In the conversation about gender equality in sports, most of the attention is focused on the players. Sometimes the attention is directed at the coaches, but for the most part, referees have been left out of the conversation.

Yet, there must be capable women with years of experience on their fields, courts and diamonds who could make those all-or-nothing game time calls as well as any white male referee.

Which is why the courtside appearance of Danielle Scott and Angelica Suffren, two black women referees, at an NBA Summer League game between the Los Angeles Lakers and the Miami Heat garnered so much attention.

Officiates are almost never paid attention to – unless they make a bad call – but this situation was different. Their inclusion means a lot to other women trying to stay close to the sport they’re passionate about and to female fans, who can see an instance of their sports knowledge respected by players, coaches and fans.

Women in sports are generally not treated the same as their male counterparts. They’re paid less and have less prominence. On this year’s Forbes’ ranking of highest-paid athletes, not a single woman was listed. Last year, Serena Williams ranked at the No. 51 spot, but likely fell off because of her maternity leave.

This is the first year the NBA has also recruited women to officiate their training ground program like the NBPA Top 100 Camp. Last year, women made up a third of the referees the NBA G League, their minor league basketball program.

One of the women, Jenna Schroeder, was a former college player who wanted to stay in the world of basketball after she stop playing. It’s the same sort of background expertise many male referees bring to the court, and now by training them through the NBA ranks, there’s a chance we’ll see many more women referees.

Before initiatives like this, women would either have to shelve their basketball career for good or compete for one of the highly coveted coaching jobs.

Learn more at Lily News

A wave of women took to the streets and protested in a Senate office building in the nation’s capital on Thursday, to call out the Trump administration’s immigrant family separations and detentions.

Around 2,500 people, largely women, joined in the demonstration in Washington, D.C., organizers told HuffPost. Led by organizers of the Women’s March, the rally was in response to President Donald Trump’s zero tolerance policy, which refers all unauthorized immigrants crossing the border for criminal prosecution, and has led to the separation of more than 2,000 kids from their parents.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and about 600 others were arrested at the demonstration. Protesters were processed on site and released, according to a statement from Capitol Police.

“I was just arrested with 500+ women and @WomensMarch to say @RealDonaldTrump’s cruel zero-tolerance policy will not continue,” Jayapal tweeted. “Not in our country. Not in our name.”

Demonstrators from across the country descended on D.C. for the protest, first blocking the street in front of the Department of Justice, and then proceeding to the Hart building, where hundreds sat down in the lobby wrapped in foil blankets ― a reference to similar blankets given to migrant families held in federal detention centers.

Protesters waved banners saying “End all detention camps,” and chanted “We care!” in an apparent response to First Lady Melania Trump recently wearing a jacket marked “I really don’t care, do u?” while on her way to visit migrant children at a detention center in Texas.

“Women across the country are horrified as we see our government violating the rights of women, separating families, and traumatizing children,” Women’s March co-chair Linda Sarsour said in a statement. “We are rising up to demand an end to the criminalization of immigrants.”

Several Democratic lawmakers showed up, including Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.), and Reps. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) and John Lewis (D-Ga.), as well as celebrities such as Susan Sarandon.

The protest was the latest of several in recent weeks against Trump’s harsh immigration crackdown. Another major demonstration is planned for Saturday across cities nationwide.

Learn more at Huffington Post

At least 414 high-profile executives and employees across fields and industries have been outed by the #MeToo Movement in 18 months, according to data collected by a New York-based crisis consulting firm.

The study looked at national news articles that singled out people for sexual harassment or other similar misdeeds, said Davia Temin, whose firm Temin & Co. did the research. Individuals with at least seven separate, national mentions were included. That includes celebrities like Bill Cosby and Louis CK, but the vast majority are corporate executives and business leaders like Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, who resigned late last week after revelations of an affair with an employee.

Among the 414 people accused, 190 were fired or left their jobs. Another 122 have been put on leave, suspended or are facing investigations since December 2016. For about 69 people, there were no repercussions. In recent months, the rate of accusations has been slowing but the percentage of people being fired has increased, Temin said.

“It started to become a tsunami, certainly after Weinstein, and it sparked other stories in the same industry and then across all industries,” Temin said. “I think it’s settled into a new plateau, but it is certainly higher than we’ve ever had before.”

Only eight of the people, like Kraznich, were said to be involved in consensual relationships. Out of the 414 people accused, all but seven are men. Much of the behavior is related to incidents that may have happened a long time ago but surfaced now as tolerance has dropped and it’s become more newsworthy.

“The eagle eyes are out for this,” Temin said. “Women understand a little better their collective power, and they’re using it.”

Learn more at TIME

Women in Saudi Arabia can now get in the driver's seat as the country officially lifts a decades-old rule that barred them from driving vehicles.

Women across the country celebrated, with many getting behind the wheel and driving around Saudi streets — the first time they could lawfully exercise such freedoms for since the late 1950s.

The Kingdom has been working since last autumn to prepare for a fresh influx of female motorists.

Saudi Arabia has officially lifted a decades-old rule that barred women from driving.

Women across the country celebrated, with many getting behind the wheel and driving around Saudi streets — the first time they could lawfully exercise such freedoms for since the late 1950s.

The Kingdom has been working since last autumn to prepare for a fresh influx of female motorists.

Several women's driving schools began popping up all over the country, with many flocking to Princess Nourah bin Abdulrahman University which became the Kingdom's first driving school for women.

State oil firm Aramco even offered driving lessons to its thousands of female employees, teaching them the basics like checking oil levels, changing a tire, and the importance of wearing a seat belt.

Ten women made history earlier this month when they became the first women to receive Saudi driver's licenses. These women held licenses from other countries and excitedly swapped them over.

For many women, their newfound freedom signals an evolving paradigm for women in the country.

"We need the car to do our daily activities. We are working, we are mothers, we have a lot of social networking, we need to go out — so we need transport," Amira Abdulgader toldReuters. "It will change my life."

Women can now pursue jobs that require the use of a car, like any number of the popular ride-hailing services.

"It's not only equality, it's about building our country together," said Enaam Gazi Al-Aswad, who had been poised to become the nation's first female driver for ride-hailing app Careem, according to CNBC."It's about community ... Women and men equally now in Saudi Arabia, not like before."

While the nation is celebrating the historic moment of progress, last month the government doubled down on activists who had been campaigning for the right to drive. At least 12 prominent women's rights activists were arrested since May 15, according to Human Rights Watch. The organization said some of the activists were held on charges similar to those for which other activists are serving long prison sentences.

Women have risked fines and imprisonment for decades

Women have been barred from driving since 1957, as part of the country's strict interpretation of Islam. While there was no formal law against it, women who drove in public faced fines and could be arrested. While there no clear explanation for why women shouldn't drive, supporters of the rule argued that driving could lead to women socializing with men, which was seen as potentially disrupting the established order inside Saudi's patriarchal society.

But activists have been campaigning against the policy for years.

In 1990, 47 women were arrested after driving through the streets of Riyadh in defiance of the ban. The movement grew stronger in 2007 when a group calling itself the Association for the Protection and Defense of Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia petitioned then-King Abdullah to repeal the rule. On International Women's Day in 2008, the movement's cofounder Wajeha Huwaider filmed herself driving and posted the video on YouTube, which received international media attention.

The movement has continued to grow over the years.

In 2011, Manal Al-Sharif, along with other women inspired by the growing Arab Spring demonstrations, started a campaign called "Teach me how to drive so I can protect myself,"There's also the Facebook group, Women2Drive. The group gained support both locally and internationally, and soon women were risking arrest to get behind the wheel.

Because of her activism, Al-Sharif was detained and released several times, and told not to drive or discuss her situation with the media. Manal has written several books, including Daring to Drive: a Saudi Woman's Awakening.She is seen as one of the world's most influential women on the subject. She now resides in Australia and remains an active critic of the Saudi government, using her experience to push for change.

"I got involved with the [Women2Drive] campaign because women were invisible. It almost feels like women don't exist in Saudi Arabia," she told Business Insider.

She says many factors have influenced the way women are treated in Saudi Arabia.

"It is institutional oppression, and it's carried out not only through policy, but also a general attitude that men have towards women," she said. "We are faced with two evils: The government restricts women with policy, and male guardians restrict women through culture."

She said a woman's place in society starts young, with young girls going through "systematic humiliation" from primary school through college. She says girls should be nurtured to become confident leaders, not mired in shame.

Still, Al-Sharif says she has been amazed by the pace of change in Saudi Arabia over the last year. Since Mohammed Bin Salman ascended to power, the country has lifted its ban on cinemas, appointed women to positions of power, and allowed women to attend soccer matches at major stadiums.

"King Abdullah wanted to make changes for women but wasn't able to do a lot because of internal politics," she said. "Mohammed Bin Salman has been pushing real change, and has been paving the way for full inclusion of women in the economy and society."

The 32-year-old Crown Prince has been pushing for modernization and a complete economic and cultural overhaul in the country through his Vision2030 program. Al-Sharif says Prince Mohammed's desire to revamp the economy has resulted in major policy changes for women.

"The government is realizing how important it is to the economy to educate and include women," she said. "They have no choice — the economy is our best reformer."

But Al-Sharif says there is a lot of work to do.

"Lifting the ban on women's driving didn't come overnight, it's been consistent campaigning to change people's consciousness."

Al-Sharif says change needs to happen in "all facets of society," from education to policy to media, and even home life.

She is now campaigning to end Saudi Arabia's restrictive guardianship laws, which require men to make decisions for women on matters including education, health care, and travel.

"Destructive behavior needs to end and we need to create a culture of respect. Policy can change, but its the attitude that is the real obstacle."

A bright future for Saudi women, but a long way to go

Dr. Lina Abirafeh, the director at the Institute for Women's Studies in the Arab World, told Business Insider that she has seen surface-level changes enhancing women's rights, but Saudi society has some work left to do.

"Positive steps are being taken but Saudi Arabia still lags behind in terms of women's rights. Saudi Arabia ranks very low in measures for gender equality compared to other countries."

She noted that in the 2016 Global Gender Gap Report, ranking health, education, economic, and political engagement, Saudi Arabia ranked at 141 out of the 144 countries listed.

Abirafeh said small changes in the last year have impacted women's quality of life, and signal positive change to come.

"The ban on driving had long served as a symbol of the country's repressive attitude towards women and their denial of women's rights and fundamental freedoms,"Abirafeh said, adding that there are many other inequalities that need to be addressed.

"Driving is clearly the most symbolic — and visible. This in a society where men and women hardly interact, and where women need a male guardian to make decisions and give permissions on their behalf."

"These recent changes are important, but they come with many conditions and caveats. There might be a strategy to appear liberal in the global arena but it is hard to tell if there is genuine intention for real change within the society - or if these are tokenistic," she said.

She believes Saudi Arabia can do much more for reform at all levels, including repealing laws that discriminate against women, reviewing the country's extreme interpretations of religious texts that deny women freedom of mobility and bodily autonomy, and reaching out to communities to change the patriarchal ethos that exists.

"There is a need to progress gradually but also to be clear that the goal is full equality — without exceptions," Abirafeh said.

She remains hopeful for the future, but is not convinced that Saudi society is prepared for full equality and the implications that come with it.

"Inequalities are many, and attitudes will take a long time to change. It doesn't seem that there is broad-based buy-in to women's rights among the population - yet. And as long as patriarchy prevails, this is a clear impediment to women achieving full rights and equality."

Learn more at Business Insider

JIDDAH, Saudi Arabia — When Saudi Arabia’s women are finally allowed to drive on Sunday, it will be the culmination of a decades-long struggle by a group of Saudi feminists who suffered imprisonment, harassment and other hardships as they campaigned for that simple right.

But many of the women at the center of the struggle will not be around to celebrate. Since May, the Saudi government has arrested at least a dozen women’s rights advocates, accusing them of nefarious contacts with foreign parties and branding them traitors in the press.

The crackdown has been seen by some as a warning from Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to other activists: Reforms are a gift from the leadership to Saudi citizens, not rights that can be won.

