It's telling that the first-ever female winner of the Fields Medal, which is the mathematics equivalent of a Nobel Prize, graduated from college in Iran, a country with one of the world's least women-friendly cultures and legal frameworks. It takes the toughest, or the most oblivious to their surroundings, to create a path that others can follow.
Despite decades of progress, women are still woefully under-represented in the "STEM" fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
In 2011, the last year for which official data are available, women made up 48 percent of the total U.S. workforce and just 26 percent of all STEM workers. The female share of tech workers at Apple is just 20 percent.