With “Wonder Woman” blazing a trail at theaters across the United States, the female superhero is being hailed as a powerful new role model for girls and a break away from sexism in Hollywood.

The film, starring Israeli actress Gal Gadot, smashed box office records on its opening weekend, raking in more than $103 million in the United States – a record for a movie directed by a woman, Patty Jenkins. The film broke the previous record for a movie directed by a woman held by Sam Taylor-Johnson for “Fifty Shades of Grey”.

Online debates ahead of the film’s release about the Amazonian superhero’s lack of armpit hair and the furor surrounding her selection last year as a U.N. honorary ambassador, have only served to boost box office takings.

But it is above all the depiction of the sword-wielding, lasso-tossing character as an empowered woman that accounts for the film’s triumph, said Melissa Silverstein, founder of the Women and Hollywood blog and co-founder of the women-focused Athena Film Festival.

“It’s almost an exclamation point on what women have been saying for a long time – in the industry, outside the industry; that our stories matter, we are the heroes of the stories, we can kick butt as well as anyone else and we’re equal,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.

Wonder Woman was first imagined in 1941 as an icon of female empowerment – even appearing on the inaugural cover of the flagship feminist publication Ms. magazine three decades later.

But her modern portrayal has been criticized for shifting to a sexualized buxom character, typically clad in a red, white and blue body suit.

The United Nations dumped Wonder Woman less than two months after naming her as an ambassador for women’s and girls’ empowerment amid criticism that her pin-up image sent the wrong message.

The film reverts to her original incarnation.

“Wonder Woman” is one of three comic-book superheroes from the 1930s and 1940s whose stories have been published almost without interruption – alongside Batman and Superman – according to Harvard history professor Jill Lepore.

Yet, Jenkins’ film is the first theatrical release starring the Princess of the Amazons. Her debut on the silver screen has prompted a host of celebratory initiatives.

In New York, “Wonder Woman” enthusiasts have raised more than $8,000 in six days to send high-school girls to a screening in Washington D.C.

And female-only showings by the cinema chain Alamo Drafthouse have sold out from Austin, Texas, to New York, with promises of proceeds going to Planned Parenthood, a women’s healthcare provider.

Silverstein said the blockbuster should herald a new era in a Hollywood film industry skewed in favor of male characters and filmmakers.

Last year, females comprised just 29 percent of protagonists among the 100 top-grossing U.S. films, according to the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University, California.

Behind the scenes, women made up just 7 percent of directors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films in 2016, a study by the same centre shows.

“The bigger picture is, for me, that women stories are as valid as male stories,” said Silverstein.

By Sebastien Malo, Editing by Emma Batha. c Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Most people in emerging and developed economies believe men are now more involved in parenting than ever before, with many saying the role of women should not be confined to the home, a global survey has indicated.

Nearly 70 percent of people thought men had a “greater responsibility for the home and childcare” than they had ever had, according to a survey of 18,180 adults across 22 countries including India, United States, Indonesia, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, Mexico and Britain.

Respondents from India, Argentina and Indonesia were most likely to say that men now had more parenting duties, while those from Russia were least likely to agree.

The online poll also found that only 37 percent of people thought the role of women was to be “good mothers and wives”.

The three countries where most respondents agreed that women belonged in the home were Indonesia (76 percent), Russia (69 percent) and India (64 percent).

“The world remains divided over the role of women, but the majority do not think women should stay at home and have children,” Claire Emes, senior director of Ipsos MORI, said in a statement.

Balancing work and family was the biggest challenge that prevented women’s participation in the labour force in developed and emerging economies, the International Labour Organization (ILO) said in a recent study.

Worldwide, 70 percent of women and two thirds of men would prefer that women work in paid jobs, it said.

A World Economic Forum study last year found efforts to close gender gaps in workforce participation and pay had slowed so dramatically in the past year that men and women may not reach economic equality for another 170 years.

Women on average earn 77 percent of what men earn, according to ILO data.

By Lin Taylor @linnytayls, Editing by Emma Batha. c Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Twenty-seven-year-old Florian Ruiz-Picasso, better known as Florian Picasso, is a French DJ and record producer who is a great-grandson of the well-known artist, Pablo Picasso. He was born in Vietnam and adopted by Marina Picasso, the granddaughter of Pablo Picasso.

