Progress toward gender equality in the United States has slowed or stalled.

We examine change in multiple indicators of gender inequality for the period of 1970 to 2018. The percentage of women (age 25 to 54) who are employed rose continuously until ∼2000 when it reached its highest point to date of 75%; it was slightly lower at 73% in 2018. Women have surpassed men in receipt of baccalaureate and doctoral degrees. The degree of segregation of fields of study declined dramatically in the 1970s and 1980s, but little since then. The desegregation of occupations continues but has slowed its pace. Examining the hourly pay of those aged 25 to 54 who are employed full-time, we found that the ratio of women's to men's pay increased from 0.61 to 0.83 between 1970 and 2018, rising especially fast in the 1980s, but much slower since 1990. In sum, there has been dramatic progress in movement toward gender equality, but, in recent decades, change has slowed and on some indicators stalled entirely.

A female genealogy of humanitarian action: compassion as a practice in the work of Josephine Butler, Florence Nightingale and Sarah Monod.

Taking the Second Conference of the International Abolitionist Federation as a starting point, this article reconstructs a female genealogy of humanitarian action by shedding light on the transnational connections established by Josephine Butler, Florence Nightingale and Sarah Monod between the abolitionist cause against the state regulation of prostitution and the nursing movement. By using gender and emotion histories as the main methodologies, their letters, journals and drawings are analysed in order to question their alleged natural compassion towards the unfortunate by examining this emotion as a practice performed according to gender, class, religious and ethnic differences. As an expression of maternal imperialism, this essentialist vision provided them with an agency while taking care of victims. However, Butler, Nightingale and Monod's care did not only work in complicity with late-nineteenth century British and French Empires, as it frequently came into conflict with the decisions taken by male authorities, such as those represented by politicians, military officials and physicians. By carefully looking at the conformation of their subjectivities through their written and visual documents, their compassion ultimately appears more as a tactic, for asserting their very different stances concerning Western women's role in society, than as an authentically experienced emotion.

Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919): Approach to limb salvage therapy.

Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919) was the first female surgeon in the United States. Her upbringing and unique medical training led her to practice medicine in a way that was revolutionary for the time. During the Civil War, her approach to wound care rivaled the current standard of care. During an era that predated antiseptic surgical technique, she prioritized cleanliness and hygiene. She opposed amputation for its surgical risks and decreased postoperative quality of life. She believed that many wounds, when appropriately attended to, would heal without amputation. She advocated for patients who she believed did not require amputations and counseled them on their rights to refuse surgical care.

A Brief Recent History of Women in Computational Chemistry at Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

Countless reports cite the importance of diversity in the academic, industrial, and government workplace. This article shares the different perspective on gender diversity from five women who have recently joined Vertex's computational chemistry group. It is written with the hope that other scientists will take the themes which resonant and adopt them to their own institutions to inspire the fostering of an inclusive environment while in pursuit of scientific discoveries.

Women's rights in Asia and elsewhere - a fact or an illusion?

More than one-third of the world's population resides in Asia. China and India have the largest population densities and the focus of this article is on these two countries. In the seventeenth century, women were globally treated as inferior and subordinate to men. Women had to listen to their fathers, husbands, and sons, and they could not inherit business or wealth. Starting in the eighteenth century and continuing in the nineteenth century, women's rights became central to political debates in Europe which demanded human rights, leading to the Women's Rights Movement. The Feminist movement began in the twentieth century, which focused on the reproductive rights of women. In the twentieth century, various Declarations have been signed by the United Nations to offer both gender equity and equality to women in the world, but unfortunately many of them have not been put into practice in Asia. In the twenty-first century, the feminist movement is focusing more on women having the power to decide the course of their lives. We still have to overcome challenges of unequal economic opportunity, political empowerment, gender violence, and human trafficking to achieve gender equality in Asia.

[The first chilean female doctors: Eloísa Díaz Insunza and Ernestina Pérez Barahona]. / Las primeras médicas de Chile y Latinoamérica: Eloísa Díaz Insunza y Ernestina Pérez Barahona.

Dr. Eloísa Díaz Insunza (1866-1950) was the first woman to become a doctor-surgeon in Chile and Latin America in 1887. Less known is her distinguished colleague, Dr. Ernestina Pérez Barahona (1865-1951), the second woman graduated in Chile as a physician, only seven days after Dr. Diaz. Dr. Diaz entered the School of Medicine of the University of Chile in 1881 and Dr. Pérez in 1883. However, both graduated from Bachelor of Medicine and Pharmacy in 1885 and received their degree in 1887. This paper highlights the extraordinary parallelism in their medical studies.

The politics of female pain: women's citizenship, twilight sleep and the early birth control movement.

The medical intervention of 'twilight sleep', or the use of a scopolamine-morphine mixture to anaesthetise labouring women, caused a furore among doctors and early 20th-century feminists. Suffragists and women's rights advocates led the Twilight Sleep Association in a quest to encourage doctors and their female patients to widely embrace the practice. Activists felt the method revolutionised the notoriously dangerous and painful childbirth process for women, touting its benefits as the key to allowing women to control their birth experience at a time when the maternal mortality rate remained high despite medical advances in obstetrics. Yet many physicians attacked the practice as dangerous for patients and their babies and antithetical to the expectations for proper womanhood and motherly duty. Historians of women's health have rightly cited Twilight Sleep as the beginning of the medicalisation and depersonalisation of the childbirth process in the 20th century. This article instead repositions the feminist political arguments for the method as an important precursor for the rhetoric of the early birth control movement, led by Mary Ware Dennett (a former leader in the Twilight Sleep Association) and Margaret Sanger. Both Twilight Sleep and the birth control movement represent a distinct moment in the early 20th century wherein pain was deeply connected to politics and the rhetoric of equal rights. The two reformers emphasised in their publications and appeals to the public the vast social significance of reproductive pain-both physical and psychological. They contended that women's lack of control over both pregnancy and birth represented the greatest hindrance to women's fulfilment of their political rights and a danger to the healthy development of larger society. In their arguments for legal contraception, Dennett and Sanger placed women's pain front and centre as the primary reason for changing a law that hindered women's full participation in the public order.