The activists did not limit themselves to the driving campaign. They fought for survivors of domestic violence, women shackled by restrictive guardianship laws and political prisoners. They represented different generations of Saudi women, trying over decades to bend the will of a harshly conservative and often obdurate state. Some garnered international acclaim. Others toiled at home, enlisting Saudi women in a struggle for rights.

Here is a look at four of the imprisoned activists.

Eman al-Nafjan, 39

In one of the first entries on her Saudiwoman blog, her widely read chronicle of life and women’s activism in Saudi Arabia, Eman al-Nafjan wrote a post titled “Upbeat feminist news from Saudi :).” She had seen a picture of a Saudi female astronaut in a newspaper, “no hijab and free-floating with a group of men and women including Steven Hawking.” And she noted the “buzz about women being allowed to drive,” citing another newspaper report that speculated that the ban might be lifted by the end of the year.

That was in 2008. The driving ban would stand for another decade.

In the interim, Nafjan, a professor of linguistics, traced the recent history of the women’s rights movement in Saudi Arabia, writing in English about the women who led the movement and the men who stood with them. She described, in simple terms, the elaborate system of social control that Saudi women were seeking to dismantle — “gender apartheid,” as she called it in one post.

“Yes it is true. If you are a woman you have to have special travel documents,” she wrote in a post titled “Women Travel Documents.” “If your main mahram (legal male guardian) is with you then him escorting you will suffice. But if you happen to be a Saudi woman and need or want to leave the country without your main mahram, you have to have a special yellow card.”

Other posts tackled poverty, the rights of Palestinians and Bob Dylan. She wrote lists of Saudi heroes that included people who have since fled into exile or been arrested.

In September 2017, when the lifting of the driving ban was announced, Nafjan posted her last article on the blog.

“The manner in which the ban was lifted seemed too simple to be real,” she wrote. “Initially, I was overwhelmed with my own powerlessness as a woman living in a patriarchal absolute monarchy.

“Were our efforts the reason the ban was lifted? Or was it a decision that had been made regardless of our struggles?”

Loujain al-Hathloul, 28

Asked once about the 73 days she spent in prison in 2014, for driving her car from Abu Dhabi across the border to Saudi Arabia, Loujain al-Hathloul, one of Saudi Arabia’s most visible women’s rights activists, offered a positive spin. Her experience in prison had been “enriching” and “a unique opportunity to meet women who are not acknowledged,” she told a reporter from the Financial Times a few years after her release.

But the social blowback for her activism had been withering, too — replete with the accusations of treason, harming the public interest and sullying the reputation of Saudi Arabia abroad, charges well-known to her fellow activists. Her description of the backlash, in a letter posted on her website two years ago, illustrated the toll taken on the activists because of attacks by their fellow Saudis.

“Naturally, many accused me of using the opportunity for my own publicity without any interest nor regard for the advancement or well-being of fellow Saudi women, but this opinion is not important,” she wrote.

“Others laid blame on me and claimed that what I did was going to delay the official decision to lift the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia, especially since my attempt was seen as a direct challenge against the government; they ignored the fact that their silence for 22 years did not have any positive outcome either.

“We have to all realise that criticising some phenomena in our home country does not equate to hating it, wishing evil upon it nor is it an attempt to shake its balance,” she continued. “It’s the total opposite.”

Aziza al-Yousef, 60

When a Saudi cleric was accused of raping and beating to death his 5-year-old daughter, Aziza al-Yousef helped start a rare public awareness campaign that focused international attention on the case as well as on the larger issue of inequality in Saudi Arabia’s justice system.

The intervention was typical for Yousef, who is widely seen as one of Saudi Arabia’s most dogged human rights advocates — leading campaigns to lift the driving ban and repeal male guardianship laws while supporting survivors of domestic violence.

“Fathers and husbands who murder their children or wives are consistently sentenced to five to twelve years in prison at most. This leniency is not extended to mothers and wives,” Yousef wrote in a news release on the case that she co-authored with Manal al-Sharif, another activist.

The preacher, Fayhan al-Ghamdi, was sentenced in 2013 to eight years in prison but was released in 2015, after paying compensation to the mother of his daughter, Lama.

Yousef, a retired computer science professor at King Saud University and a mother of five, continued pressing for equal justice and repeal of the guardianship laws, appearing on television shows, meeting with officials and hosting a regular salon at her house to discuss women’s rights. Her activism was local: She ­encouraged her peers to resist exile and “stay home and fight for their rights,” another activist said.

In the run-up to a driving protest she helped organize in October 2013, she told journalists she had been defying the driving ban for at least two years.

“I’ve been driving around Riyadh since then and haven’t had any real problems,” she told a reporter for the Telegraph newspaper. “Twice someone ran at my car and made threatening gestures — one old man, one younger — but it was no big deal.

“I’ve driven all over the world. Why not in my homeland?”

Nouf Abdulaziz, 31

Weeks after the other activists were arrested in May, Saudi authorities detained Nouf Abdul­aziz, a feminist, writer and television producer who had expressed support for the women on Twitter. The show of solidarity was a reflex for Abdulaziz, who is also an outspoken defender of Saudi political prisoners.

Her activism had cost Abdul­aziz plenty. She had struggled to find work before her arrest, largely, she and those who knew her suspected, because of her reputation for speaking out. “She has intellectual integrity,” said Hana al-Khamri, a writer and activist who knows Abdulaziz. “She did not let the fear that was planted by the regime following the arrests intimidate her.”

“Hello, my name is Nouf, and I am not a provoker, inciter nor a wrecker, nor a terrorist, nor a criminal or a traitor,” Abdulaziz wrote in a letter a friend posted online after her arrest. “A daughter to an honorable and honest family that has undergone a lot of harm because of what happened to me.

“Maybe they see that being rid of me is the path to a better country,” she wrote. “I was never but a good citizen that loved her country and wished the best for it.”

After she posted Abdulaziz’s letter, the friend, Mayaa al-Zahrani, was also arrested, according to Saudi activists and Human Rights Watch.

Learn more at Washington Post

The U.S. Open will not penalize players whose rankings have tumbled because of pregnancy-related breaks from the game in awarding seeds for its women’s field, starting with this year’s tournament. But it’s unclear how the U.S. Tennis Association will strike a fair balance between the interests of returning mothers whose rankings have slid and active players who have surged ahead of them in the interim.

The decision in principle follows criticism leveled at French Open officials in May for not seeding Serena Williams, a three-time champion of the tournament, in her return to competition after giving birth to a daughter in September.

During Williams’s 13-month hiatus from the game, her ranking slid from No. 1 in the world to No. 454. While she was granted a place in the French Open’s 128-player women’s field, the fact that she didn’t receive one of the tournament’s 32 seeds meant she was at risk of facing one of the top players in the world in her first-round match. Williams advanced to the French Open’s fourth round, nonetheless, but was forced to withdraw hours before facing former No. 1 Maria Sharapova because of an injured pectoral muscle.

Katrina Adams, president and chief executive of the USTA, confirmed that the tournament would factor in absences for pregnancy and childbirth in issuing its seeds starting with the upcoming tournament, which gets underway Aug. 27.

“We have top players who exemplify womanhood, becoming mothers, and are not being allowed to return following their pregnancy with a record that reflects that — Victoria Azarenka last year, and Serena now doing the same thing,” Adams said Saturday in a telephone interview.

Adams noted that in the business world, when the CEO of a company leaves to have a baby, she doesn’t start at the bottom when she returns to work.

“With Serena, you’re looking at one of arguably the greatest players of all time. There’s a level of respect there,” Adams said. “But it’s not about Serena; it’s about the accomplishments of a Serena — a number one player, with 23 Grand Slams.

Adams explained that the precise formula had not been worked out, explaining: “We have no idea what, when or how, but we definitely know we’ll seed her.”

The USTA’s decision was first reported by the New York Times.

The issue of how tennis treats players returning from childbirth has emerged as a source of debate among tournament officials and competitors, particularly in light of the French Open’s decision regarding Williams, 36, who has dominated the game for the past 15 years. While many tennis followers believe women shouldn’t be penalized for missing time because of pregnancy, the issue of how to do so without giving them preference over active players who deserve a seed commensurate with their current ranking is tricky. How do tournaments strike a fair balance?

In a telephone interview earlier this week, former touring pro Pam Shriver, who works as an analyst for ESPN, predicted the issue will become increasingly commonplace. Not every female player will make the decision to postpone childbirth until after retirement, as did Shriver, former world No. 1 Chris Evert (also a mother of three) and many of their peers in the 1980s and ’90s.

“It’s going to be happening more and more because of the extended lengths of careers,” Shriver said. “There are going to be more moms on tour for the foreseeable future. [Williams] is the most high-profile one.”

Each of the sport’s four majors — Wimbledon and the Australian, French and U.S. Opens — has the prerogative to seed players as it sees fit to ensure a balanced tournament. Typically, the majors follow the most recent world rankings, although Wimbledon traditionally exercises its privilege to depart from that formula and consider players’ past performance on grass.

Wimbledon, which will begin July 2, will announce its seedings Wednesday. Tournament officials have signaled they are likely to award Williams, a seven-time champion of the tournament, one of the 32 seeds despite her ranking of 183rd. Wimbledon has precedence for doing so with several players, Williams among them.

In 2011, tournament officials seeded Williams, the defending champion, seventh despite a ranking of 26th in the world at the time. The slide resulted from a near year-long absence triggered by a freak injury, suffered when she stepped on broken glass and later developed blood clots in her lungs following her 2010 Wimbledon championship.

Women’s Tennis Association rules don’t protect the seeds of players whose rankings have slid because of missed time — whether because of injury, pregnancy or suspension. The organization is expected to reconsider that policy later this year.

Regardless, the four Grand Slams are not beholden to WTA policies in seeding their fields.

Since returning to competition in March, following a Fed Cup appearance, Williams has played seven singles matches on the pro tour, posting a 5-2 record at tournaments in Indian Wells, Miami and the French Open.

Former top-five player James Blake, who is now Miami’s tournament director, said this spring that he believed the WTA current policy for seeding players returning from pregnancy was “a kind of punishment.”

Shriver agrees but believes the solution is tricky. While she said she believes strongly that there should be no protection for players who have missed time because of suspensions (as Sharapova did following a positive test for a banned substance), Shriver sees the issue of pregnancy, which is often regarded the same as an injury in workplace policy, as different.

Going forward, Shriver said she clearly sees the merits of protecting players returning from pregnancy for the purposes of getting a spot in tournaments. But a protected seed in those tournaments, she believes, is a different matter.

“Giving somebody an automatic seed is really something you need to think about. That means you’re assuming that person is playing at the same standard or at the standard that seed warrants. When you give somebody a seed, that means you believe they are worthy, based on their current play, to represent that seeded position.”

Learn more at Washington Post

Female soccer fans in Iran were taken through a roller coaster of emotions on Wednesday — and all before their team stepped onto the field to play against Spain.

For 38 years, women have been banned from watching men’s sporting events in Iran. But on Tuesday, local news agencies in Iran reported that women would be allowed to watch a live broadcast of Iran’s World Cup match against Spain, taking place in Russia the next day, at Tehran’s Azadi Stadium. Then, just hours before the doors were set to open, authorities canceled the event.

“Tonight’s match between Iran and Spain will not be broadcasted at Azadi Stadium today due to infrastructure difficulties,” Iran’s Tasnim news agency wrote less than three hours before kickoff. “Since there will be no public broadcast, it is respectfully asked from our dear nationals to avoid going to Azadi Stadium.”

Many fans turned up at the stadium anyway. Finally, after about an hour, the police gave way. The stadium gates were opened and men, women and children who had bought tickets filed in, whipping out their phones and selfie sticks to capture a piece of history. Moments later, the official account of Iran’s national team tweeted a picture of a female fan in the stands of Azadi Stadium holding up an Iranian flag. “Azadi Stadium, now!” the tweet said in Farsi.

Iran’s ban on women watching men’s sporting events has long sparked protests, but it became the subject of heated debate in the lead-up to the World Cup.

