Once the tour bus pulls into the narrow street beside St. Augustine Church, a couple of blocks down from Grumpy’s, the five nuns on board exit to applause from more than 50 people gathered to meet them. After a short tour of the church and an impromptu meeting with local kids from the church’s summer camp, Sister Simone Campbell stands behind her portable podium to address the crowd.

As Network’s executive director, Sister Simone has plenty to say: “Catholic sisters know the real-life struggles of real-life Americans. When the federal government cuts funding to programs that serve people in poverty, as does the current House Republican budget authored by Rep. Paul Ryan, we see the effect in our daily work. Simply put, real people suffer, and that is immoral.”

Sister Simone speaks with a gentle, lilting voice, but her words are pointed and direct. Speaking at the bus tour’s kickoff event in Des Moines, Iowa, on June 17, she said, “The reason we’re out around the country is because most people don’t know what the House of Representatives has done.” What it has done, in Sister Simone’s view, is attempt to reduce the deficit by cutting vital social services to vulnerable families while further reducing the income taxes for the top 2 percent.

This is a view that is shared by U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, an organization that acts collaboratively on issues important to the church and society. In letters to Congress, the conference has stated its opposition to the budget cuts, indicating that the “circle of protection” around essential programs for poor people has been broken.

Nora had not been involved in that suit, but she had, somewhat famously, toiled in the magazine’s mailroom in the 1960s. It was her first job out of Wellesley, and she was paid $55 a week to deliver the mail to the magazine’s editor, Osborn Elliot. We wanted to know what it was like and, more important, why she had left.

Newsweek was a different place half a century ago. And though Ephron knew she wanted to be a writer—and announced as much in her first interview—she was told, in no uncertain terms, that “women don’t write at Newsweek.” Instead, they were given jobs as clerks and mail girls, tasked with delivering coffee, and fact-checking the men’s copy if they were lucky. “There were no mail boys at Newsweek,” Ephron later wrote. “If you were a college graduate (like me) who had worked on your college newspaper (like me) and you were a girl (like me), they hired you as a mail girl. If you were a boy (unlike me) with exactly the same qualifications, they hired you as a reporter.”

Ephron would spend just nine months at the magazine, and yet even before she was famous, she was a legend among her contemporaries. She was the success story among droves of women with writerly ambitions: the one who’d escaped the boy’s club, who’d made a name for herself, who’d gone on to prove that women could write.

But when it came to the women who had sued their company—and us, the women who came after them, questioning how much had changed—we knew Nora would have something to say: about women, work, and, well, the age-old debate over having it all.

Replied a commenter named JamieSchofield: “We’re not. We’re emotionally invested in trying to stop people from MURDERING BABIES ... The issue is whether an unborn child is a person ... The issue of abortion has NOTHING to do with controlling anyone’s bodies or taking way people’s reproductive choice.”

The advocacy group NARAL Pro-Choice America tweeted about the story, advising followers: “Read this exclusive & jarring interview w Keith Mason, a leading activist behind #antichoice ‘personhood’ measures.”

That got pro-life sites riled. Live Action News, a site that describes itself as “a youth-led organization dedicated to building a culture of life,” took issue with the word “jarring,” accusing NARAL of disapproving the story because it reported both sides of the debate without picking a side. “A balanced article by a major news outlet scares abortion advocates,” the site said. “Instead of portraying the Masons as extreme misogynistic prudes leading the charge in the ‘War on Women,’ Newsweek portrays the personhood movement as cool, edgy, youthful, and—most importantly—growing.”

As we reinforce K-12 education, we must also expand educational offerings to include kids up to age 4. Currently, millions of children sit in front of TVs for the first five years of their lives—either at home, or in bad child care (because that’s all their parents can afford). No thoughtful interchanges, no challenges to figure things out for themselves, no active play. Add to that a lot of sugary, fatty food, and you have a formula for failure.

Even the best elementary ed is bound to fail kids who enter kindergarten completely unprepared. The damage has already been done. A good, affordable child-care system would provide the fix. A decent education is a nation’s obligation to all its citizens. It would cost money—just north of 1 percent of GDP by one estimate—but the investment would pay off in savings on prisons and in increased productivity and engagement.

