Mildred Loving-the living woman who challenged the law

Mildred Loving, a black woman married a White man in 1958 in Washington DC. When they went home to Virginia where they have lived since they were kids, they were arrested. There was a ban of interracial marriages so that the marriage was deemed null and void and therefore they were being arrested for cohabiting as man and wife.

Her husband preferred to leave Virginia rather than divorce or leave Mildred. They left Virginia together to avoid jail time and settled in Washington DC.

Mildred changed history by challenging the law. She decided to fight for their right. She wrote Robert F. Kennedy who referred the case to the ACLU. In 1967, the Supreme Court lifted the interracial marriage ban nationwide.

Her husband died in 1975 due to car accident. Mildred Loving died last May 4, 2008 to join her husband where race is not a matter of discrimination for loving couples.

The First Youngest Female professor

Alia Sabur started teaching at 18 and is the youngest college professor in history.
She started talking and reading when she was just 8 months old and graduated elementary at age 5.

She went to college at age 10 and graduated at age 14 earning a bachelor’s of science degree in applied mathematics summa cum laude from Stony Brook University — the youngest female in U.S. history to do so.

She pursued her M.S. and Ph.D in materials science and engineering.

Sabur decided to teach so that three days before her 19th birthday, she became a professor at Konkuk University in Seoul, Korea.

This distinction made her the youngest college professor in history, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, beating the previous record held by Colin Maclaurin in 1717.

Maclaurin was a student of physicist Isaac Newton. Sabur said she is merely gravitating toward putting what she has learned to good use.

Before applying at the university, she has taken n up teaching math and physics courses at Southern University in New Orleans.

source: msnc

Harvard's First Woman President

The mistake of the former president was that he provoked other women professors in Harvard with his sexist comment that women had less "intrinsic aptitude" than men for science.

Now the oldest university in the US has named the first female president, Drew
Gilpin Faust.



Excerpt of the news:

Dr. Faust, the Dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, will become the university's 28th president on 1 July.

"She knows Harvard and higher education, and her interests extend to the whole of the university, across the arts and sciences and the professional domains," said James R Houghton, senior member of the Harvard Corporation and chair of the presidential search committee.

Harvard,Women,Gilpin Faust

Lady Astronaut in love, kidnaps fellow astronaut

This is not a movie. This is in real life. If you are stunned, don't. As Balise Pascal had said " Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves."

This is an excerpt of the news:

A US astronaut has been charged with trying to kidnap a woman she thought was a rival for the affection of a space shuttle pilot.

Navy Capt Lisa Nowak, 43, who flew to the international space station last July, was charged with attempted kidnapping, battery and other crimes.

She drove from Texas to Florida to confront Colleen Shipman, disguised in a wig and trench coat.

Read the entire story here.


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Women struggling to land top jobs in Silicon Valley

It seems there is still a big gap between the employability of women and men. This news article tells us how women are not yet accepted as co-equal with men in terms of
getting the juicy positions from top corporations. What's wrong?



Women struggling to land top jobs in Silicon Valley

Excerpt of the news:


SAN FRANCISCO -- Silicon Valley may be leading the way in the technology sector, but the IT hub is still lagging behind when it comes to the battle of the sexes, a recent study has shown.

Women account for only 6.5 percent of board members on Silicon Valley firms, and of that figure only 8.8 percent occupy top positions within the companies, the University of California, Davis study found.

The survey, which involved around 400 firms with an annual turnover of $100 million or higher, also reveals that only 10.2 percent of women have positions of responsibility within the companies.

Of the 400 companies taking part, 103 are based in Silicon Valley. The study showed that high technology firms' success in promoting women lags behind averages for the rest of the California business sector.

The number of female board members came in at 6.5 percent for companies in the survey against 8.8 percent for California as a whole; while women directors are 8.8 percent against 11.7 percent.

Those figures lag behind national averages, where 14.3 percent of board members are women, who also occupy 15.7 percent of top jobs, according to two surveys carried out in 2005 by Catalyst.

Several prominent Silicon Valley firms have bucked the trend, with computer giant Hewlett Packard and software manufacturer Hyperion each having around 31 percent women in leading positions. Nineteen percent of board members of Internet sales site eBay are female, meanwhile, and the company has been led with success by a woman, Meg Whitman, since 1998.

"The top industries that are represented in Silicon Valley tend to be more focused on the high tech industry, such as semiconductors, electronics, communications, and our data have showed that these industries have much fewer women as board members and executives," said the study's author Katrina Ellis.

Chris Melching, president of a women's business association, attributes the shortfall to a reluctance to change.

"If you look at the habit and the pattern of always looking for men, they look at what's familiar," Ellis said. "It's much easier to call people you already know than to go, 'I'll have someone completely opposite of what I have looked at'. It's harder to do and it takes a lot more time."

Melching added that women offered formidable leadership skills to businesses. "Women bring strong communications skills, we are very intuitive, we have excellent negotiation skills, we like to collaborate intuitively, we multi-task".

A 2004 study by Catalyst appears to support Melching's views, indicating that an increase in female representation in senior positions often led to improved financial results.

That view was endorsed by Godfrey Sullivan, the head of Hyperion.

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