Facts and figures on females from throughout the world.

By Saba Ghaffari, Illustrations by Jessica Wetterer

5th Female Nomination

Lady Bird Writer and Director Greta Gerwig is the fifth woman to be nominated in the directing category in the history of the Academy Awards. Only one woman has ever gone on to win the Oscar—Kathryn Bigelow for the 2008 motion picture The Hurt Locker. Gerwig is a double nominee this year, as Lady Bird was also nominated for Best Original Screenplay. Additionally, the film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Actress for Saoirse Ronan and Best Supporting Actress for Laurie Metcalf. The 90th annual Academy Awards take place March 4.

40 Percent

More women are starting new businesses than ever before. According to the 2016 Kauffman Index of Startup Activity, women make up 40 percent of new entrepreneurs in the U.S. In recent years, it appears women have been outpacing men in the entrepreneurial realm, with the number of female entrepreneurs growing at twice the rate of the number for their male peers. A Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey illustrated from the year 2015 through 2016 that men’s entrepreneurial participation grew 5 percent, while women’s entrepreneurial rates increased by 10 percent. This exceeding growth, the survey noted, is most likely attributed to the continually closing gender gap and greater access to female role models and mentors.

1st Gold Medal

Chloe Kim, 17, is an American snowboarder who participated in the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. While this was her first time to participate in the Winter Olympics, she’s been breaking records from a very young age. In 2016, she became the first American woman to win a gold medal in snowboarding at the Winter Youth Olympic Games. Kim, who earned her first medal ever, a silver at the Winter X Games when she was just 13 years old, won three gold medals at the Winter X Games, all before she turned 16. She is also credited as the first and only woman to land back-to-back 1080 spins (A 1080 spin consists of making three 360-degree turns in the air.), which she did at the 2016 U.S. Snowboarding Grand Prix.

1st Award

Oprah Winfrey was awarded the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the 2018 Golden Globes ceremony Jan. 7. The award, which is bestowed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for “incredible contributions to the entertainment industry,” has been presented a total of 65 times. Winfrey is the 15th female to receive the honor and the first woman of color to ever be presented with the award. This is certainly not the first time Winfrey has made groundbreaking history; in 1986, she also became the first black female host of a nationally syndicated daily talk show, with The Oprah Winfrey Show, and in 2003, became the first billionaire in the U.S. who was both African-American and a woman.

2 Times the Difference

Women are making their mark in the startup scene. A survey published by FundersClub revealed technology startups with at least one female founder hire twice as many female employees than startups with no female founders. These female-founded tech startups also hire more women overall than major tech companies. This finding demonstrates women in leadership roles are imperative for the advancement of other women. While these figures are impressive, women-owned startups are still a minority in the male-dominated tech industry. In fact, a recent Crunchbase study showed just 17 percent of startups in 2017 had a female founder, a number that has remained constant for the last five years.

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