If such long-term benefits are not enough of a positive for you: child care is also an immediate jobs engine. Thousands of well-paid jobs would be created for teachers in the centers, for construction workers to build the centers, and for those who teach the teachers. The effect is multiplied when these well-paid teachers spend that money at community businesses.

A national child-care system would benefit us not only in the future but in the present, by freeing today’s grown women, of all classes, to participate more fully in growing the economy. It would do this both by making good child care affordable and, also important, by countering the current guilt-inducing media coverage that misrepresents child care’s role.

Born in Cairo in 1962, Ali was 17 when she married Morsi—her first cousin, a common practice in the Arab world. The couple relocated to the United States shortly after they wed, where Morsi completed his doctorate in engineering at the University of Southern California and later worked as a professor at California State University, Northridge. Ali, who trained as a translator, gave birth to two of their five children while living in the U.S. It was there that she was first enthralled with the grassroots work of the Muslim Brotherhood and became an active member of the organization, engaging in charity work, primarily with a focus on education.

In one of the only interviews she has given to date, she reportedly said she prefers to be called “Oum Ahmed” (the Mother of Ahmed) by the Egyptian people—a traditional designation referring to her eldest son. She also said that she is opposed to living in the presidential palace formerly inhabited by the Mubaraks, and would instead prefer to buy a house in Cairo, suitable for entertaining large groups.

Comments on Twitter have ranged from the likes of “Morsi's wife is no Carla Bruni” to “I am so proud of the way Mrs. Morsi looks.” While some are concerned about the social changes that might be associated with the new Islamist leadership, the fact is that religious conservatism is increasingly the norm in the Arab world’s most populous nation, and many young women feel that Ali may be a true representation of Egyptian society. “I expect her to dress the way she sees fit—she has to represent Egypt, the culture, the people, by her actions rather than her clothes,” said Summer Gamal Eldin Nazif, 17, who is a Morsi supporter, though too young to cast a ballot. “For 30 years, we had an aristocratic first lady. The elites think the first lady should represent them.”

Suzanne Mubarak, a graduate of the American University in Cairo, was described last year in a Newsweek profile as “arrogant, deluded, out of touch.” After succeeding Anwar Sadat following his assassination, Hosni Mubarak reportedly sought to limit his wife’s exposure to public life so as not to subject her to the same scrutiny from conservatives faced by her predecessor, Jihan Sadat. That would change though, and she increasingly came under fire for monopolizing the country’s women’s-rights movement and other social activities, while her husband’s administration clamped down on social freedoms. Suzanne was rumored to have spearheaded efforts to see her son Gamal become the next president of Egypt, as many feared. After her husband’s resignation, state-run Al-Ahram newspaper described her as “ambitious to the point of being criminal, and cruel to the point of being disturbed.” She fell out of the public eye after reportedly suffering a heart attack while serving a 15-day detention for corruption allegations last year. Today, she is rarely heard from, even as her husband clings to life while serving a life sentence in prison. To this day, many cultural and educational institutions carry her name.

“Bill Gates and Steve Jobs created products used by women and geared toward women, but they’re not made by women,” said Saujani. “Girls don’t see that these professions are open to them. It’s so important to see someone who looks like you doing the thing you think you cannot do.”

Though women comprise more than half the workforce, they hold less than 25% of all science, tech, engineering and math jobs, according to a report by the Department of Commerce.

Saujani recently announced she is exploring a run for Public Advocate in 2013, as her former boss Bill de Blasio is term limited out and expected to run for mayor.

“She is one of the few people running for the office who understands the potential of technology to help reinvent the Public Advocate’s office as a network rather than a single person on a soapbox,” Chairman of NY Tech Meetup and founder of Personal Democracy Andrew Rasiej said.

