In space, the future is female—at least according to US moviegoers. Variety reports that Hidden Figures, a biopic about three female African-American mathemeticians who made and checked the calculations needed to safely send John Glenn into orbit—and get him home again—knocked Star Wars sponoff Rogue One, which is about a young woman who leads a courageous and diverse band of misfits on a dangerous mission to change the fate of the galaxy, out of first place at the box office this weekend.

A hijabi beauty contestant in Minnesota. A bipolar woman who founded Kenya's first mental health hotline. A female police chief in Cyprus fighting human trafficking. Women all around the world are changing it every day. Meet seven of them. 

Southern California senior citizen Doris Payne, whose career as a jewel thief stretches across seven decades and three continents, was arrested again last week at an Atlanta mall for lifting a $2,000 diamond necklace.

An African American woman raised in segregated Ohio, Payne's first score was to walk out of a store wearing a watch she was trying on when another customer walked in; the shopkeeper, she said, didn't want to be seen serving a black customer and abruptly ignored her. By her twenties, she decided to use her skills to support her mother, who objected to the scheme, but, "I kept saying, 'No, it's not stealing. I'm only taking what the man wants me to have.'" 

Payne has never used violence and claims she never conceals the items she steals—she's always walked out the door wearing them. Crime is the only career she has ever known, taking her as far as Paris, Milan, and Tokyo—she claims to have escaped custody at least once, in Europe—as well as all across the United States. 

Her lifetime take is estimated at $2 million. Her career has even inspired a 2013 documentary, The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne. 

A whole lot of (mostly male) journalists are working through their feelings after reading Teen Vogue's "Donald Trump is Gaslighting America" and realizing that maybe young women really do care about more than lip gloss and fall fashion—and that publications that cater to them are stepping up. 

But Teen Vogue (and adult Vogue, and Cosmopolitan, and Marie Claire, and Vanity Fair, and Elle, and...) have been covering politics like champs for a while now, running excellent pieces that would be right at home in, say, the New York Times Magazine. 

Hard to believe? Check out Jill Filipovic's "Is the GOP Setting Itself Up for a War on Women II?" in Cosmopolitan and Lyz Lenz's "The Donald Trump Supporters...Who are Secretly Voting for Hillary" in Marie Claire, and judge for yourself. 

Electing our first female president will be great, but some experts think we can't call it progress until we elect our second.

The puzzling rise of Stephen Bannon from the internet's frat row to a top office in the West Wing may have less to do with Donald Trump’s personal ideology than that of a little-known hedge-fund heiress and activist libertarian mega-donor named Rebekah Mercer. 

Mercer, an intensely private woman who manages her family’s political investments and whose family is also a majority investor in the psychographic analytics company Cambridge Analytica, appeared out of nowhere in 2012 when she attended an election postmortem for GOP mega-donors and, according to the Washington Post, “stood up before the largely male crowd and delivered an unsparing critique of the Republican’s technology and canvassing operations.” Disgusted by what she viewed as the ineptitude of the Koch operation during the 2012 campaign, Mercer decided on election night to devote her family’s political efforts to burning the GOP’s house down.

Over the past four years, Mercer has frequently bucked the GOP establishment in order to drive the party ever further right, and originally backed Ted Cruz, whose constitutional originalist approach to governance closely aligned with her tea-party sensibilities. But when Cruz dropped out of the race and Trump emerged as the nominee, Mercer, unlike the Koch brothers, was unafraid to shift her support to the political novice, whom she saw as a convenient vehicle for advancing her populist agenda.

Though the Mercer family's political investments don't begin to approach the Kochs', she amplifies its impact by actively involving herself in how it's spent—including guiding Mercer-funded campaigns to hire Cambridge Analytica to drive their decision-making. But Mercer is not shy about exerting considerably more influence, up to and including influencing staff appointments. Mercer is believed to be behind the replacement of Corey Lewandowski and Paul Manafort with Bannon—who according to The Hill is “tied at the hip” to Mercer—and Kellyanne Conway—who worked on a pro-Cruz super PAC with strong ties to Mercer—earlier this summer.

Mercer remains closely involved with the Trump operation today, currently serving as a member of Trump’s transition team, overseeing the hiring of lower-level appointees and lobbying for Cabinet secretaries she views as conservative true believers.

In light of this, Bannon’s elevation of starts to seem less surprising. Bannon, as it happens, has served as a board member of Cambridge Analytica and run the Mercer-backed Government Accountability Institute, and the Mercers, as it happens, have a significant financial stake in Breitbart News. 

If you can’t fathom why your Republican representatives are having such difficulty publicly expressing reservations over the appointment of such a rabid alt-rightist like Bannon to a White House post—maybe it’s because the Mercers have a financial stake in them, too. 

A young Hong Kong lawmaker is getting what Americans are starting to see as the “Hillary treatment”—being brutally excoriated online and at demonstrations by opponents with gendered slurs and threats. Yau Wai-ching, along with a fellow pro-self determination Youngspiration Party legislator who is male, have not been shy about using coarse language to speak out against mainland rule of the island. But the pushback against Yau has been much more intense—and sexually aggressive. 