Florian has gained recognition for collaborations with 20-year-old Dutch DJ superstar Martin Garrix and Steve Aoki, the highest grossing dance artist in the US. In 2016, Florian was ranked by DJ Mag at 38th on their annual list of Top 100 DJs in the world.

He started making music at the age of 13, when he would perform at events at his boarding school. He became more serious about his musical career at age 19 and has been performing in big clubs since age 16. He has opened for acts like Swedish House Mafia and performed at major music festivals, such as Ultra Music Festival and Tomorrowland. 

Originally based in Cannes, France he currently resides in Geneva, Switzerland.

Seventy percent of millennials who took part in a recent survey stated that the ability to travel was the main motivation for working, second only to paying for necessities such as rent and bills.

But while millennials may be foot-loose and experience-driven, they are also career-minded, ambitious and motivated by jobs that allow them to acquire the skills and knowledge they need to grow both personally and professionally.

Offering flexibility for work schedules and vacations is important for employers who want to attract the best talent out there. Increasingly, companies are allowing and even encouraging employees to work remotely for set periods of time, which is proven to improve morale and productivity.

But instead of simply offering employees the perk of working in pyjamas from their over-priced inner-city apartments a couple of days per week, there are multiple benefits to embedding a company culture that encourages staff to travel and work “on the road” for short periods of time each year.

Here are three reasons encouraging employees to work while travelling could improve a lot more than just team morale:

1. Traveling and working allows your team to grow personally and professionally

According to a recent survey by Hipmunk, 38 percent of millennials travel for business, compared to just 23 percent of Gen Xers and 8 percent of baby boomers. However, Sara Sutton Fell, founder and CEO of FlexJobs states, “From the surveys we’ve done of millennials and flexible work, it’s not so much that they want their jobs to include travel such as traditional business trips to meet clients,” says Sutton Fell. “It’s that they want to be able to travel and still do their jobs.”

While not every job role requires foreign travel, there are multiple opportunities for growth and learning abroad which any employee could benefit from while still doing their normal job remotely, such as visiting foreign branches, business cross-pollination exchanges with companies in the same sphere, networking events and conferences.

Offering the opportunity to represent your company abroad is not only an attractive incentive for talent acquisition, but also has a positive impact on many other levels. Travel experiences increase employee commitment to the organisation, focus and productivity and give a goal for employees to work towards. Travel has been proven to broaden individuals’ horizons, and boost professional and personal growth by placing people out of their comfort zones, and forcing them to adapt to foreign norms, languages and customs.

In the increasingly ‘global’ work ecosystem, sending employees to work and cooperate with, and learn from other companies is a great way of growing your network. Thanks to a growing number of events, conferences and accelerator programs emerging around the world, cooperation and communication is improving in the startup ecosystem. Rather than going head to head, startups are increasingly learning from each other, and gaining inspiration from the innovation of other startups in their sphere.

Encouraging your employees to interact and cooperate with other startups around the world can inspire them to implement ideas spawning from different cultures as well as strengthen their entrepreneurial mindset, which they can transfer back to their work back home.

2. Embedding working ‘on the road’ forces your company to provide real flexibility.

Rigid 9-5 office based schedules are fast becoming a thing of the past. Forward thinking companies are realizing that aside from improving morale, offering flexibility in schedules and for vacations actually improves productivity too. With smartphones, portable devices and increased wireless internet saturation, workers can effectively be plugged into their desk from anywhere, at any time of the day, and if they want to take an afternoon off and catch up over the weekend it shouldn’t affect their overall output.

However, while timetable and vacation flexibility are becoming more common, for many companies they still remain a perk, to be taken advantage of or not at the employee’s discretion. Leading companies like Netflix, Best Buy and Virgin are pioneering “unlimited vacations” a policy which on face value appears attractive to experience-driven millennial employees, and talent-hunting managers alike. But critics argue that in reality this tricks employees into taking less vacations, isn’t applicable to all industries and is hard to implement fairly across teams.

For early stage startups the limitations posed by skeleton teams and limited resources can often make ‘unlimited vacations’ unrealistic, but if working trips are embedded in your company culture, your company will be forced to make this flexibility part of day to day operations.

Rather than being forced to hastily organize cover and shift responsibilities at the last minute before someone takes vacations, your company needs to have systems in place to accommodate remote working. These include rolling out communication tools like Slack, and using shareable documents like Google Docs and Excel which can be accessed by different employees easily. Employees working remotely can easily join team meetings and brainstorming sessions via Skype or Google Hangouts, and tools like Join.me even allow for screen sharing and interactive online whiteboards for conference calls.

