It has been 41 years since the first woman was elected president of the Harvard Law Review – Susan Estrich.
It has been 27 years since the first black man was elected president of the Harvard Law Review – Barack Obama.
After 130 years, for the first time, the president who will issue Volume 131 of the Harvard Law Review is a black woman – Imlime Umana. [NYTimes- GenderAvenger Blog 9/18/19]
The University of Texas will retire the jersey of basketball player Kamie Ethridge, who wore No. 33. This is the first time the University has retired the jersey of a female athlete. Ethridge lead Texas to the 1986 NCAA Championship and won a gold medal for the U.S. at the 1988 Olympics. Her jersey was retired during halftime at a football game between Texas and LSU. [AP/WYOP 9/18/19]
Only 11% of the art acquired by the 26 top museums in the United States in the last decade were works by women. Only 29,247 works by female artists were acquired by institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art out of 260,470 total works. Data shows that the peak number of acquisitions by female artists occurred in 2009 and has been relatively stagnant since then. [NYT, 538.com 9/26/19]
Over the past year, women started an average of 1,817 new businesses per day in the U.S. That now represents 42% of nearly 13 million businesses overall, which employ 9.4 million workers and generate revenue of $1.9 trillion. Women of color make up the biggest portion of these businesses according to the annual State of Women-owned Business Report. [ Fast Company/GenderAvenger Blog. 9/28/19]
When Laura Meyer won the World Pizza Championship for pan pizza in Parma, Italy, the Italian judges called her the male word for champion. Despite her first-place victory, she was the only winner who didn’t get a trophy that day. Hers was mailed a year later. “They basically refused to acknowledge that a woman had won,” she said, recently recalling the snub. She was the first woman to win – and the first American. That was in 2013. [NPR/GenderAvenger blog 10/25/19]
Simone Biles, at the age of 22, has won more world gymnastics medals—25—than any female or male in history. [WP 10/14/19]
MIT economics professor Esther Duflo, one of this year’s three winners of the Nobel prize for economics, is only the second woman to win the prize since its inception in 1969, and the youngest recipient at age of 46. Duflo was awarded the prize, along with her husband Abhijit Banerjee, and Harvard University professor Michael Kremer, for their work on effective investments for fighting poverty in India and Africa. Duflo said she hoped her win would inspire many other women to continue working “and many other men to give them the respect that they deserve like every single human being.” [BBC News]
According to the American Trucking Association, the number of women in the trucking industry has grown by 68 percent between 2010 and 2018. While women represent only 6.6 percent of the industry’s total workforce, there is no gender distinction when it comes to pay. Other reasons for the increase in female truckers include continued growth in e-commerce as well as a tight labor market. [Wall Street Journal]