Savannah Cunningham, In Center Of Marine Online Misogyny Scandal, Starts Basic Training In April

Controversy has swirled around Savannah Cunningham, who has long aspired to become a Marine, for months. Savannah was the subject of lewd messages from men as she also learned that an all-male group of Marines was circulating a nude video of her on Facebook, thanks to a former boyfriend. 

"It was such a creepy invasion of privacy," Savannah told theNew York Times. "They were actively seeking nude images of me, anything they could get their hands on."

Most likely a majority of women would turn and run when confronted with this raw misogyny in Marine culture. Not Savannah. Cunningham ships off to basic training the first week of April. Checking on her Twitter feed, on March 4 -- just as news of the Marine scandal was breaking, Sav Cunningham posted: "Very happy, excited, & humbled right now. I am the top female poolee in all of Arizona. "

“Someone needs to stand up and say this does not represent the values of the Marine Corps,” Savannah said. “If not me, then who? Yes, for a long time it was a boys’ club, but there needs to be progress.” Read on In-Depth.

Melinda Gates Takes The Lead Worldwide In Delivering Birth Control To Poor Women

Melinda and Bill Gates on first trip to Africa in 1993.

The commitment of the Gates Foundation to gender equity globally will surely take another uptick with the upcoming probability that the Trump administration will shut down all funding for Planned Parenthood internationally and in the US. The first order of the incoming Obama administration was to reverse the Bush administration's commitment that no taxpayer dollars fund contraception projects around the world. And Hillary Clinton as Secy of State created a new position, the Office of Global Women's Issues, to prioritize the drive for gender equality worldwide.

The strategic thinking, fact-based female half of the world's largest foundation knows: "“You empower a woman and you change the world. We know that if a woman is economically empowered inside her family, all kinds of magical things happen.”

In 2012, when the Gates Foundation announced its support of a $4.3 billion public-private partnership designed to give 120 million women in the world’s poorest countries voluntary access to contraceptives by 2020, Melinda chose multiple international public stages, ranging from a TED talk to the London Summit on Family Planning, with the goal of underlining her unyielding commitment to the issue of birth control. Her decision put the devoted Catholic at odds with her church, and she has never looked back.  “We have 220 million women asking us for contraceptives, and we’re not delivering them,” Gates says. “Because of the political controversy, we backed away from the issue as a world. And yet women are dying in childbirth because they have child after child after child, and their children are dying because they’re coming too quickly.”

Women Artists Score Big In Virtual Reality, Scoring Big In Male-Dominated Tech Space

A mere tech child or not, virtual reality is expected to be a $150 billion industry by 2020. In Virtual Reality, Women Run the World writes New York Magazine . Silicon Valley and gaming Internet culture in general are known for their hard-ass mentality about women in their midst. Because virtual reality is truly an original opportunity for creators, women are -- for once -- operating in a relatively level playing field. There is “no formalized industry, and therefore no industry hierarchy, making it particularly welcoming to outsiders and newcomers,” explains Julia Kaganskiy, director of the New Museum’s New Inc. incubator. “Effectively everyone is a newcomer, and there are virtually no insiders.”

Women populate VR panels, conferences, support groups, and mentor relationships in significant numbers. Four of the 11 virtual-reality projects in the New York Film Festival’s Convergence division, a creative combo of VR and immersive storytelling, were created by women. and Convergence programmer Matt Bolish, a Convergence programmer, says in the five years of the program, “women have not only been at the forefront as creators, but as producers, writers, and financiers."

Women made a strong showing at the New Frontier VR exhibition at Sundance this past January. Helping celebrate the 10th anniversary of the program,  40% or a record 13 of the 32 lead artists on VR projects were women. “This is really a powerful medium and we have to make sure we do better this time,” says Kamal Sinclair, who directs the New Frontier Labs program. “We saw how women dropped out of computer science in the early ’80s. They were there in the beginning. How do we make sure we learn from those missteps?”