3. Traveling and working allows you to attract the best talent

Attracting and retaining talent is becoming more challenging. As the demand for qualified professionals with specific skills grows – especially for development and technical roles – so do potential candidates’ expectations in terms of flexibility, work environment and many other perks that go way beyond financial compensation.

Adam Kingl, director of learning solutions at the London Business School argues “With younger workers being fully aware that you can email or call someone from anywhere, the idea of working differently becomes a criterion that people are expressly looking for before they’ll sign on the dotted line, it’s not a perk or reward.”

Modern employees want the whole package. As well as being paid appropriately, they expect to work in environments where they can learn, challenge themselves, and fulfill their own personal goals, whether that be initiating their own projects, or travelling the world.

Until recently, employees who wanted to take an extended trip needed to quit their jobs, or take unpaid sabbaticals. However, startups like Remote Year, now offer ‘round the world’ year long digital nomad experiences, and can arrange openings with leading companies for people with specialized skill sets as well as entry-level employees. Similarly, Embark, We Roam, and Hacker Paradise offer shorter couple of weeks to twelve months experiences in Latin America, Europe and Asia. To stay competitive, attract and keep ahold of experience driven millennials, offering the chance to travel while working remotely could put your company in good stead with potential employees, who want to discover the world, but also develop their careers.

Managing remote teams has its challenges, and will require extensive training and adoption of new tools to facilitate team members being away from home base for extended periods. However, the benefits of encouraging team members to spend time in foreign countries outweigh the challenges. So instead of worrying which talented employees are getting cold feet and will move on to new adventures, allow them to pick up their backpack, their laptop and get out there, with the knowledge they will come back even better than before.

By Juliana Hernandez and Juan Nates, co-founders of WorkplaceA.com  

Young people have started to question how their clothes are made but consumers of all ages need to do more to tackle fashion labor abuses, according to a British lawmaker and sustainable fashion campaigner.

Baroness Lola Young said young people are increasingly engaged with political and economic issues and willing to fight on social causes – and labor abuses in the garment industry were no exception.

Young, a former actress who was made a life peer of Britain’s House of Lords in 2004, said harnessing this energy was vital to revolutionize the fashion industry which has come under pressure since more than 1,100 workers died in the Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh in 2013.

“A lot of young people are very concerned about a whole range of social justice issues and therefore are quite willing to go into the fray when they know what is going on,” said Young, who founded an All-Party Parliamentary Group on Ethics and Sustainability in Fashion.

Young said transforming consumer behavior in the West and changing the model of the “throwaway disposable society” is an important way to tackle labor abuses, particularly in the fast fashion sector.

Many big fashion brands have been criticized for failing to improve the conditions for workers in their global supply chains – from poor health and safety standards and long working hours to low pay and bans on forming trade unions.

WAY FORWARD

She said while young people could often not afford more expensive clothing, she hoped exchange ventures at retailers such as Sweden’s H&M – where customers return old clothes for recycling in return for vouchers – could show a new way forward.

She said they are also getting more engaged even as many have concerns over a period of global instability.

“Paradoxically, what feels like current political volatility has made some people sit up and think: ‘What are we doing here? We’ve got to take more control over what’s happening in this world and fight some of these injustices much more openly,'” Young said in an interview.

She said different sectors of the fashion industry – from fast fashion to haute couture – had different challenges and will have to take different approaches to the problems.

Yet Young added that fully addressing the issues surrounding the supply chain was a “big ask” for the industry as “we need to look again fundamentally at how the garment industry works”.

“You really need to look at your business models because they’re not delivering this ethical industry that many of us would like to see,” said Young, who will be on a supply chain transparency panel at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit next month.

Young said while Western awareness of the issues has grown recently, many people still don’t think about where their clothes come from until their attention is drawn by a large-scale event such as the Rana Plaza disaster.

Young said one of most effective ways to tackle the problems would be to support organizations working on the ground to implement a effective monitoring system that would empower workers and enable them to fight for better conditions.

Yet she emphasized the urgency of tackling these issues.

“Time is running out in relation to the environment, time is running in terms of the dreadful impact that it’s having on various communities and individuals around the world. So you’ve got to get on and do something really really quickly,” she said.

By Ed Upright, Editing by Belinda Goldsmith; c Thomson Reuters Foundation.