Komen also has faced sluggish turnout at many of its pink-ribbon fundraising races this year, with the charity attributing the decline both to the economy and the controversy. This month, the group’s signature race in Washington, D.C., drew around 27,000 participants, down from around 37,000 last year. The D.C. race also lost its top fundraising participant from the prior year, U.S. Congressman Mike Honda, who had raised more than $10,000 in 2011. In addition, Komen canceled its annual lobbying day, an event at which activists lobby for government programs, not Komen programs—raising concerns that the controversy could have far-reaching effects on women’s health.

However, Rader said she is beginning to see “signs that people are remembering what we do, supporting programs in their community.” Seventy-five percent of funds raised at a community race stays in the local community, going to screenings and treatment for women, according to Komen; the other 25 percent goes to research. Rader said the group is preparing for Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October, and pointed to a well-attended race this past weekend in St. Louis. That race drew more than 50,000 participants, although the number was down from 64,000 last year. She also said Komen recently had provided $58 million in new research funding for 2012, including 154 grants to researchers in 22 states and seven countries.

The Komen foundation has raised some $1.9 billion to combat cancer in the 30 years since its launch. More than 100,000 volunteers work in a national network of affiliates. Nancy Brinker, a former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, launched the charity after her sister, Susan G. Komen, died of breast cancer in her 30s.

Brinker came under heavy scrutiny for her management and spending style after the Planned Parenthood debacle. Last week, she got some good news: Webster University in St. Louis said it was honoring her with a George Herbert Walker School of Business and Technology Person of the Year Award, citing her “work and dedication” and her “promise to her dying sister.”

The commission is, by mandate, bipartisan, and by DC standards it is tiny: its original operating budget of $4 million was reduced by 30 percent earlier this year. But that hasn’t insulated it from consistent criticism over the years, primarily for using its mandate to promote the religious freedom of Christians before all others, and for what some have called an anti-Muslim bias.

Ghori-Ahmad alleges in her suit that she was first told that she was not being hired due to a hiring freeze, but that other people were hired during the same period. The original job offered to her was eventually divided up, she says, and the bulk of the work was shouldered between two white Christian men, neither of whom had a law degree or proficiency in South Asian languages, even though the job advertisement had requested that applicants have both.

One of the more explosive claims in the suit comes from an internal email that said hiring a Muslim to investigate religious freedom in Pakistan was akin to “hiring an IRA activist to research the UK twenty years ago.”

Ghori-Ahmad contends that this email was sent by USCIRF’s then-Commissioner Nina Shea. In a letter sent to several blogs as well as The Washington Post, Shea claimed she never wrote those words, and has protested the release of the email. In her letter, Shea also said her rejection of Ghori-Ahmad was connected to her work at the Muslim Public Affairs Council, where she was working when she got the offer from USCIRF. (Ghori-Ahmad had already given notice to the Council when USCIRF rescinded its offer.)

In 2004 Tillman sat talking about accounts with colleagues in her downtown Seattle consulting office when a chaplain and three Army soldiers arrived to tell her that her husband had been killed in Afghanistan. Nearly overnight she saw her life and her marriage thrust into the public spotlight, as the military lionized her husband while hiding the circumstances surrounding his death. More than a month passed before the truth emerged—that her high-school sweetheart had been killed not by insurgents but by friendly fire.

Reeling from the lies and the truth and suffering from unrelenting grief, Tillman turned to her husband’s last gift to her: a “just in case” goodbye letter he left on their dresser “without ceremony”  nearly a year earlier between deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

As Tillman tells it, her husband’s letter began:

“It’s difficult to summarize 10 years together, my love for you, my hopes for your future, and pretend to be dead all at the same time...I simply cannot put all this into words. I’m not ready, willing or able.”

What changed? Well, 40 years ago, committed women from around the country, driven by everyone who said they couldn’t do something, worked with Congress to ban gender discrimination in our public schools. Title IX was the result of their efforts, and this week, we celebrated its 40th anniversary—40 years of ensuring equal education, in and out of the classroom, regardless of gender.

