to eat about four bites before claiming he was full.

You might think I would lose my temper, but this had happened before, so I was prepared with a well-planned response. I reached over and started eating his food. Bite by bite, I finished everything on his plate, figuring that would teach him to mind his dinner.

Unfortunately, the plan had a different effect. Everywhere we went after that, Jeff expected me to finish his meals. It got so I would only order him meals I liked, knowing how it would go.

And at home, forget about it. I was a workaholic back then, two jobs, out of the house at dawn and not back until 8 or 9. A lot of those nights, Jeff wouldn’t eat his dinner. His mother would get so angry, but what could she do? How do you force someone to eat? The best she could do was the tried-and-true route, telling him that if he didn’t eat dinner, he wouldn’t get dessert.

I would walk into his room when I got home, and he would be lying there, wishing he had eaten dinner so he could have a snack before bed.

“You hungry?” I would whisper, and he would nod, big eyes gleaming in the light from the hall. I would sneak him something, our little secret. Sometimes we would eat it together.  Continue here.