Earlier this year, Iran publicly reinforced the ban, which was introduced by Iran’s ruling clerics after the 1979 Islamic revolution. In March, 35 women attempting to sneak into Azadi Stadium for a match between two Tehran clubs were detained by authorities. A day later, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who was present at the match, told reporters that Iranian President Hassan Rouhani had “promised that women in Iran will have access to football stadiums soon.”

On Friday, Iranian female fans frustrated by the ban took to the stadiums in St. Petersburg in the first of such protests in the tournament’s history.

With women finally having entered Azadi Stadium for the first time since the ban, they are hoping that the rules around watching sporting games in Iran will be changed permanently.

“Once spectators have shown their respect for the rules, we hope it will be possible to screen the Iran-Portugal game in the same stadium [next Monday] and that will mark the start of families attending matches played at the Azadi,” Tayebeh Siavoshi, a female member of Iran’s parliament, told the Iranian Students News Agency.

Yeganeh Rezaian, a 34-year-old Iranian journalist living in the United States, also was optimistic. Rezaian, who recently wrote about the lack of rights for female soccer fans in Iran, watched the 2014 World Cup in a dark coffee shop in Tehran, with the doors locked and the volume muted. (Rezaian’s husband is a Washington Post columnist.)

“If we do it once . . . we can keep pushing for more. I really, really hope it happens,” Rezaian said, her voice choking up with emotion.

Learn more at The Lily

The election of London Breed as mayor of San Francisco, which was all but made official Wednesday when Mark Leno, the runner-up in the election, conceded defeat, was a remarkable victory.

Ms. Breed is the first African-American woman to hold the post in San Francisco. And San Francisco is now the largest American city with a female mayor.

For many black people in the city, Ms. Breed’s election has a special resonance, one that rekindles the hope that the long and steady decline of San Francisco’s African-American population might be stanched or even reversed.

“We were fast becoming an invisible people in this city,” said the Rev. Amos Brown, the pastor of Third Baptist Church, where Ms. Breed is a congregant. “Maybe we can now stop this hemorrhaging.”

John William Templeton, a historian of black culture and business in San Francisco, said he hoped Ms. Breed could serve as a beacon and a magnet for black entrepreneurs across the country.

“The campaign got a lot of people around the country interested in San Francisco who wouldn’t have thought about it before,” he said.

Mr. Templeton contrasts the many individual successes of black people in San Francisco with the collective poverty of African-Americans over all in the city. Black people have a median income that is a fraction of that for whites or Asians.

“Blacks have succeeded individually but not as a group,” he said.

In a city where black people make up less than five percent of the population, the chief of police, the city administrator, the superintendent of schools and the head of the public works department are all African-Americans.

Mr. Templeton points to both the racist policies toward blacks and Chinese people of decades past and the city’s current evangelizing spirit of tolerance.

Ms. Breed’s election, he said, “reflects the best of San Francisco as a western sanctuary where people who didn’t have opportunities in other places could come.”

Learn more at NY Times

When Uncharted Power founder Jessica O. Matthews delivered a pitch to venture capital investors in the fall of 2015, she did it in costume — her company happened to be celebrating Halloween the day a friend brought by some venture capital investors, unannounced.

“I was not concerned, being dressed as Serena Williams, who is everything,” Matthews told Next City. “Can’t say the same for other members of the team.”

Whether or not the costume had anything to do with it, Matthews did end up raising $7 million in venture capital, putting her Harlem-based company on the path to developing products that generate power from being walked upon, driven upon, kicked or pushed around — so far.

A new report reveals that black women founders like Matthews are indeed on the rise when it comes to venture capital investment, though there is still very far to go for venture capital investment in the United States to reflect the country’s true diversity. Released yesterday, ProjectDiane 2018: The State of Black Women Founders is the second biennial report providing a snapshot of the state of black women founders and the startups they lead in the United States.

According to ProjectDiane 2018, the amount raised by black women founders increased 500 percent, from $50 million in 2016 to $250 million in 2017. Still, Black women raised only 0.0006 percent of all tech venture funding since 2009, the report found. Despite the number of startups founded by black women more than doubling since 2016, a majority of startups founded by black women still have not received any venture capital funding, according to the report.

To produce the ProjectDiane 2018 report, the research firm digitalundivided reviewed over 8,000 U.S.-based startups and companies located in the Crunchbase, Pitchbook and Mattermark databases as well as updated data from the ProjectDiane2016 database. The firm also reached out to organizations working with black and Latinx entrepreneurs and startups, and employed an online survey to collect additional data. Funding for the report came from JPMorgan Chase, the Case Foundation, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

Covering the years 2015-2017, the ProjectDiane 2018 report encompasses a period when more black-led venture capital firms have come into existence and into the headlines.

John Henry, who sold his on-demand laundry startup and founded Harlem tech accelerator Cofound Harlem, went on to co-found Harlem Capital Partners in 2015, which has promised to invest in 1,000 ventures led by people of color over 20 years.

Arlan Hamilton founded Backstage Capital also in 2015, raising $5 million in capital to invest in female, minority, and LGBTQ entrepreneurs. She made headlines again earlier this year, announcing a $36 million fund to invest exclusively in startups founded by other black women, TechCrunch reported.

Increasing diversity in tech and other popular venture-backed sectors (such as food) isn’t merely a charity case for investors. There’s an economic case to be made, as well.

“[Hamilton] gets access to entrepreneurs that your typical [Silicon] Valley investor might not,” says Lars Rasmussen, an angel investor and veteran of Google and Facebook who invested in Backstage Capital’s first $5 million fund, told Inc. Magazine. “It’s almost like using an unfair advantage by knowing Arlan and using her connections into an area that is overlooked, and wrongly overlooked.”

Learn more at Next City

Iranian authorities on Wednesday jailed a prominent human rights lawyer who has defended women who removed their mandatory Islamic head scarves in public.

Nasrin Sotoudeh was arrested at her home by unidentified agents and taken to Evin Prison in Tehran, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, an advocacy group.

Her husband, Reza Khandan, said the agents told him she must serve a five-year sentence but did not say on what charges she was being detained, the group said. Khandan confirmed her arrest to The Times.

Separately, state media reported that Farhad Jafari, a well known writer in the city of Mashhad, was arrested 12 days ago for supporting “the girls of Enghelab Avenue,” near the Tehran square where, in December, a woman removed her headscarf in protest of modesty laws that require Iranian women to cover their hair.

The simple protest galvanized a nationwide women’s movement against the head scarf, or hijab, and added to the antigovernment unrest that has roiled Iran over the past several months.

The arrests suggested that Iran’s crackdown against human rights defenders and dissidents was escalating as the judiciary and clerical establishment seeks to keep a lid on public anger.

Sotoudeh, one of Iran’s most high-profile rights lawyers, has defended one of the women arrested and prosecuted in the anti-hijab protests. More recently, she has criticized the Iranian judiciary’s move to allow only state-approved lawyers to work on cases involving activists, dissidents and other detainees held for political reasons.

She and other opponents of Iran’s hard-line judiciary were reportedly planning a sit-in to protest the restrictions, which top judicial officials have defended as being in the interest of national security.

“The arrest of this distinguished attorney, who has dedicated her life to defending detainees held on politically motivated charges, reveals the state’s fear of those who defend due process and the rule of law in Iran,” Hadi Ghaemi, executive director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, said in a statement.

Amnesty International called Sotoudeh’s arrest “an outrage” and demanded her immediate release.

“Her arrest today is the latest example of the Iranian authorities’ vindictive attempts to stop her from carrying out her important work as a lawyer,” said Philip Luther, the group’s research and advocacy director for the Middle East.

Sotoudeh had previously served a three-year prison sentence for “spreading propaganda against the system.” She was granted a pardon in 2013 and released by President Hassan Rouhani at the start of his term, when he promised to relax political and social restrictions.

Rouhani, who won reelection last year, has failed to deliver on those promises. Meanwhile, Iranians have grown increasingly frustrated as their country risks sliding back into economic isolation following President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the 2015 nuclear agreement and reinstate U.S. sanctions.

Jafari, the writer, was taken to Vakilabad Prison in Mashhad, according to news reports.

The Iranian Writers Assn. condemned his arrest as “a clear breach of freedom of speech and the basic rights of citizens.”

“Farhad Jafari has not committed any crime, unless exercising freedom of speech is a crime,” the group said in a statement.

Learn more at L.A. Times

Aminta Cifuentes suffered weekly beatings at the hands of her husband. He broke her nose, burned her with paint thinner and raped her.

She called the police in her native Guatemala several times but was told they could not interfere in a domestic matter, according to a court ruling. When Cifuentes’s husband hit her in the head, leaving her bloody, police came to the home but refused to arrest him. He threatened to kill her if she called authorities again.

So in 2005, Cifuentes fled to the United States. “If I had stayed there, he would have killed me,” she told the Arizona Republic.

And after nearly a decade of waiting on an appeal, Cifuentes was granted asylum. The 2014 landmark decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals set the precedent that women fleeing domestic violence were eligible to apply for asylum. It established clarity in a long-running debate over whether asylum can be granted on the basis of violence perpetrated in the “private” sphere, according to Karen Musalo, director for the Center for Gender & Refugee Studies at the University of California Hastings College of the Law.

But on Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions overturned the precedent set in Cifuentes’s case, deciding that victims of domestic abuse and gang violence generally will not qualify for asylum under federal law. (Unlike the federal courts established under Article III of the Constitution, the immigration court system is part of the Justice Department.)

For critics, including former immigration judges, the unilateral decision undoes decades of carefully deliberated legal progress. For gender studies experts, such as Musalo, the move “basically throws us back to the Dark Ages, when we didn’t recognize that women’s rights were human rights.”

“If we say in the year 2018 that a woman has been beaten almost to death in a country that accepts that as almost the norm, and that we as a civilized society can deny her protection and send her to her death?” Musalo said. “I don’t see this as just an immigration issue … I see this as a women’s rights issue.”

Sessions’s decision reversed a 2016 ruling by the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals, the body responsible for interpreting U.S. asylum law, granting asylum to a Salvadoran woman who said she was abused by her husband. Musalo is co-counsel in the case.

Sessions’s reasoning hinged on the argument that domestic violence victims generally are not persecuted as members of a “particular social group,” according to his ruling. Under federal law, asylum applicants must show that either “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion … was or will be at least one central reason” for their persecution.

In the precedent-setting Cifuentes case, the Board of Immigration Appeals held that an applicant can qualify for asylum as a member of a particular social group of “married women in Guatemala who are unable to leave their relationship.” To support its ruling, the board noted that Guatemala has a culture of “machismo and family violence.” Spousal rape is common and local police often fail to enforce domestic violence laws.

Sessions rejected that reasoning. “When private actors inflict violence based on a personal relationship with a victim,” Sessions wrote, “then the victim’s membership in a larger group may well not be ‘one central reason’ for the abuse.”

“The prototypical refugee flees her home country because the government has persecuted her,” Sessions wrote. “An alien may suffer threats and violence in a foreign country for any number of reasons relating to her social, economic, family, or other personal circumstances. Yet the asylum statute does not provide redress for all misfortune.”

As Kara Lynum, an immigration lawyer in Minnesota, tweeted, “Sessions thinks these women aren’t eligible for asylum because their husbands are only violent to them — not all women.”

A group of 15 retired immigration judges and former members of the Board of Immigration Appeals wrote a letter in response to Sessions’s decision, calling it an “affront to the rule of law.”

The Cifuentes case, they wrote, “was the culmination of a 15 year process” through the immigration courts and Board of Immigration Appeals. The issue was certified by three attorneys general, one Democrat and two Republican. The private bar and law enforcement agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, agreed with the final determination, the former judges wrote. The decision was also supported by asylum protections under international refugee treaties, they said.

“For reasons understood only by himself, the Attorney General today erased an important legal development that was universally agreed to be correct,” the former judges wrote.

Courts and attorneys general have debated the definition of a “particular social group” since the mid-1990s, according to Musalo.

“It took the refugee area a while to catch up with the human rights area of law,” Musalo said.

A series of cases led up to the Cifuentes decision. In 1996, the Board of Immigration Appeals established that women fleeing gender-based persecution could be eligible for asylum in the United States. The case, known as Matter of Kasinga, centered on a teenager who fled her home in Togo to escape female genital cutting and a forced polygamous marriage. Musalo was lead attorney in the case, which held that fear of female genital cutting could be used as a basis for asylum.