I was reminded of this milestone last month, when I awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Pat Summitt. When she started out as a basketball coach, Pat drove the team van to away games. She washed the uniforms in her own washing machine. One night she and her team even camped out in an opponent’s gym because they had no funding for a hotel. But she and her players kept their chins up and their heads in the game. And in 38 years at the University of Tennessee, Pat won eight national championships and tallied more than 1,000 wins—the most by any college coach, man or woman. More important, every single woman who ever played for Pat has either graduated or is on her way to a degree.

Today, thanks in no small part to the confidence and determination they developed through competitive sports and the work ethic they learned with their teammates, girls who play sports are more likely to excel in school. In fact, more women as a whole now graduate from college than men. This is a great accomplishment—not just for one sport or one college or even just for women but for America. And this is what Title IX is all about.

An eight-year-old deportation order that Chang—who came to the U.S. when she was 7—was seeing for the first time had caught up with her. Chang knew she wasn’t here legally, but had thought her application was still pending, and her status thus unresolved.

At border patrol, Chang called her dad and texted friends. Everyone who knew and loved her flew into action. But they couldn’t move quickly enough to prevent her from boarding a bus to Eloy Detention Center, where she surrendered her own clothes and says she was demeaned by guards until they realized she spoke perfect English. She said Eloy staff spent time “barking orders” at detainees and “giving us the death glare to eat faster, walk faster. I don’t know why they can’t say please or thank you,” Cindy said.

She was detained at the facility many have compared to jail, with no clear timetable for how long she’d be there and the looming prospect of imminent deportation to a country she hadn’t seen in 20 years, and whose language she barely speaks.

With help from the Methodist church community where she teaches Sunday school, her Congressman Mike Honda, the Asian Law Caucus, and a petition with more than 2,000 signatures from change.org, the San Jose resident was granted an extremely rare temporary stay of removal and was freed from Eloy, which can hold more than 1,500 female detainees at one time, after just three weeks.

And it wasn’t even supposed to really matter.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 had a simple goal: to end sex discrimination in schools that receive federal money. Had the ERA passed, however, it wouldn’t have even been needed. But as approval of the constitutional amendment stalled in the states, Title IX became the law that endured—and made a difference.

Edith Green, a congresswoman from Portland, began working on the law in the early 1970s. Nicknamed “Mrs. Education” for her many years of work on higher education, she was appalled to learn that public schools could create special programs for boys that excluded girls. At the time, girls were often discouraged from taking advanced math and science classes, female teachers rarely became principals, and many law schools and medical schools had quotas that kept women to no more than 10 percent of the class.

All she wanted was for girls and women to get a fair deal. But over and over, her male colleagues told her, women just want to stay home and raise families. Men need those opportunities, but women don’t.

Eleo Sears was condemned from pulpits and town squares for wearing trousers that gave her the ease of movement to compete effectively in the sports she loved—and, she concluded, if such attire infuriated the moral arbiters of her day, then so much the better. She honed her innate talent and, with refreshing humor and a firm refusal to take “no” for an answer, she became the first woman to play polo on a men’s team. She became a five-time national doubles tennis champion and the first female national squash champion. She convinced Harvard officials to open their squash courts to other women players; she founded the Women’s Squash Racquets Association, and she coached the U.S. Women’s International Squash Team. She was also a long-distance swimmer; she boxed and played golf; she ice-skated; was a crack shot with a rifle, and raced yachts. She excelled in 19 different sports, making her America’s most versatile female athlete.

If you ever wanted to see Eleo spring into action, you just needed to bet against her. Such a bet in 1912 set her off on a 110-mile hike down the California coast. Other bets in later years sparked a series of record-setting hikes between Boston, Newport, and Providence, which gained her national attention and inspired walking contests among men and women across the country. The New York Times, in a 1925 editorial, praised Eleo as America’s valiant pedestrienne who was perfecting “the one universal art to save the world from physical degeneracy.”

Eleo’s tradition-shattering exploits were not confined to sports arenas. She was one of the first women to fly an airplane and drive an automobile, and in 1909, she became the first woman on record to fight a speeding ticket. She explored the ocean’s depths in a submarine. Clearly not a woman to shy away from controversy, she got herself arrested in 1910 for smoking in the lobby of Boston’s Copley Square Hotel, not because she had any fondness for cigarettes, but because women were prohibited from smoking there, while men could do so undisturbed.