Not even heads of state are immune, as Samantha Bee recently learned. In Europe, the taboids are full of photos purporting to show the president of Croatia, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović. Except they're not: It’s Coco Austin, wife of Ice-T. And it turns out that possibly the best place in the world to be a female head of state is a Pacific nation you may have never heard of: The Marshall Islands. 

The latest Wikileaks dump reveals that Abedin, whose first job for Hillary Clinton was as an intern in the First Lady’s office, is not so much Clinton's body woman, power-broker, or strategist—so much as she is Clinton’s “external hard drive.” 

Melania Trump’s demand that People reporter Natasha Stoynoff retract her claim that she had a brief, friendly conversation with Mrs. Trump when they crossed paths in New York after Stoynoff said Donald Trump had groped and kissed her during a photo shoot seems bizarre on the face of it. 

In the request, Melania’s lawyer writes, "The two are not friends and were never friends or even friendly. At the time in question, Mrs. Trump would not even have recognized Ms. Stoynoff if they had encountered one another on the street.”

There’s more to it than just inexplicable Trumpian crazy. In fact, it’s a power grab. In essence, Melania—or, Donald working through Melania—is asserting that Stoynoff, who covered the Trumps often, was so insignificant, so unworthy of the Trumps’ attention, that Melania would never have bothered to acknowledge her on the street. In doing so, Trump not only belittles Stoynoff but also bolsters his argument that he never would have assaulted her because he never would have even noticed her in the first place. Which is an unusual claim for a man who says, “No one has more respect for women than me."

Pity poor Kellyanne Conway, possibly the most visible embodiment of the “glass cliff” today. Hired to salvage Donald Trump’s flailing campaign this summer, she’s one of the latest top female executives brought on specifically to turn around a struggling enterprise. (See also: new Britain prime minister Teresa May and Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer.) Women, it turns out, are most likely to be hired in troubled times—and therefore more likely to be set up to fail than their male peers. Is it because women candidates are more likely to take risks to advance their careers, or because boards become more open to the idea of a nontraditional candidate when all else has failed? If the campaign of misogynist-in-chief Donald Trump is any indication, the answer may be both. 

The visceral backlash against Hillary’s candidacy for president can be linked to a social phenomenon called “precarious manhood,” which posits that while femininity is biological, masculinity is a behavioral achievement that must be earned and maintained. 

Peter Beinart writes in the Atlantic: “Two analyses of American murder statistics, for instance, suggest that in cities in the South, where men tend to hold traditional attitudes about gender, greater economic equality between men and women correlates with higher rates of male-on-female murder.”

There’s a good chance we’ll see a record number of female Senators come November, and that’s great news for anyone aggravated by Washington gridlock. (So, everyone?) Women, recent research has begun to show, just get more done. They’re more likely to sponsor and cosponsor legislation, they’re more bipartisan than men, and when their party is in the minority, they accomplish more than their male counterparts. Time will tell if they remain this motivated once women consistently achieve true parity in the legislature—the same research that shows female members of the minority get more done also shows that this is also true for any legislator holding an unsafe seat.

Half the battle is just being heard, especially if you’re a woman of color, as Attorney General Loretta Lynch can attest. At one point during her career, it took the reprimand of a male colleague to get a client to direct his questions toward her.   

But not all women have strong male allies at work, and it’s up to them to have each other’s backs. In 2013, New York Magazine writer Ann Friedman coined the term “shine theory,” urging women to befriend powerful women rather than compete with them based on the advice of her best friend Amina, who liked to say, “I don’t shine if you don’t shine.” Female aides in the White House have been using shine theory to great effect in meetings with the president, echoing each other’s ideas while explicitly naming the woman who originated it. They call it “amplification,” and say it’s helped to ensure women are credited for their contributions and has increased the likelihood that they’ll be invited to contribute more.A

A whole stack of organizational research suggests that women are more collaborative and empathetic and significantly less violent than men, and the American public regards female politicians as considerably more honest, ethical, and willing to compromise than men. But whether those traits can be extrapolated into any generalization about female leadership remains to be seen.

A deep lifetime affection for pop culture and comfort with the inherent silliness of the medium has enabled Michelle Obama to advance her agenda in ways no other first ladies could imagine. She’s guest-starred on NCIS to promote Joining Forces, her campaign with Dr. Jill Biden to support military families, sang karaoke with James Corden to promote Let Girls Learn, and engaged in a goofy Twitter war with Britain’s Prince Harry to promote the Invictus Games for wounded veterans.

But it might be her intentionally goofy Mom dancing with Jimmy Fallon to encourage parents to cut a rug with their kids as part of her Let’s Move campaign that shows Obama at her least self-conscious. (For the record, Obama really can dance. Check out her moves during National Dance Day.)