“Fundamentally the principle was the same,” as the one at stake in Sessions’s ruling, Musalo said. Female genital cutting, like domestic violence in the broader sense, generally takes place in the “private” sphere, inflicted behind closed doors by relatives of victims.

Musalo also represented Rody Alvarado, a Guatemalan woman who fled extreme domestic abuse and, in 2009, won an important asylum case after a 14-year legal fight. Her victory broke ground for other women seeking asylum on the basis of domestic violence.

Then, after years of incremental decisions, the Board of Immigration Appeals published its first precedent-setting opinion in the 2014 Cifuentes case, known as Matter of A-R-C-G.

“I actually thought that finally we had made some progress,” Musalo said. Although the impact wasn’t quite as pronounced as many experts had hoped, it was a step for women fleeing gender-based violence in Latin America and other parts of the world.

Now, Musalo says, Sessions is trying to undo all that and is doing so at a particularly monumental time for gender equality in the United States and worldwide.

“We’ve gone too far in society with the MeToo movement and all of the other advances in women’s rights to accept this principle,” Musalo said.

“It shows that there are these deeply entrenched attitudes toward gender and gender equality,” she added. “There are always those forces that are sort of the dying gasp of wanting to hold on to the way things were.”

Sessions assigned the 2016 case to himself under his power as attorney general and said the move will help reduce the growing backlog of 700,000 court cases.

He concluded his ruling by saying he does not intend to “minimize the vile abuse” that the Salvadoran woman suffered or the “harrowing experiences of many other victims of domestic violence around the world.” But the “asylum statute is not a general hardship statute,” Sessions wrote.

Relatively few refugees are granted asylum annually. In 2016, for example, nearly 62 percent of applicants were denied asylum, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Paul Wickham Schmidt, a retired immigration judge and former chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals, wrote on his blog that Sessions sought to encourage immigration judges to “just find a way to say no as quickly as possible.” (Schmidt authored the decision in the Kasinga case extending asylum protection to victims of female genital mutilation.)

Sessions’s ruling is “likely to speed up the ‘deportation railway,’ ” Schmidt wrote. But it will also encourage immigration judges to “cut corners, and avoid having to analyze the entire case,” he argued.

“Sessions is likely to end up with sloppy work and lots of Circuit Court remands for ‘do overs,’ ” Schmidt wrote. “At a minimum, that’s going to add to the already out of control Immigration Court backlog.”

Learn more at The Washington Post

Laurene Powell Jobs — like the inventors and disrupters who were all around her — was thinking big. It was 2004, and she was an East Coast transplant — sprung from a cage in West Milford, N.J., as her musical idol Bruce Springsteen might put it — acclimating to the audacious sense of possibility suffusing the laboratories, garages and office parks of Silicon Valley. She could often be found at a desk in a rented office in Palo Alto, Calif., working a phone and an Apple computer. There, her own creation was beginning to take shape. It would involve philanthropy … technology … social change — she was charting the destination as she made the journey.

She eventually named the project Emerson Collective after Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of her favorite writers. In time it would become perhaps the most influential product of Silicon Valley that you’ve never heard of. Yet at first, growth was slow. The work took a back seat to raising her three children and managing the care of her husband, Steve Jobs, as he battled the cancer that killed him in 2011 at age 56, followed by a period of working through family grief.

She inherited his fortune, now worth something like $20 billion, and became the sixth-richest woman on the planet. By 2014, Emerson Collective was up to 10 employees. “For the first few years I worked here, there would be people who would say, ‘Who?’ ” says the eighth hire, Anne Marie Burgoyne, director of grants. “ ‘Is there someone in the Valley who’s famous whose last name is Emerson?’ That seemed like a fair question. The Valley is a place of reputation, so it’s logical to ask whose last name is Emerson. Nobody knew who we were.”

Powell Jobs, now 54, wanted it that way, and she wished she could stay out of the spotlight. She wrote a short essay on the sublimity of anonymous giving that she handed out to employees. One of her staff recently gave it to me to read but not to quote: Her policy on anonymity is anonymous. She was frequently seen but not heard — seated with Michelle Obama during the State of the Union address in 2012, vacationing with former D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, whom she dated a few years ago after he moved to California. When she did speak, she seemed most comfortable having wonkishly impersonal conversations at forums with, say, a Stanford entre­pre­neur­ship professor on the subject of “Injecting Innovation Into Intractable Systems,” or with musician Will.I.Am on “Art, Activism and Impact.”

All the while, she tended to Emerson Collective, quietly assembling a kind of Justice League of practical progressives: Arne Duncan, education secretary in the Obama administration, came on board to tackle gun violence in Chicago. Russlynn Ali, assistant education secretary for civil rights in the Obama administration, co-founded Emerson’s affiliate for education reform, the XQ Institute, where none other than storied urban fashion entrepreneur Marc Ecko has landed as chief creative and strategy officer. (“I feel like everything I’ve done up until this moment was for this reason,” the former T-shirt designer for Spike Lee and Chuck D told me.) Andy Karsner, assistant energy secretary for renewable energy in the George W. Bush administration, runs environmental programs. Jennifer Palmieri, communications director for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, consults on communications strategy. Dan Tangherlini, head of the General Services Administration under Obama (and D.C. city administrator under Fenty) is the chief financial officer. Peter Lattman, former deputy business editor of the New York Times, oversees media investments and grants. Marshall Fitz, former vice president of immigration policy at the Center for American Progress, runs immigration reform efforts.

Then, last year, Powell Jobs unleashed a series of dramatic moves across a three-dimensional chessboard of American culture. In July, Emerson Collective purchased a majority stake in the Atlantic, a 161-year-old pillar of the journalistic establishment. In September, an arm of the collective and Hollywood’s Entertainment Industry Foundation co-opted the four major networks in prime time to simultaneously present an hour of live television, featuring dozens of celebrities inviting the nation to reconceive high school. Over the following weeks, the collective partnered with the French artist JR to create two monumental pieces of guerrilla art on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border that went viral on social media as satirical critiques of the border wall. In October, she bought the second-largest stake — about 20 percent — in the estimated $2.5 billion holding company that owns the NBA’s Wizards, the NHL’s Capitals, Capital One Arena and several other sports ventures.

The pace continued this year. In February, Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant announced he was committing $10 million to help create a Washington-area branch of a program that Powell Jobs had co-founded, which supports students to and through college in nine cities. In March, Emerson Collective helped bring director Alejandro Iñárritu’s shattering virtual-reality installation “Carne y Arena” — an immersive experience that simulates what it’s like for an immigrant to cross the border — to an abandoned church in Northeast Washington.

She had our attention now — but what was she doing? Emerson Collective did not appear to conform to traditional models of philanthropy. Its worldview seemed more or less clear — center-left politics with a dash of techie libertarianism — but its grand plan was unstated while its methods of spurring social change implied that simply funding good works is no longer enough. The engine Powell Jobs had designed was equal parts think tank, foundation, venture capital fund, media baron, arts patron and activist hive. Certainly, it was an original creation — and potentially a powerful one. “I’d like us to be a place where great leaders want to come and try to do difficult things,” Powell Jobs told me recently. “I think we bring a lot more to the table than money. … If you want to just be a check writer, you’d run out of money and not solve anything.”

Laurene Powell made her first foray into philanthropy near the beginning of high school in West Milford. She learned of the work of the Southern Poverty Law Center and dipped into her savings to send a cashier’s check of about $20. She got a form thank-you letter back from civil rights crusader Morris Dees. “They would reliably write to me a couple of times a year,” she says. “I would read them over and over, and they told really beautiful stories. I was always animated by the notion of who gets the opportunity and who doesn’t.”

Her father was a Marine Corps pilot who was killed in an airborne collision when she was 3. Her mother was left with four children under the age of 6 and not much money. She scrambled for ways to make ends meet, setting an example of “work ethic and commitment to focusing on what you need to do to be successful or, in her case, to survive,” Laurene’s older brother Brad told me. Laurene and her three brothers — two older, one younger — always had jobs. The local paper route was passed down from one sibling to the next. There was no money for the family to travel, so Laurene collected stamps of countries she would like to visit someday. (Their mother later married a school guidance counselor, and Powell Jobs has a younger sister and three stepsiblings from that marriage.)

“School was the thing that really worked for me,” she says. “I did well in school, and so it was a nice, positive, rewarding cycle for me to want to spend as much time there and to excel.” Fewer than half the students at her high school went on to college, according to Powell Jobs, but she and her brothers were determined. With student loans, multiple jobs, work-study and a small family commitment, she paid for enrollment in the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied economics, political science and French. “I know it in my core that, without that, I never would have had the opportunities that I have in my life,” she says. Education would become Emerson Collective’s seminal issue. “For the students who I work with, I understand that school is their way out,” she says. “It’s really their portal to anything larger than what they see around them. That was true for me.”

After Penn, she landed a job as a quantitative analyst with the fixed-income trading department at Goldman Sachs. “She was one of those people who interfaced between the super geniuses and the guys like me who were more normal,” Jon Corzine, who ran the fixed-income division before going on to become governor of New Jersey, told me. In other words, she translated esoteric research into strategies that traders and clients could use. “She was just a strong personality on the floor, because of her intelligence and her ability to relate to people.” At a time when there weren’t many women on the trading floor, Corzine says, she was one of a few “pioneers … who were prepared to deal courageously with a world that wasn’t always trying to assess people on the quality of their minds and performance.”

She loved the work but left within a few years; wanting to be an entrepreneur, she applied to the Stanford Graduate School of Business. One evening in October 1989, she and a fellow business school student arrived late for a guest lecture where nearly all the seats were taken. They sat in the aisle, then grabbed seats in the front row. The guest lecturer was led to the seat beside her. “I looked to my right, and there was a beautiful girl there, so we started chatting while I was waiting to be introduced,” Steve Jobs told biographer Walter Isaacson.

It had been Laurene’s friend’s idea to come to the lecture in the first place. “I knew that Steve Jobs was the speaker, but the face I thought of was that of Bill Gates,” she told Isaacson. “I had them mixed up.” After the lecture, Jobs invited her to dinner. They walked to a vegetarian restaurant in Palo Alto and stayed for four hours. In March 1991, when he was 36 and she was 27, they were married in a historic lodge in Yosemite National Park. “Steve and I were together for 22 years starting from the day we met and never apart,” she told me. “And it’s the greatest blessing of my life.”

Emerson Collective’s headquarters occupies three floors of a building on a corner in Palo Alto. The walls carry prints such as Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” plus edgier fare such as Adam Pendleton’s room-length collage mural inspired by Malcolm X’s “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech. On a recent Monday, employees had flown in from across the country for a periodic day of all-hands meetings, when grants, investments, campaigns and strategies would be reviewed. The hushed hum of exam day prevailed.

Powell Jobs and I talked the next day in a conference room, where she explained how the collective, which has about 130 employees, works. “Really important is to be very, very close to the individuals, families and communities that we’re hoping to serve,” she said. “If we’re not listening to them, if we’re not thinking of how do we equip them with the tools to solve their own problems, if we don’t understand that actually the wisdom of the community far surpasses our own, then we’re in the wrong business. If people are in this building for more than a few days in a row and not out in the field, then we need to check each other.”

“There’s a sense here that failure is not the death knell, that it actually can be a badge of honor and a learning experience,” she continued. “All of our country would benefit from having that attitude towards failure.”

She set up the collective as a limited liability company rather than a foundation, not unlike the three-year-old Chan Zuckerberg Initiative established by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg. This gives flexibility to do more than just make grants to nonprofit groups. “When philanthropists are engaged in the type of system change that Laurene is,” Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, a venture philanthropy expert at Stanford and a friend of Powell Jobs’s, told me later, “you have to be as nimble as possible because ecosystems are constantly shifting, stakeholders are developing new positions on particular issues, political contexts change, economic forces evolve.”

