"Who the fuck is Plain Jane?" reads a T-shirt from the Spring 2013 collection by Montreal lifestyle brand Plain Jane Homme. Next to the question stands the silhouette of a naked woman, her back turned, with panties around her ankles. This is the logo of a Canadian clothing company that purports to be inspired by "the ultimate gentleman." Originally only appearing on T-shirts, the image is reminiscent of the infamous 1970s mud-flap girl favored by long-haul truckers and now adorns hats, jackets, and pants sold across Canada, the U.S., and Europe.

But it begs the question: who the fuck is Plain Jane Homme—or any other company in 2013 for that matter—to make female submission its mascot?

Two years ago, PJH cofounder Hardip Manku, said in an exclusive interview with GQ magazine that the company’s logo was merely functional. “I wanted to create the letter ‘A’ and the only way to turn a female figure into that shape was to include the panties at the base of her legs,” he said. But with the PJH website describing the brand as an homage to “the girl every guy wants and every girl wants to be,” it’s difficult not to take umbrage. I’m not the sort of girl who wants to drop her underwear for a $48 T-shirt, and I’m pretty sure none of the other women I know would want to do that either.

Amanda Knox’s highly anticipated book Waiting to Be Heard, published Tuesday in the United States, is not exactly a thriller.

Instead, it is a collection of carefully selected memories of her time in Perugia, Italy, where she spent four years in a sweltering prison accused of killing her British roommate Meredith Kercher. Knox does write candidly about her claims of heavy-handed interrogation at the hands of abusive Italian cops, sexual harassment by a creepy older prison guard, and her adamant denials of involvement in Kercher’s murder. But most of it has been heard before.

What’s new about the book is a close look at a person no one seems to really know—Knox herself.

In a promising step toward the economic empowerment of women in emerging markets, the Coca-Cola Co. and International Finance Corp. (IFC) on Monday announced a joint initiative that aims to support female entrepreneurship in Eurasia and Africa.

The $100 million, three-year project will provide businesswomen within Coca-Cola’s supply chain with access to critical financial backing. In doing so, the initiative will pool the vast resources and networks of two of the world’s largest corporations. Coca-Cola’s beverage distribution system, which supplies more than 200 countries around the globe, has been held up as a model of efficiency and reach by such luminaries as Melinda Gates, who has urged not-for-profits to take a page from the company’s playbook. Meanwhile, the IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, leveraged more than $20 billion in private-sector investments last year to foster sustainable growth.

The initiative, for which the IFC will utilize its network of local and regional banking institutions to provide financing to women in the Coca-Cola value chain, is already being implemented in Nigeria. There, the two firms are working with Nigerian Bottling Co. and Access Bank to offer financial support to local female microdistributors. In a statement on the joint project, Nathan Kalumbu, the president of Coca-Cola’s Eurasia and Africa group, said: “Women entrepreneurs make significant contributions to emerging and developing economies, yet have lower access to finance than their male counterparts. By providing greater access to capital, we are investing in our own success and the success of the communities we serve.”

When she was still a small and bookish girl, holed up in the library of a Sacred Heart nuns’ school in Dublin, Mary Robinson read about towering human-rights figures—Eleanor Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi—and dreamed of doing something worthwhile with her life. Before long, and famously, she did: first, as one of Ireland’s youngest senators and a barrister taking up cases with the European Court of Human Rights; then, as Ireland’s first female president, promoting peace in Northern Ireland and reaching out to the country’s marginalized communities; and, from 1997 to 2002, as the United Nations’ high commissioner for human rights, bearing witness to, and calling for international action on, vicious conflicts and widespread suffering in places such as Kosovo, Sierra Leone, East Timor, and Chechnya.

Now a member of Nelson Mandela’s Elders and the president of the Mary Robinson Foundation–Climate Justice—and a 2009 recipient of the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom—Robinson has detailed her career in a new memoir, Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice. From her early years in western Ireland, where she grew up in a large, loving, and faith-filled family, through her advocacy for the world’s most vulnerable citizens, Robinson’s story is one of determination, moral courage, and profound integrity of spirit.

In honor of International Women’s Day, I recently sat down with Robinson in Washington, D.C., to talk about her book, her long history of fighting on behalf of women’s rights, and her latest efforts to bring climate justice into the international spotlight. Here are excerpts from the interview:

Last February Landen Gambill decided to take action against her ex-boyfriend, who she says raped and stalked her throughout their long-term relationship. Now the 19-year-old is being threatened with possible expulsion from her college for creating an “intimidating” environment for her alleged abuser—and she’s gearing up to fight back.

