[Kobi]

1975
The U.S. Supreme Court rules that women cannot be excluded from juries because of their sex.

1975
The World Congress for International Women's Year opens in Berlin.

1976
Barbara Jordan, the first African American woman elected to Congress from the Deep South, becomes the first African American and the first woman to give the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention.

1976
Labour minister Tina Anselmi becomes the first woman in the Italian cabinet.

1976
Betty Williams and Mairéad Corrigan-Maguire, founders of the Northern Ireland Peace Movement (later Community of Peace People), are awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace. The joint Catholic-Protestant group is formed after three children are killed during fighting between British soldiers and the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

1977
Canadian law prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex or marital status.

1977
Nigerian women are granted the right to vote.

1977
In Saudi Arabia, Princess Misha'al is accused of adultery and executed.

1977
Salvadoran women establish the Committee of Mothers of Political Prisoners and Frente Femenino (“Women's Front”).

1977
Roman women demonstrate against rape, beginning a campaign to change rape laws.

1977
The mothers of Argentine “disappeared” political prisoners begin a series of vigils.

1978
Kuwaiti women successfully demonstrate against a proposed law prohibiting women from working in offices.

1978
Mary Douglas Leakey discovers footprints of early hominids at Laetoli, Tanzania. Her find causes a revision of the date at which humans became bipedal.

1979
Margaret Thatcher becomes the first female prime minister of Great Britain.

1979
The First Congress of São Paolo Women starts the Brazilian day-care movement.

1980
New guidelines from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission prohibit sexual harassment.

1980
Three thousand women in Gdansk, Poland, defy tanks to pass out flowers and Solidarity literature.

1981
Sandra Day O'Connor becomes the first woman justice to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.

1982
Twenty thousand British women protest the placement of cruise and Pershing missiles at Greenham Common.

1983
Iranian women are required to wear the chador; the penalty for appearing unveiled is a prison sentence of 1 to 12 months.

1985
Chilean women demonstrate in Santiago against the repression of General Augusto Pinochet.

1986
The U.S. Supreme Court upholds affirmative action on the basis of race or gender.

1988
Benazir Bhutto becomes prime minister of Pakistan. She is the first woman leader of a Muslim country in modern history.

1989
American Barbara Clementine Harris becomes the first female Episcopal bishop.

1989
Canadian women gain access to all combat posts in the military (except submarine duty) because of a lawsuit filed in 1981.

1990
A group of Saudi Arabian women drive cars in Riyadh to protest laws preventing them from operating motor vehicles. They are briefly imprisoned and suspended from their jobs.

1990
Violeta Barrios de Chamorro is elected president of Nicaragua. She is Central America's first female president.

1991
The Nobel Prize for Peace is awarded to Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

1992
The Irish vote to allow free access to abortion information and affirm a woman's right to go abroad to obtain an abortion.

1993
Janet Reno becomes the first female U.S. attorney general.

1993
Tansu Ciller becomes Turkey's first female prime minister.

1993
Kim Campbell becomes Canada's first female prime minister.

1994
Takahashi Hisako becomes the first woman justice on Japan's Supreme Court.

1995
The United Nations' Fourth World Conference on Women meets in Beijing.

1996
In Afghanistan the ruling Taliban government places strict restrictions on women, forbidding them from receiving an education and working outside the home.

1996
A report on female genital mutilation urges international action to end the ancient rite of passage that has already been performed on roughly 100 million girls worldwide.

1998
Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of former Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, is unanimously elected to lead India's Congress Party.

1999
Mireya Moscoso becomes Panama's first female president and in December oversees the U.S. handover of the Panama Canal.

2000
Beverley McLachlin becomes Canada's first female chief justice of the Supreme Court. Some 70 years earlier the same court had ruled that women were not “persons.”

2000
Tarja Halonen becomes Finland's first woman president.

2000
At the Sydney Olympics, American athlete Marion Jones becomes the first woman to win five medals in track-and-field events at a single Games. She is stripped of her medals in 2007 after she acknowledges her use of banned substances.

2000
Sirimavo R.D. Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka, the world's first female prime minister, retires.

2001
Hillary Rodham Clinton is sworn in as a U.S. senator from New York, becoming the first former first lady to win elected office.

2001
Katharine Graham, former publisher of The Washington Post, dies. She was the first woman to head a Fortune 500 company and at one time was considered the most powerful woman in the United States.

2001
Voters in Bahrain approve a referendum that includes the right of women to stand for office.

2002
Britain's Queen Elizabeth II celebrates her Golden Jubilee, marking 50 years on the throne.

2003
A Nigerian appeals court overturns a sentence of death by stoning in the adultery case of Amina Lawal.

2004
Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai is awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, becoming the first black African woman to win a Nobel Prize.

2005
In Ireland the McCartney sisters make a public issue of their brother's murder, spurring international criticism of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

2005
Kuwaiti women are granted the right to vote (effective 2007).

2006
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is inaugurated as Liberia's first woman president.

2007
California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi becomes the first woman to serve as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

2007
Pratibha Patil becomes the first woman president of India.

2007
Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto is assassinated shortly after her return to Pakistan following eight years of self-imposed exile.

2007
For the first time in UN peacekeeping history, an all-female unit is deployed. Comprising more than 100 Indian policewomen, the force is sent to Liberia to train police and assist with local elections and prison security.

2008
Gen. Ann Dunwoody becomes the first woman to serve as a four-star general in the United States.

2009
Michelle Obama becomes the first African American first lady when her husband, Barack Obama, is sworn in as the 44th president of the United States.

2009
Sonia Sotomayor is sworn in as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; she is the first Hispanic and the third woman to serve on the court.

2009
A U.S. government panel announces that women who are not at an increased risk of breast cancer should begin receiving regular mammograms at age 50, rather than 40 as had been previously recommended.

2010
Elena Kagan becomes an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

2010
The University of Connecticut's women's basketball team wins 90 games in a row—the longest winning streak in college basketball history—before falling to the Stanford Cardinal.

2011
Television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey launches the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN), “a multi-platform media company designed to entertain, inform, and inspire people to live their best lives.”