Although the language of Title IX addresses sex-based discrimination in education on a very broad level, the most widely lauded changes have occurred in the area of athletics. To a certain extent, academic gains have not occurred on par with athletic gains. Yet even within collegiate sports, women still have fewer participation and athletic scholarship opportunities than men, and far fewer immigrant, minority, and women from low-income families play sports than middle-class Caucasian women. Access to competitive women’s sports is not yet equal.

In the classroom, while female students demonstrate greater success than their male counterparts by certain measures, boasting higher GPAs and graduation rates, women are still underrepresented in STEM fields. The academic achievement gap has narrowed in many important ways, but the STEM gender gap remains a particularly recalcitrant problem. In a global economy driven by technology and innovation, men still hold the most prestigious, highest-paying jobs by a large margin. The jarring lack of women in scientific, technical, or other nontraditional professions—defined as an occupation in which less than 25 percent of the workforce are women—was not fully addressed until 2000, 30 years after the passage of Title IX, when the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy performed their first on-site compliance inspections.

In academia, Title IX compliance with regard to STEM education has likewise been slow to take hold—women are 25 percent less likely to attain full professorship than men, and make up only 19 percent of full professors in these fields as of 2006. Marked differences in advancement across diverse fields also prevail. Although female representation in the social and life sciences has climbed steadily since Title IX passed, progress in mathematics, physics, and engineering has remained stagnant over the last decade, and has even declined in computer science in recent years.

The slow progress in STEM fields has been attributed to a number of factors, including pervasive cultural biases and gender stereotypes, and hiring, promotion, and tenure-track practices that penalize pregnant women and female caregivers. There are deeply entrenched cultural beliefs about gender differences in intelligence, ability, and interests. These beliefs impact female identity and academic performance at every stage of one’s education, from preschool to postgraduate work. Biology, for instance, is seen as a largely gender-neutral subject requiring no special “innate” talents in math and science, whereas computer science and engineering are considered “male” fields. Such assumptions are both the result of and result in unequal representation in critical fields and leadership positions, creating a self-reinforcing negative feedback loop. Women, even when they have attained high levels of success, may present their achievements in social situations very differently from men potentially to their own detriment. Princeton’s 2011 report on undergraduate women’s leadership found that “women consistently undersell themselves, and sometimes make self-deprecating remarks in situations where men might stress their own accomplishments.”

The cost of saying no to a forced marriage is extreme—it can mean the loss of your family, forever. I know this well because I said no myself, as a British girl at the tender age of 14. I was the sixth of seven daughters in a conservative Sikh family in the English industrial city of Derby. One by one, my sisters had been pulled out of school and sent to India to marry strangers. My mother locked me in my room for weeks until I agreed to submit. I finally said yes, to try to gain my freedom. When my parents let me visit a friend, I ran away.

A few years later, one of my older sisters, Robina, who had been forced to wed an abusive man, set herself on fire to escape. She died with burns on more than 90 percent of her body. After that tragedy, I started my charity, Karma Nirvana to save other women and girls from such a fate.

My family disowned me due to my refusal to wed. For 30 years, I have stood by my decision. Last week, I watched my daughter Natasha marry the man she loves—the way it should be—and the pain of my family’s absence became insignificant. This wedding day arrived due to my decision as a teenager, which subsequently gave my children the right to choose. They will never inherit my family’s past legacy of abuse. This is a message that must be echoed to save future generations.

The British prime minister is right to refer to forced marriage as “little short of slavery.” As he said, “For too long we have thought, Well, it’s a cultural practice and we have to run with it.” This message will hopefully strike the consciences of all those who turn a blind eye. If a country believes that forced marriage is an evil practice, then it will act to stamp it out. It is important to create a cultural shift whereby officials are not so afraid of being perceived as racist or politically incorrect that they turn a blind eye to clear evidence.