Gambill was a freshman at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill when she took her case to the school’s honor court—a judicial body made up of five undergraduates—trying to avoid the emotional toll of a criminal trial. At the time, she says, she hoped to simply get a no-contact order to keep her ex-boyfriend away from her. Instead, she says, she endured a hearing that spanned 28 hours, in which she claims she was grilled about why she didn’t leave her boyfriend sooner and was scolded for “showing emotion on her face.” Gambill says she was asked loaded questions like, “Why didn’t you break up with him?” and “Why didn’t you fight back harder?”

“I had really high expectations of UNC as a liberal university,” Gambill says. “[I thought] they were going to support me as a survivor and as someone who’s in a relationship with sexual abuse. I was totally let down.”

Now former WCBS anchorman Rob Morrison is finally out of his marital home this week, and his wife, Ashley, may be one of those women who is lucky to be alive. He allegedly had a long-term pattern of physically abusing his wife, who is a beautiful and intelligent television journalist. Merely a month before this incident, the police were called when he is said to have choked her until she almost passed out. However, she then decided to drop the January complaint, saying that she had exaggerated her accusations.

I certainly hope that Ashley, with support from family, friends, and counselors keeps Rob out of the house for good. Yet, I won’t be surprised if she, like so many other women, lets him back into her life.

Last month, Rihanna went to court, reunited with her battering boyfriend, Chris Brown, to support his claim that he completed his community service—which was put in place precisely because of the vicious beating he gave her on the night before the Grammys a few years ago. They are back together and smiling at the cameras again.

In late January, Human Rights Watch released a 196-page report “Capitol Offense: Police Mishandling of Sexual Assault Cases in the District of Columbia,” concluding that in many sexual assault cases, Washington police did not file incident reports, which are required to proceed with an investigation, or misclassified serious sexual assaults as lesser or other crimes. Human Rights Watch also found that the police presented cases to prosecutors for warrants that were so inadequately investigated that prosecutors had little choice but to refuse them and that procedural formalities were used to close cases with only minimal investigation. Below, Eleanor Gourley tells her story.

I always felt that if I was the victim of a crime that the police would be there for me.

The May 2011 night I was assaulted, the police were mostly helpful and kind. One officer came to the hospital with me and stayed by my bed for about an hour, talking to me because I was so nervous and alone.  My attacker had stabbed me with a box cutter and told me he would kill me if I did not do as he asked. He took my cell phone, so I couldn’t call anyone.  The officer let me use his phone.

As President Obama works to shape his second-term team, the last thing he needs is criticism about the insularity and lack of diversity among the tippy-top players. But earlier this month, when The New York Times ran a front-page photo showing a December Oval Office meeting between the POTUS and 11 senior staffers—10 men plus a tiny glimpse of senior adviser Valerie Jarrett’s leg—it was hard not to wonder: where are the women? It was arguably even harder, however, to resist rolling one’s eyes when the administration pushed back with one of the lamest rebuttals in modern politics.

As ever with such critiques, it fell to Jarrett, chief keeper of the Obama brand, to play defense. Addressing the oft-heard complaint that White House women get cut out of both key meetings and presidential playtime, she told Politico, “I don’t play golf. I don’t play basketball. I don’t really like cards ... I don’t think anybody questions whether or not I have a role to play here. And so I think it is irrelevant whether the president wants to do that in some of his free time. What’s really important is, when we have something to say, does he listen to us? And he does.”

As for POTUS’s view of women in general, she asserted, “The reality is that this president has been surrounded by strong women his entire life.”

Former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet told ABC's Barbara Walters Saturday that she's hopeful about her organization's daunting task of bringing about gender equality around the world. Bachelet is running the newly launched United Nations group U.N. Women.

"We're not starting from zero," Bachelet said, adding that the U.N. partners with grassroots women's organizations even in countries that grant very few rights to women. "I have to tell you the only possible way to really ensure women's rights is to empower them. That's why for me, empowerment is essential."

Bachelet said bringing about economic equaity is crucial to empowerment, and that the best way to do that is to convince governments that women are smart investments.

"That's a tough job," Walters responded.

"It is, but there's so many wonderful women everywhere doing so many things. There are women that are being raped and women that are being harrassed, put in jail, whatever, but there's always this capacity for resilience, standing up again, organizing themselves."

Bachelet added that she sees a "huge opportunity" in the Middle East for women to get more rights as some countries may soon be re-writing their constitutions.

Bachelet said she hopes to recruit more women U.N. peacekeepers in regions like Congo to show people that women can be in positions of power and to be more effective at preventing rapes. She said a Congolese woman who was gang-raped by rebels asked the U.N. High Commission on Human Rights to help stop the epidemic of sexual violence in the country. "What reparation do I want? I do not want money," the woman said. "The only reparation I want is for you to see rape as not my problem, but your problem."

Walters asked Bachelet if she would consider running for president of Chile again, to which Bachelet responded, "I'm working for the women in the world, today, that's my essential issue."