Emerson invests in private companies, Powell Jobs said, not because the goal is to make money but because Silicon Valley has shown her that “amazing entrepreneurs who … are 100 percent aligned with our mission” can find solutions that might not occur to a nonprofit. Emerson is also able to back advocacy groups, launch its own activist campaigns and contribute to political organizations. It has given $2.6 million at the federal level since 2013, primarily to Emerge America, dedicated to recruiting Democratic women candidates, and to Priorities USA, a Democratic super PAC. Powell Jobs herself is a registered independent and has made about $4 million in federal campaign contributions since 1997, mainly to Democratic candidates and organizations in line with issues of concern to Emerson.

The LLC structure also means Emerson need not disclose details of its assets and spending. “The majority of her philanthropy, no one knows about,” Arrillaga-Andreessen said. However, a tax filing Powell Jobs signed last fall offers a clue to the scale, showing that a related entity called the Emerson Collective Foundation began 2017 with $1.2 billion available, largely from Disney stocks and bonds, a fruit of Steve Jobs’s sale of Pixar to Disney in 2006.

For the crew Powell Jobs has assembled, being tapped to join the collective was like being called to a mission. In early 2016, shortly after he had left the Obama administration, Arne Duncan mentioned to Powell Jobs his idea for a novel experiment to confront the gun carnage in his home town of Chicago. “I said that I can’t guarantee you that I’ll be successful — I may fail,” Duncan recalled to me. “She said basically, ‘I want to take on some of society’s most in­trac­table problems for the next 25 years and then pass the torch to someone else. So why don’t I support you in that work?’ … I think she was actually attracted to the level of difficulty.”

From his think tank perch in the immigration reform movement, Marshall Fitz watched Emerson coming over the horizon with surprise. “The common kind of question that is asked out in Silicon Valley and certainly asked at Emerson is, ‘What if?’ ” he told me. “As a D.C. policy-wonk guy, we never asked that question because, one, we rarely had the resources or the time and space to ask the question. Because of the culture, rarely do you have the creativity to think fully outside the box in a way that she was clearly already bringing to the table.”

To make sure Emerson is thinking as audaciously as the entrepreneurs all around it, Powell Jobs will go on “tech tours” with her friend Ron Conway, the legendary Silicon Valley angel investor. They visit the next big things in the area, as they did Pinterest, Facebook and Airbnb before they were all that. “What’s fascinating is that by listening to all these founders, she has basically put founders at the head of each of the sectors of Emerson Collective, so that she’s really funding entrepreneurs inside the collective who want to disrupt their spaces,” Conway told me. “She wants people to innovate in their sector — education reform, getting the Dream Act passed. So Emerson has become like an accelerator for causes around social change.”

In the mid-1990s, Powell Jobs began tutoring 12th-graders in a nearby high school. Many of them would be the first in their families to go to college — if they could get there. Filled with racial, ethnic and class tension, the school happened to have been the setting for “Dangerous Minds,” the 1995 film starring Michelle Pfeiffer. “We found such a failed system,” Powell Jobs explained later to a lecture hall full of Stanford students, where this time she was the honored speaker. “It needed the type of entre­pre­neur­ship and problem solving that I was doing in the for-profit space and that I thought was a higher and better use of my life to do in the social sector.”

She and her friend and fellow tutor, Carlos Watson, who would go on to co-create OZY Media, co-founded College Track in the struggling community of East Palo Alto in 1997. Their central insight, which might seem obvious now but wasn’t then, is that students without resources or a family tradition of higher education need support that other families take for granted: how to believe in yourself, how to find your voice and tap your passion, how to write an application essay, how to assemble loans and scholarships.

Now in nine cities — Durant’s branch in Prince George’s will be the 10th, and two are planned for the District — the program follows students for 10 years, starting in ninth grade and for six years after high school, if needed to graduate from college. Powell Jobs continues to personally mentor students during the transition from high school to college. To her students, she was and is “Laurene,” not the wife or widow of someone big. “I didn’t learn who Laurene really was until I was about to graduate from college, six years after I met her,” one of Powell Jobs’s mentees named Mayra told me. Now 32, she is an undocumented immigrant brought from Mexico as a child, and she asked that her last name not be published because President Trump has ordered the cancellation of the program that protects her and other “dreamers” from deportation. She went on to graduate school and now works in public health in the Bay Area.

Mayra’s immigration status is an important detail in this story. She entered College Track in 2001. The first time she ever disclosed her status was in the college application essay she worked on with Powell Jobs. This was around when Powell Jobs discovered the issue of undocumented immigrants, as the first class of College Track kids was applying to college. Despite knowing no other country but America, they could be denied financial aid and the ability to work. Powell Jobs naively thought it was just an absurd glitch in the system that would be quickly fixed once politicians heard about it. “I didn’t know that there was another side to the argument,” she told me. “I still do not think there is.”

She became an advocate for immigration reform and began seeking ways to influence that debate. This is how the moving parts in her machine for making change became more intricate, with one issue leading to another. “If we actually want to be helpful to the individual and their family, we can’t just focus on education, we have to focus on the whole ecosystem so that they can live much more healthy, productive lives where they are,” she says. “Every single community that we work with in College Track is dealing with some issue on the spectrum of serious, poisonous, toxic environmental issues in their air, water and soil. I thought for a long time we’d like to have a practice around that, but it wasn’t until I found the right people that we started building it out.”

This period in the late 1990s and early 2000s coincided with Steve Jobs driving Apple toward a series of innovations, including the Apple Store, iTunes and the iPod. And he supported his wife’s own innovations. “He loved the work of College Track,” Powell Jobs says. “And he was as offended by the dreamers’ situation as I was. He felt like these things were no-brainers. … And he was equally frustrated that the schools deliver very different education across the country.” Their own children biked to the public schools in Palo Alto. The family lived in a house like all the others on a regular street, not in a gated community.

Steve Jobs’s cancer was diagnosed in 2003. Powell Jobs is frank about the pain of “losing my husband and life partner — seeing him through a terrible illness, then losing him and raising my kids as a single mom. And in doing it, dealing with the public in that way. Having to grieve but also manage the public grieving, and buttress my kids as they managed the same thing.” She told me the experience may well inform her in her current efforts: “There are a lot of people who have experienced loss and suffering, but sometimes they haven’t done the work to allow them to connect to someone else’s loss and suffering.”

Even when the couple knew there would soon come a time when Laurene would have a whole lot of money to spend as she saw fit, they didn’t talk much about how she would go about it. Steve left it to her to design that future. “He had a lot of faith in me, and he definitely believed I could figure out many things,” she says.

She remains in close touch with Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. “She deeply understands Apple,” Cook told me. “She’s one of my most trusted advisers,” on subjects such as privacy, immigration and education. “She takes on these fairly multidimensional, complex issues and sort of unpeels them layer by layer, and I think has positioned Emerson really well to make a huge difference in the world.”

The recent dramatic pickup of Emerson’s activity coincides with Powell Jobs’s youngest child having left for college. “The ambition has been there for a long time,” she says, “and only now it’s more and more possible to work in this way.”

“I’m very aware of the fact that we’re all just passing through here,” she adds. “I feel like I’m hitting my stride now. … Change doesn’t happen quickly. It happens slowly, slowly, and then all at once. Sometimes that’s 10 years, sometimes it’s 20 years, and sometimes you don’t live to see it. … It is my goal to effectively deploy resources. If there’s nothing left when I die, that’s just fine.”

n 2013 Powell Jobs commissioned documentarian Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth,” “He Named Me Malala”) to make a film called “The Dream Is Now” about dreamers hoping to build lives in this country. She wanted it done in a matter of months to have a timely influence on the political debate. It was typical of Emerson Collective’s approach to issues. Alongside the usual tools of polling and policy advocacy, it will create, say, an “immigration innovation incubator” to foster tech solutions, and it will enlist artists and storytellers to appeal to the public on alternative channels.

“She was very involved in helping us pick who we should follow, how we should frame the issue,” Guggenheim told me. “We talk a lot about changing hearts and minds, about engaging people and telling stories that break through. … She is very focused on how do we tell stories that can change hearts and minds.”

Immigration is perhaps the most partisan fight into which she is pushing a stack of her billions of chips, on behalf of those who see the issue the way she does. On the other side is a countervailing apparatus of funders, thinkers and advocates pushing for tighter borders, fewer legal immigrants and more deportations. Since she entered the fray in 2001, her opponents have won nearly every battle in Washington, so she is turning her tactics away from the capital. “We’re looking for ways to activate people around the country, so that they can understand what’s at stake,” she says. “So that they can start building a chorus that Congress can’t ignore.”

Her strategy on education policy has been similarly novel. The long list of storytellers in acting and song who participated in last fall’s prime-time education reform special — from Tom Hanks and Viola Davis to Lin-Manuel Miranda and Andra Day — did a good job of selling Emerson’s approach to reimagining high school. The XQ Institute, Emerson’s independent education arm, has pledged $115 million to 18 schools across the country pursuing their own innovative approaches, including Washington Leadership Academy, a tech-focused public charter in the District. Without prescribing exact models, the group wants schools to focus on the competence a student achieves in a given subject more than the number of hours she sits in that class. There’s an emphasis on knowledge relevant to employers of the future.

However, some reviews of the televised special were skeptical: “Encouraging such tinkering is a fine use of philanthropic dollars,” Jack Schneider, assistant professor of education at College of the Holy Cross, wrote in The Washington Post. “But that isn’t what the XQ project is promoting. Instead, it is publicizing a historically uninformed message that today’s technologies demand something new of us as human beings and that our unchanging high schools are failing at the task.”

Either way, the dollars will continue to flow toward Powell Jobs’s vision of immigration and education reform. On all her issues, as she masters the eclectic levers of influence she is fashioning to her ends, she has the resources to sway the debate in a way that some might question — but few can match.

The most effective way to create change in this country is to build a grass-roots movement, a national outcry that is so loud and so powerful that our leaders cannot ignore it.

Laurene Powell Jobs

And yet, Powell Jobs herself is content to melt into the background. One night at the Inner-City Muslim Action Network on the South Side of Chicago, for the benefit of some visitors including the Chicago-raised rapper Common and me, young men told stories of why they joined Emerson’s anti-violence program called Chicago CRED. Deontae Allison, 22, who would receive his high school equivalency diploma the next day, said he has been shot 13 times. “I went through the negative life. I’m trying to see what a positive life is now.” Old associates on the streets can’t believe that, at CRED, Allison consorts with men from bitterly rival neighborhoods. “Now we look at each other as brothers,” he told me later. A young man in a White Sox hat training to be an electrician said: “Last month I lost my father to gun violence. I lost a lot of friends to gun violence, close friends, people I used to run with, three of them died. This program makes you want to wake up the next day.”

Run by Arne Duncan, CRED stands for Creating Real Economic Destiny. It starts with the market-based belief that young men will enter the productive legal economy from the drug trade and other criminal street commerce if they have a chance at a decent job and wage. Half a dozen cohorts of up to 30 men in different sections of the city report every day to centers where they learn trades while being paid up to $12.50 an hour. Even more important, they can study for high school equivalency diplomas, receive counseling for emotional trauma, get mentoring from life coaches and write illustrated memoirs that are published as books. It’s not giving them a “second chance,” Duncan says. “For a lot of guys, we’re giving them a first chance they’ve never had.” There’s a waiting list of more than 100 to enroll.

That night at the Muslim action network, after several of the young men told their stories, case manager Billy Moore spoke up. He was responsible for a notorious killing in Chicago. In 1984, at the age of 16, he shot and killed high school basketball hero Ben Wilson and served nearly 20 years in prison. Now he uses his example as a lesson to the young men. “You can’t measure the success of a conversation,” he said. Recently Moore’s own son was shot to death. “I’m so committed to my mission in life right now that if the young man who killed my son walked through the doors and asked to be a part of this program,” he said, “then I would sign up to be his case worker, so I could change his life.”

Afterward Powell Jobs exchanged small talk with the men, some of whom have gotten to know her, but she made no formal remarks on this evening nor the next day at the graduation ceremony where, in contrast, a corporate co-sponsor took the opportunity to make a speech. Neither she nor Emerson were mentioned from the podium or in the program. “She blends in with the crowd, yet she’s probably the most powerful woman in the world,” Moore said. “My father told me a long time ago you can know a man’s true character when you give him unquestioned power. She has power. You can see her true character is being a humble woman. She don’t use her power to steal attention from what’s going on.”

