Playing sports is a very gendered experience. After all, teams are often single-gender, and sometimes the game itself is modified depending on who’s playing. Softball, with its bigger ball and overhand throw, is culturally regulated to girls, even though it started as an all men’s sport, while games like baseball and football are thought of as the realm of men and boys. For 11-year-old Nadia Diaz, however, softball just isn’t for her: it’s “too girly” and frankly, she can hold her own on the baseball field. Where else could she find an opportunity to strike 19 boys out while pitching a Little League championship-winning game?

Following months, perhaps years, of complaints about how the “highest-ups” at Facebook are all men, Sheryl Sandberg, the company’s COO since 2008, has finally become the first woman appointed to the board of directors. It won’t be the first board she’s been on, but it’s probably fair to say that it’s about darn time Facebook made this change. We’ll go ahead and say it: The Mary Sue “likes” this.

Even after making considerable gains in gender equality by opening up military positions to women, the U.S. Navy had long kept nuclear submarine posts as men-only, citing difficulties creating comfortable living spaces for both genders in such cramped quarters. However, the ban on women serving in submarines has since been overturned, and now the Navy’s first women nuclear submariners have gone on patrol and are doing just fine.

I understand the job of an actor is to dive into each role wholeheartedly and bring the character to life but there are times when an individual you’ve come to know in one sense takes on a role on the opposite side of the spectrum. For instance, Natalia Tena. She’s done a lot of work in her time but my first time seeing her was in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix playing Nymphadora Tonks. The next role I saw her in? As the wildling Osha in HBO’s Game of Thrones. She does a fantastic job on GoT but she’s had to do a few things that made me never be able to look at Tonks the same way again. Without getting too specific before the jump, the actress doesn’t have a problem doing what the role calls for, she just wishes male actors had to do the same more often. [Warning: coarse language about the human body.] 

As we know, there is a dearth of women working behind the scenes in Hollywood, even if we have seen a slight improvement since the 1990s. But when I say “improvement,” don’t get too excited. Using the numbers from the LA Times, women working high-level jobs in non-acting jobs in film — directors, producers, etc. — accounted for 18 percent of the whole lot, up from 17 percent 14 years ago. “Improvement” over the course of 14 years amounts to one percent. In politics, that’s within the margin of error, so it might not even be that accurate. This means less movies that are geared directly to women. And now, one of the women who usually appears in front of the camera, Meryl Streep, is using all that attention we pay to her to ask a very important question: “Why? Why? Why? Don’t they want the money?”

After winning a massive write-in campaign, Stephen Colbert has found himself on Maxim‘s “Definitive List of the World’s Most Beautiful Women,” the Hot 100. You might be asking yourself why Colbert, who is part of the male species, and, therefore, not a woman, is being listed on such a list. Well, you have to ask yourself something else: When you look at Stephen Colbert, is his gender all you see? Is your mind that closed?

Feel free to put this down in the column of things you don’t normally hear every day. Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, recently stated in an interview that women would probably be better off if they married other women instead of men. Read on for her thought process and her advice for female geeks. 

A study by Stanford University has shown that in 15 European countries, women depend on public transportation much more than men do, and it might have something to do with the kinds of jobs they have. Specifically, women with careers in the “care industry” (which depends more on public transportation in general) are more likely to use public transportation than their male counterparts as well as men in other lines of work. Over here in the U.S., women with children under the age of five also use public transportation more than men do. So, what exactly does it mean, then, when cuts are made to public transportation? Is this a new issue for gender equality?

O joy, ’tis a happy Monday indeed! For now we can eagerly anticipate a new step in gender equality thanks to Axe Body Spray, who has introduced Anarchy — a Spray for Ladies! And there is an ad! Gosh, I wonder if it’s going to feature a homely woman being pawed by a gaggle of sexy, sexy menfolk, just like in the corresponding ads for the boys … Oh, no, wait. She is already hot. And taking her clothes off. In the midst of a police chase and a traffic accident. Yup. Okay, never mind then. Axe remains 100 percent a men’s brand.

You might not expect a real-life game based on a fictional game in a fantasy book series would be dealing with real-life issues such as gender equality, but it is. Muggle Quidditch leagues are, apparently, dealing with a new ruling that states that every team must have a 4:3 ratio of male players to female and vice versa, and some are not dealing with it well. This is a bit surprising for two reasons: 1. Quidditch was always co-ed in the Harry Potter books and movies, placing absolutely no preference on males over females and regularly featuring female team captains and players in all the same positions, making a very clear statement that boys and girls are equally skilled and respected in Quidditch. 2. This game came from a book about a boy wizard.