Rami Nashashibi, executive director of the Muslim network, told me he has seen too many “great-white-hope-syndrome programs with this idea of we’re going to, quote unquote, save some black and brown kids, feel good about ourselves, and the money may or may not be here in three years.” Rarely do they acknowledge the bigger picture of structural racism and systemic oppression layered into the history of every block where these young men come from. Powell Jobs “believes in a bigger picture and was able to connect dots,” Nashashibi said. “A philanthropist on her level can really just do a lot of that from a comfortable distance and not want to come and have a whole bunch of conversations, and not dictate and drive. She’s willing and eager just to be an active participant in the space.”

Learn more at Washington Post

This week, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez made history by appointing 11 female cabinet members, out of 16. The country’s new Socialist government is the first to boast a cabinet of more women than men.

Socialist spokesman Ander Gil told reporters that the cabinet configuration “complies with the word given by the prime minister, with women and men with long and prestigious careers.”

“This is a responsible government that represents very well the talent and the future of Spain,” he told La Sexta TV.

Sánchez’s cabinet is unusual in Spain and around the world. Here’s why:

• Women hold just 23 percent of the seats in national parliaments, up from 11 percent in 1995.

• According to a 2017 United Nations study, women make up less than 10 percent of elected parliaments in nearly 40 percent of countries.

• In four countries, no women hold national office.

• There are fewer than 30 female heads of state and heads of government, and women don’t fare any better when it comes to cabinet positions. In 2017, 18 percent of all cabinet ministers were women.

This phenomenon also plays out in the United States where female representation is lacking across the board. More than 100 countries have more women in their legislatures than the U.S. One challenge is that the U.S. boasts relatively strong incumbency rates. Nearly 90 percent of congressmen run for reelection, and nearly all of them win — meaning it’s harder to replace men with women.

As Vox explained — citing research from the Inter-Parliamentary Union — American women are less likely to run for office than women in other countries:

Women consistently underestimated their qualifications and perceived themselves differently than men who had nearly identical credentials. Women were also more likely to perceive campaigning as harder and were less likely to have anyone — whether a friend or a party official — encourage them to pursue political office. Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Lawless and Fox’s study is this: Potential women candidates were 15 times more likely than men to be responsible for the majority of child care, and six times more likely to manage most housework. With those kinds of obligations, who has the time to run for office?

Twenty-two percent of Trump’s senior-level Cabinet jobs are held by women, which is a slight departure from the Cabinet of President Barack Obama, where one-third of those seats were filled by women.

Learn more at The Lily

Forbes has just released its annual list of the top 100 highest paid athletes in the world, and for the first time, it doesn’t include any women.

Tennis legend Serena Williams was the only female on the list last year, ranking No. 51 with $27 million in earnings. But Williams took an absence from the sport to have a child, so her earnings weren’t enough to make this year’s list.

“Williams remained engaged with her partners during the year and banked an estimated $18 million off the court from sponsors Nike, Wilson, Intel, JPMorgan Chase, Lincoln, Gatorade, Beats, and more,” Kurt Badenhausen, a senior editor at Forbes said, “but it wasn’t enough to crack the top 100.”

In recent years, tennis stars Maria Sharapova and Li Na have made the list, but Li retired in 2014 and Sharapova was suspended for 15 months for using a banned substance.

Forbes compiled the list by adding all prize money, salaries, bonuses, and endorsement deals earned between June 1, 2017 and June 1, 2018.

The No.1 athlete on the list, retired boxer Floyd Mayweather, crushed the competition by making $285 million — more than the No. 2 and No. 3 athletes on the list combined. Nearly all of his 2018 income came from a single 36-minute fight against UFC’s Conor McGregor. McGregor also made this list at No. 4, raking in $99 million.

The absence of any women on the list is made worse by the inclusion of Mayweather at the top. He has a long and disturbing history of physically abusing women. As the #MeToo movement has slowly turned the tide against serial abusers, Mayweather’s continued success serves as a reminder for the world of sports.

According to Forbes, the lack of women on the list has a lot to do with the growing popularity of team sports and related licensing deals as opposed to individual sports, such as golf and tennis, where women having typically earned more endorsements.

“Athletes in team sports make up 82% of the list,” Forbes said. “Salaries in team sports have exploded over the past 25 years as media companies spent billions on TV deals for live sports content.”

But sexism can also explain some of the wage gap as well. The U.S. women’s national soccer team, which generates more revenue than the men’s squad, has recently filed a wage-discrimination complaint against U.S. Soccer in 2016, with claims of being paid one-quarter of what the men make.

In the world of basketball, NBA players are paid about 50% of the league revenue, whereas WNBA players only receive about 33%. “It’s tempting to assume that when we account for the revenue disparity between the NBA and WNBA, the gender wage gap disappears,” David Berri at Vice Sports writes. “Unfortunately, that seems to run counter to the data. Even when we consider differences in revenue, there remains a significant gap between the wages paid to WNBA players and their NBA counterparts.”

Learn more at Good Sports

Saudi Arabia has issued the first driving licenses to women in decades, even as prominent advocates for giving women the right to drive in the conservative kingdom have been arrested and labeled as “traitors” by government-backed media.

Ten women who already had valid driving licenses from other countries were allowed to trade them in for Saudi ones Monday after undergoing brief tests at the General Traffic Department in the capital, Riyadh, and other cities, the government said in a statement. But they won’t be able to use the new licenses until June 24, when all women can begin applying for them.

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that does not currently permit women to drive, a policy that has long been a source of international condemnation. Although there is no law barring women from driving, no licenses have been issued to them in more than 50 years, forcing women to rely on chauffeurs and taxis or male relatives with vehicles.

The lifting of the de facto ban, announced in September, has been one of the most eagerly anticipated reforms in Saudi Arabia, where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has championed sweeping changes intended to modernize the country and create job opportunities for a mostly young population. But the uproar over the recent arrests threatens to eclipse any public relations benefits from allowing women to drive.

“It’s absolutely welcomed that the authorities have begun issuing driving licenses to women,” said Samah Hadid, who directs campaigns in the Middle East for the London-based human rights group Amnesty International. “But unfortunately this comes at a price where the very women who campaigned for the right to drive are behind bars instead of behind the wheel.”

Rothna Begum, a women's rights researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch, dismissed Monday’s event as a publicity stunt intended to deflect criticism.

“Now we have videos of traffic police handing over these driver’s licenses to divert the world’s attention from the fact that the women who were actually behind championing the cause … are not only in prison but have been charged and potentially face very, very long sentences,” she said.

At least 17 people were arrested on suspicion of trying to undermine the kingdom’s security and stability, a case that human rights groups said has primarily targeted individuals who advocated for women’s rights.

They include activists who were arrested before for defying the ban on women driving and also campaigned for the lifting of restrictions requiring women to obtain the permission of a male guardian before marrying, traveling abroad or getting released from prison.

Eight were temporarily released, pending the completion of a procedural review, the Saudi Public Prosecutor's Office said in a statement Sunday. Nine others — four women and five men — remain in custody and face possible trial.

The detainees were said to have admitted to serious charges, including communicating and cooperating with individuals and organizations “hostile to the kingdom,” recruiting “persons in a sensitive government entity to obtain confidential information and official documents to harm the higher interests of the kingdom” and providing financial and moral support to “hostile elements abroad.”

Activists convicted on similar charges are serving between eight and 10 years in prison, Begum said.

Saudi prosecutors did not publicly identify the suspects who remain in custody. But Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said they include three women who are among the most well-known proponents for allowing everyone to drive: Loujain Hathloul, Aziza Yousef and Eman Nafjan.

State-backed media accused the detainees of betraying their country and acting as “agents of embassies.” One pro-government Twitter account posted images of some of them with the word “traitor” written in red across their faces.

Activists said their treatment shows that for all the social and economic reforms in Saudi Arabia, there is still no tolerance for criticizing the monarchy or advocating for more change.

“This is a kingdom that bans protests, that bans independent human rights organizations and trade unions,” Begum said. “This has not changed under Mohammed bin Salman. If anything, since his ascent to power, the situation has become more repressive for human rights defenders.”

Even some supporters of the crown prince suggested that the government may have erred in arresting the women.

“My understanding is that they broke the law technically in something they did, which was not really directly related to their activism,” said Ali Shihabi, founder of the Washington-based Arabia Foundation. “But I still think that this was maybe an overreaction.”

He said the 32-year-old prince has done more than any king in the last 50 years to advance women’s rights in Saudi Arabia — an effort that has required him to push back against a “very strong, conservative, reactionary part of society that has been resisting these changes for decades.”

Shihabi said officials may have wanted to show that they aren’t cracking down only on conservative clerics and their supporters, who have also faced arrest in recent years.

“The government is very nervous [about] balancing different elements of society as it’s pushing for disruptive change,” he said.

At the same time, he added, the government does not want to be seen as implementing a “Western agenda.”

“Because these women are so Western and liberal, and they are being feted in the West … they help give meat to that narrative with Saudi conservative public opinion,” Shihabi said. “In the view of the crown prince, this is in the interests of Saudi Arabia. It’s not because Uncle Sam has asked him to do this.”

Learn more at L.A. Times

Accountancy giant PwC has banned all-male shortlists for jobs in the UK in an attempt to increase the number of women in senior roles at the firm.

It said the move was prompted by its recent pay gap report showing men on average earned 43.8% more than women.

The company said recruitment was one of the areas it was looking at as a way to narrow the gap.

PwC also plans to ban all-male interview panels and examine how "career defining roles" are awarded.

Making sure that "everybody in the firm" had access to important career opportunities such as working on big projects or for well known clients, would be "a real game changer", said PwC's chief people officer Laura Hinton.

She said the move was part of the firm's wider plan to improve the diversity of its workforce, which includes looking at the attitude of senior management.

It also has a returnship programme, which encourages those who have taken a break from work, such as maternity leave, to do six months paid work experience.

The company has also started to allocate "progression coaches" - usually partners - who will work with women and ethnic minorities employees to help develop their careers.

The Daily Mail, which first reported PwC's decision, said it was the first of the big four accountancy firms to ban all-male shortlists.

'More common'

Jill Miller, policy adviser at the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD), said it did not have data on the number of firms which had banned all-male shortlists for jobs, but said it was becoming "more common".

She said new rules forcing firms to publish their gender pay gaps had increased transparency and focused leaders' attention on how to improve the figures.

However, many firms were failing to exploit the data they had on their workforce, she said, such as when and why women were leaving the firm.

"It's important to look at as wide a talent pool as possible. Overall it's about levelling the playing field and getting best person for the job."

PwC's decision comes amid a furore over diversity at the Bank of England, which recently appointed a male economist to its rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee despite a shortlist of four women and one man.

The Treasury said the role had been awarded on merit.

Ms Hinton said that hiring diverse people at a senior level was "a real challenge" because candidates tended to be "disproportionately male".

Improving diversity at graduate and school-leaver levels was easier because the firm had more control, she said.

For example, it had found that male graduates tended to apply for graduate placements earlier on in their university career. As a result, rather than filling up their assessment centres on a first-come first-served basis, it makes sure each centre has a 50/50 split between male and female applicants.

"Little things like that can stack up against women," she said.

"The challenge is making sure that at every stage in the process we are saying yes to get the right person and not excluding. The objective is to keep pushing and to encourage others to do the same."

Learn more at BBC

What does your organization do?

VoteRunLead trains diverse women to unleash their political power, run for office, and transform American democracy – all through award-winning programs, online tech, and by inspiring community.

Please describe the activation your organization seeks to launch.

VoteRunLead is an expert at building independent political power and grassroots movements at the local level. Through the LA2050 Activation Challenge, we aim to train at least 10,000 women by 2020 through online and in-person events, helping to motivate underrepresented leaders, and ultimately ushering at least 50 women to run for offices in L.A. County by 2020. Women not running will also catalyze positive change by voting, speaking out on issues, and organizing their communities.

Which of the CONNECT metrics will your activation impact?

Government responsiveness to residents’ needs

Participation in neighborhood councils

Voting rates

Will your proposal impact any other LA2050 goal categories?

LA is the best place to LEARN

LA is the best place to CREATE

LA is the best place to PLAY

LA is the healthiest place to LIVE

In what areas of Los Angeles will you be directly working?

County of Los Angeles

How will your activation mobilize Angelenos?

Advocate for policy

Digital organizing or activism

Trainings and/or in-person engagements

Create new tools or technologies for greater civic/political engagement

Increase participation in political processes

Influence individual behavior

Describe in greater detail how your activation will make LA the best place to CONNECT?

A recent poll showed that LA is one of VoteRunLead’s “hotspots,” with a huge demand for our trainings coming from LA County. With relatively low voter turnout and a city council that is 77 percent men, LA is an ideal location to connect and engage through civic participation and women’s leadership training. VoteRunLead would be honored to help residents connect through our tried-and-true strategies:

In-Person Trainings and Engagements. Our signature training, called “Run As You Are,” is a six-point curriculum covering key ways for women to develop and execute their public leadership skills, including 1) Confidence & Qualifications; 2) Campaigns & Elections; 3) Government & Civic Literacy; 4) Practice & Feedback Cycles; 5) People & Networks; and 6) Reputation & Impact. Evaluations of these award-winning trainings show that women emerge with greater knowledge and confidence, committed to the path to lead.

Digital organizing and activism. VoteRunLead’s online trainings and workshops provide an opportunity for leaders to learn from anywhere, on their own schedules. In 2017, 6500+ views of our curriculum demonstrate that women are willing to partake in online experiences, and our social media network of nearly 20,000 individuals is active, engaged, and supportive.

Increasing participation in political processes. VoteRunLead targets women to run for office between now and 2020; specifically, those who are underrepresented: women of color, younger women, women with lower incomes – and they are eager to lead. Our data shows that our trainings are effective: In November 2017 elections, we had 49 women on the ballots across the country (a similar organization, 6x the size of VoteRunLead, had 55 women running). Nearly 70% of our candidates won their elections, including 70% of first-time candidates (statistics show that usually, first-timers win 10% of the time) and 39% were women of color. And, even if trainees don’t run, they vote.

Advocating for policy. Studies show women are more likely than men to pass a bill and work in a bipartisan manner. Our alumnae pass pay equity bills, bring long-ignored issues to the fore, and advocate for vulnerable populations. Nonpartisan VoteRunLead welcomes women of all backgrounds and beliefs, speaking to all parties and millennials who often claim no party affiliation.

VoteRunLead creates new tools and technologies for greater civic/political engagement. As mentioned above, VoteRunLead has an engaged online community and aims to expand online tools.

Influencing individual behavior. VoteRunLead’s message of empowerment and collaboration impacts women not only on a systemic level, but also on an individual one, which opens new doors in their everyday lives.

Through this work, VoteRunLead will deliver specifically on the LA2050 metric to increase participation in neighborhood councils, training and propelling women into office to create a more responsive governance that addresses residents’ needs.

How will your activation engage Angelenos to make LA the best place to CONNECT

Since its inception in 2014, VoteRunLead has maintained a population of trainees that is at least 60 percent women of color, with approximately 25 percent coming from lower-income households and 30 percent of our trainees starting their leadership trainings with us at age 35 or younger. No other leadership training organization for women is so diverse or so intent on finding and connecting the untapped, unheard voices that are so necessary to making our democracy an inclusive, effective one.

Moving forward, VoteRunLead will continue our commitment to diversity and inclusion, ensuring that the next waves of leaders are truly representative of the population. To do so, we will continue the strategies and tactics that have been so effective to date, partnering with like-minded organizations that focus on recruitment of diverse voices, such as Higher Heights, IGNITE, 9 to 5 Working Women, Gamma Phi Delta sorority, MomsRising.org, and more. We will also bring in additional partners to reach women from different backgrounds, races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and political affiliations, to bring the full perspectives and power of women leaders forward.

Additionally, creative partnerships with corporations such as WeWork, wherein space is donated for trainings and workshops, connect VoteRunLead to reach entrepreneurs, movers, and shakers in communities across the country.

Please explain how you will define and measure success for your activation.

Measuring success through the following goals and outcomes, VoteRunLead will:

VoteRunLead aims to tap into the potential of women in LA, across party lines, who are motivated to and ready to lead. By 2020 (during the grant term), the organization aims to:

Train 1,000 women in LA through in-person trainings and workshops;

Reach 9,000 women in LA through online experiences;

Propel at least 50 women to run for office in their communities, whether through elections on the school board, city council, etc. and through appointed positions;

Activate all women to step into their unique leadership roles in their communities, joining the ranks of motivated citizens who connect and improve their city and county; and

Propel women into public leadership so that representation reflects the actual population (currently, 51 percent of the U.S. is women; about 40 percent are women of color, but approximately 80 percent of government is led by men, and they are overwhelmingly white men).

We believe that our activation crosses over into the LEARN, PLAY, CREATE, and LIVE areas as well. Through VoteRunLead trainings, women are encouraged to articulate what they value and explore how they can realize those values in their communities. Thus, even if an alumna doesn’t run for office, she may take it upon herself to become an entrepreneur, engage with her child’s school, and/or advocate for green spaces and healthy environments.

Where do you hope this activation or your organization will be in five years?

In five years, VoteRunLead as an organization hopes to have trained more than 1.2 million women nationwide, with approximately 10,000 of them hailing from LA. We know this is possible, because the excitement and motivation are happening now, with no signs of slowing down. We cannot miss the opportunity to align our tools and training with the the enthusiasm women are showing through marches, protests, and social media movements! VoteRunLead has the expertise, the proven program, the team, and the model to activate the next wave of activated citizens.

Ilhan Omar is a great example of who we attract and what we do. VoteRunLead was founded in Minnesota and works regularly there to provide trainings. Omar is currently a MN State Representative, who trained with VoteRunLead for years, solving work/life challenges as we provided scholarships and child care–because we know that’s what it takes for women to be able to run. With training, personal meetings with our experts, and our nationwide support network, Omar has become a nationally recognized leader, the first Somali-American legislator, and a trainer for VoteRunLead. We’re shifting the story that women cannot or should not lead, and making it possible for women to do so en masse. We would love to create this kind of success in LA.

VoteRunLead is fortunate to have a growing media presence, supported by an active network of trainees, alumnae, and experts who live our message of empowerment and inclusivity. These women sit on school boards and in state houses across America, are racially and ethnically diverse, and come from both rural and urban areas. Recent media coverage includes:

The aforementioned alumna Ilhan Omar, a former refugee, Muslim, and mother of three was profiled in Time magazine’s “Firsts” series. She was also featured by NPR, BBC, and NBC (all searchable online);

VoteRunLead was recently featured in ABC’s Nightline; and

Politico is talking about how VoteRunLead trainees are changing the game.

Your support is critical in ensuring our success. We are nimble and tech-savvy, well-known for the racial and ethnic diversity of our leaders and alumnae. We have a proven curriculum, a track record of significant “wins,” a network of powerful individuals and partnerships, and an engaged, diverse group of 10,000+ new women ready to vote, run, and lead. We are eager to make a seismic impact on the political practice and policies in LA, to include all voices and create equal opportunity. Yet we need innovative opportunities such as LA2050 in order to make this happen.

This is not a moment, it’s a movement. It leads the way for generations of women and girls who will be civically minded and politically active, and this movement includes all of us. We are ready to activate LA!

Learn more at LA 2050

Most employees, at one point or another, have been the victim of incivility at work. Ranging from snarky comments or rude interruptions to being disrespected in a brusque email, organizations can be breeding grounds for this type of behavior. Compared to more egregious forms of workplace mistreatment like sexual harassment, incivility — which is classified as low-intensity deviance at work — may seem minor. Yet, the costs of incivility can add up.

Estimates from a large-scale study indicated some astounding statistics: in response to incivility experiences, 48% of employees intentionally decreased their work effort, 47% intentionally decreased their time at work, and 38% internationally decreased the level of quality in their work.

Even more shocking, 80% of employees indicated that they lost time at work due to merely ruminating about experienced incivility, with 66% indicating that their performance declined, and 78% indicating that they lowered their commitment to their organization. The authors of this study also estimated that — due to cognitive distractions and time delays — the monetary cost of incivility can be upwards of $14,000 per employee. As such, there are financial and human well-being-related costs borne from exposure to incivility at work.

One finding that has been frequently documented is that women tend to report experiencing more incivility at work than their male counterparts. However, it has been unclear to as to who is perpetrating the mistreatment towards women at work. Some have theorized that men may be the culprits, as men are the more dominant social class in society and may feel as though they have the power to mistreat women. Perhaps as more overt forms of mistreatment like sexual harassment have become legally prohibited and socially taboo, subtle forms of discrimination in the form of incivility may increasingly occur within the workplace. Others, however, have theorized and suggested that women may be mistreating other womenbecause they are more likely to view each other as competition for advancement opportunities in companies.

Our research examined these two opposing views by conducting three complementary studies. These studies involved rather large samples, surveying between 400 and over 600 U.S. employees per study, across a variety of service operations and time periods. In each study, we consistently found that women reported experiencing more incivility from other women than from their male coworkers. Examples of this incivility included being addressed in unprofessional terms, having derogatory comments directed toward them, being put down in a condescending way, and being ignored or excluded from professional camaraderie.

This is not to say that men weren’t acting uncivilly; rather, the frequency was higher between women and their female counterparts. In addition, men didn’t seem to have differential experiences surrounding mistreatment — they experienced lower incivility than women overall, and reported fairly equal levels of incivility from both women and men. These findings were consistent even after accounting for the gender composition of the workplace and for personality traits — like how dispositionally negative and paranoid people in our samples typically were — that may increase the likelihood that individuals perceive mistreatment.

The question, though, is why? Why would women be more susceptible to this treatment from other women? Our research suggests that when women acted more assertively at work — expressing opinions in meetings, assigning people to tasks, and taking charge — they were even more likely to report receiving uncivil treatment from other women at work. We suspect that it may be that women acting assertively contradicts the norms that women must be warm and nurturing rather than emphatic and dominant. This means that women who take charge at work may suffer backlash in the form of being interpersonally mistreated.

It may also be the case that these assertive behaviors are viewed as ruthless by other women; given that women are more likely to compare themselves against each other, these behaviors may signal competition, eliciting incivility as a response.

Men, however, don’t seem to have the same problems when they deviate from gender norms, at least in how other men respond to these exceptions. In our research, men who acted in a warm, nurturing manner tended to report lower instances of incivility from other men compared to those who reported lower levels of this kind of behavior at work. So, whereas women were seemingly penalized by their female counterparts for acting in a way inconsistent with gender norms, men received a social credit of sorts from their male peers. Society seems to be providing men with more latitude to deviate from societal expectations, whereas women aren’t afforded the same luxury.

Lastly, we found that the effects of being the target of incivility took a toll on women’s well-being. We asked employees in one of our studies to report their job satisfaction at work over the last month; in another, we also assessed job satisfaction in addition to how alive and energetic employees felt and their intent to leave their current job. In response to being mistreated by their female counterparts, women reported lower job satisfaction, lower levels of vitality, and increased intentions to quit their job. Incivility directed from men did not garner these same results for women or for men in our studies. As such, incivility among women may be a unique experience that organizations should work towards addressing.

How? Broadly, organizations should aim to cultivate cultures of civility with their employees and both teach and train civility at work. There is evidence, for example, that interventions aimed at increasing discussions surrounding the value of civility at work can be effective at reducing rates of mistreatment. Other options include employee-run resource groups or affinity groups for women, preferably sponsored by senior female leaders; or mentoring programs that pair aspiring women with female leaders.

Employees and managers alike also need to treat issues associated with incivility seriously. There may be a tendency to shrug off these experiences, but doing so can perpetuate a negative cycle for employees and diminish the very real experiences women are having in the workplace. Managers and coworkers alike take accounts of incivility to heart to improve women’s experiences in the workplace.

Research aside, it is important for people to analyze their own experiences and behaviors. Let’s be honest: there has probably been a time when we’ve all been rude at work. Maybe we were so busy we didn’t have time to be polite; maybe someone rubbed us the wrong way; or maybe we were just in a bad mood. Ultimately, when we are rude to our coworkers or our teammates, we harm them in the same way that these experiences can harm us. Being introspective and understanding our own experiences and actions can help make the workplace a more civil place, which ultimately makes it better for both women and men.

Learn more at Harvard Business Review

Thursday’s Google Doodle celebrates pioneering geochemist Katsuko Saruhashi on what would have been her 98th birthday.

Saruhashi’s groundbreaking research focused on acid rain, radioactivity spread through oceans, and CO2 levels in seawater.

1. Saruhashi broke many glass ceilings

She was the first woman to earn a PhD in chemistry from the University of Tokyo in 1957, the first woman elected to the Science Council of Japan in 1980, and the first woman to win the Miyake Prize for geochemistry in 1985, an award named after her mentor, Miyake Yasuo.

2. To promote more women in the science, Saruhashi also started the Society of Japanese Women Scientists

The mission of the society, established in 1958, is to have more women contributing to sciences and world peace.

“There are many women who have the ability to become great scientists. I would like to see the day when women can contribute to science and technology on an equal footing with men,” she once said.

3. Saruhashi’s first major contribution to the field involved a methodology to determine CO2 levels in seawater

She was the first to determine carbonic acid levels based on temperature, pH Level, and chlorinity. Today, oceanographers call this “Saruhashi’s Table”.

4. Saruhashi’s second major area of research was to quantify nuclear pollution caused by testing in the 1950s

She measured the amount of radioactivity in seawater and found that fallout from U.S. atomic tests in the Marshall Islands in the 1950s reached Japan after about a year and a half. Her findings on how radioactivity spreads helped led to restrictions on oceanic nuclear experimentation in 1963.

5. In 1981, Saruhashi founded the Saruhashi Prize

The Saruhashi Prize is an annual award to recognize the research contributions of female scientists.

She died in 2007 of pneumonia.

Google’s Doodle remembers Saruhashi with an illustration that depicts her with a clipboard in front of a turbulent blue sea.

Learn more at Time

Women in Florida may be the first in the U.S. to achieve paycheck parity in 2038, while those in Wyoming may be among the last to close the wage gap, not getting there until 2153. According to new research released today by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), there will be 13 states where movement in the gender wage gap is so slow that a woman born in 2017 will not see equal pay during her working life.

Nationally, women averaged 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man in 2015. Julie Anderson, a senior research associate with IWPR, looked at Census data between 1959 and 2015 to track the differences in earnings between women and men who are employed full-time, year-round. Based on historical trends, the research paper predicts how long it will take for women in each state to earn as much as their male counterparts. The answer isn’t very optimistic—projections reveal just how lethargic change has been so far and how significant the variations are across state lines.

If the current pace is to continue, the paper argues, it will take another 42 years until the country as a whole closes the wage gap in 2059. In four states—North Dakota, Louisiana, Utah, and Wyoming—pay equality won’t be achieved until the 22nd century.

It’s important to note that the situation is far worse for women of color. If current trends continue, Anderson warns that black women will have to wait until 2124, while Hispanic women will not see pay equity for another 231 years—until 2248.

Among the states that are the closest to ending wage inequality, the reasons aren’t uniform. For example, in Florida and Nevada, it’s not necessarily due to robust policies that bolster equal pay. Rather, it’s because men are setting a fairly low bar for earnings. “Women in states like Florida and Nevada earn somewhere in the middle when compared to other states, but men in those states earn near the bottom in relation to overall men’s earnings,” says Anderson.

When it comes to other high-ranking states, like California and Maryland, we can see how current efforts will pay off in the future. These states, Anderson says, are working hard to pass policies like paid sick leave and medical leave that play a major role in keeping women in the workforce. California and Maryland are predicted to close the wage gap in 2043.

The predominant industries and occupations within a state can also explain differences in earnings. States ranked at the bottom—Wyoming, Louisiana, and North Dakota—all have a very large share of men working energy and construction jobs. “These industries pay high wages, and employ very few women,” says Anderson. However, in states that employ a large number of government workers, such as Washington, D.C., there’s generally more transparency around things like promotion and hiring practices, which helps bridge the gap and boost equal pay, she adds.

Could focusing on state-level data help us better understand what is causing wage gaps? Anderson thinks so. It paints a complicated picture, she says, but mapping “also points out different entry points for states to focus their efforts on if they want to address the problem.”

Learn more at CityLab

Experts in Harvard Chan School discussion say research, treatment need to be more sensitive to differences between men and women.

Much of how we attack serious illnesses like heart disease, depression, and Alzheimer’s has been informed by studies of men. And that approach misses important gender differences in how the diseases look, progress, and respond to treatment, according to panelists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“[We need] education and awareness on every level, with every sector,” said British Robinson, chief executive officer of the Women’s Heart Alliance. “We have to take a whole-systems approach. That system includes our medical and clinical systems, hospitals systems. It includes our physicians, our nurses, our community health workers.”

Differences between men and women are particularly salient in diseases of the heart and brain, panelists said, including heart attack and heart failure, major depression — which occurs at double the rate in women — and Alzheimer’s disease, which strikes women more frequently than their longer average lifespans explain.

More women experience heart attacks that have atypical symptoms, including heartburn, back pain, anxiousness, and fatigue. In addition, women tend toward smoother arterial plaque, which can make heart disease harder to diagnose through catheterization, panelists said.

“They’re called ‘atypical’ because the ‘typical’ was defined on the male norm, and so when women present with burning or back pain or jaw pain they’re often triaged in a different way in the emergency room,” said Marjorie Jenkins, director of medical initiatives and scientific engagement for the Food and Drug Administration’s Office of Women’s Health. “So a woman comes in. She’s anxious. She has heartburn. She has back pain. She’s questioned. She tells the doctor she’s tired. She’s really nervous. So the doctor thinks she’s having a panic attack or she’s depressed and therefore she gets medication for that. Those medications will not treat a heart attack. She needs to be screened for heart disease.”

Harvard Medical School Professor of Psychiatry and Medicine Jill Goldstein, who heads the Women, Heart and Brain Global Initiative at Massachusetts General Hospital, and Ana Langer, a professor of the practice of public health and director of the Women and Health Initiative at Harvard Chan School, also participated in the discussion on Wednesday, “Heart and Brain Disease in Women: Sex and Gender Connections.”

One opportunity for raising awareness is in research, panelists said, noting that before recent gains, women were underrepresented for decades. Even when women are included, data isn’t always analyzed by sex, missing an opportunity to tease out gender differences.

“If we don’t get the data, we won’t know the answers,” Jenkins said.

To truly understand gender disparities, researchers should design trials in a way that accounts for factors such as the natural ebb and flow of hormones, which Goldstein cited as a possible driver of differences. Studies also need to account for the influence of life stages such as puberty, pregnancy, and menopause, panelists said.

Learn more at Harvard Gazette

When investor and entrepreneur Jalak Jobanputra first visited a blockchain conference five years ago she got goosebumps. The experienced investor had heard of cryptocurrencies but now that they had truly come into maturity she was excited. Now, five years later, she’s building her entire VC practice around blockchain and sees bright days ahead for the technology.

Join us Jobanputra, the founder of FuturePerfect Ventures, as we talk about her take on crypto, the future of investment, and the direction she’s headed in terms of investment and startup innovation.

Technotopia is a podcast by John Biggs about a better future. You can subscribe in Stitcher, RSS, or iTunes and listen the MP3 here.

Read more at Tech Crunch

When Black Panther opened last weekend to record-breaking box office success, many of the viewers driving the film to that achievement were female moviegoers, who made up 45% of the audience. Though that number may defy conventional wisdom about superhero movies, it’s not so surprising given the actual plot of the movie. After all, as the University of Pennsylvania’s Salamishah Tillet noted for The Hollywood Reporter, the movie doesn’t just pass the Bechdel test — a measure of the substantiality of a film’s female characters — but “those scenes in which two or more women are talking to, disagreeing with, or fighting alongside each other without a man present are some of the movie’s most riveting ones.”

But the strong women of Black Panther are more than just a potential inspiration to women in the audience today. They’re also a window into a true, if oft-forgotten, piece of history.

In the film, the fictional Dora Milaje — “adored ones,” an all-female military group that protects the King and the fictional nation of Wakanda — are perhaps the most obvious example of female strength. The Dora Milaje were introduced in Black Panther comic by Christopher Priest, who took over as lead writer of the series in 1998; since the series’ relaunch in 2016, they’ve become much more central to the plot. (The title character, who was Marvel’s first African-American superhero, was created in 1966.) In their initial appearance, Priest’s narrator describes the female bodyguards as “Deadly Amazonian high school karate chicks,” who were also the King’s “wives-in training.” While many have speculated about the inspiration behind these warriors, it is clear that one of their main antecedents was the famous all-female African military corps of Dahomey, West Africa (now The Republic of Benin), whom the French dubbed “Dahomey Amazons” after female warriors in Greek mythology.

Some experts believe that the first such regiment, which emerged sometime in the 17th century, comprised hunters called gbeto, while others contend they were recruited from among the King’s many wives. As Sylvia Serbin describes in The Women Soldiers of Dahomey, these warriors can be difficult to categorize, as their names were based on a woman’s weapons expertise and unit to which she was assigned. Whatever their origin, the King was always surrounded by armed women in public and private life. By the end of the 19th century an estimated 4,000 women, many of whom began their training as teens, were among the Dahomey military ranks. In times of war, during the transatlantic slave trade and in the fight against French colonialism, Dahomey female warriors “were the last line of defense between the enemy and the King,” writes Serbin, “and were prepared to sacrifice their lives to protect him.”

Not only is this history clearly reflected in the fictionalized Wakanda, where Black Panther is set, but so is the idea of a political system wherein men and women control political institutions jointly. Though the nation has a King, he depends on the central female characters, played by Angela Bassett (mother/adviser to the King), Letitia Wright (Princess/lead scientist), Lupita Nyong’o (spy/insurrectionist), and Danai Gurira (adviser to the King/General of Dora Milaje). As numerous Africianist historians have attested, this system also shows up in the true history of pre-colonial African reality. For example, John Henrik Clarke explained in his essay on African Warrior Queens in Black Women of Antiquity, in the years before colonialism, “Africans had produced a way of life where men were secure enough to let women advance as far as their talents would take them.”

European societies of the time were constructed differently, and men believed women were not intellectually capable of making political decisions. Even so, European women were viewed as virtuously superior to their foreign female counterparts. Consequently, notions of black female innate inferiority led to the creation of stereotypes — what scholars Patricia Morton and Patricia Hill Collins have called “disfigured images” and “controlling images,” respectively — that were used to justify oppression.

From slavery to the present, black women have had to contend with four major stereotypes, which Collins identified in her classic book Black Feminist Thought. First, the Jezebel, the hyper-sexual woman who sought to corrupt the good morals of white men. Second, the Mammy, the dutiful caretaker who insured that everyone, white and black, adhered to the tenets of white supremacy. Third, the Matriarch, an ultra-domineering woman who terrorized her children and castrated her male partner. And fourth, the Welfare Mother (an update of the Jezebel), a woman with no work ethic or sexual morals, who has multiple children just to receive government assistance.

Notably absent among those stereotypes is the idea of the righteous warrior.

The Dora Milaje aren’t the only way in which Black Panther brings pre-colonial African ideas into modernity. As Nathan Connolly has written for The Hollywood Reporter, the movie contends with five centuries of imagining a world without a history of “environmental degradation, colonialism, cultural genocide or the elevation of white aesthetics to the exclusion of all else.”

Part of the real work of creating such a world must begin with moving black women, in the words of bell hooks, “from margin to center,” and creating an aesthetics that challenges, refutes and destroys those stereotypical concepts of black womanhood.

The importance of this achievement cannot be overstated. For black women and girls the world over, Wakanda represents a fictional world in which their natural beauty and intelligence are accepted norms of a society that values and affirms both their femininity and humanity. How much more significant, then, to know that this vision is based on reality.

Learn more at Time