When John Bolton was asked in a 2016 interview in the highbrow Octavian Report what he considered “the top threat to global order,” the uber-hawk did not quickly respond that it was Iran.

Nor did he finger North Korea.

Instead, the foreign-policy iconoclast that many would place to the right of a Dick Cheney or a Donald Rumsfeld said that for him the main threat was the withdrawal of the United States from its position of leadership and from “vigorously asserting its interests” around the world.

Under President Barack Obama the US had accelerated this retreat based on “the mistaken impression … that if the US is less assertive, less visible, less present in the world that there will be enhanced international peace and security,” Mr. Bolton opined. “I think exactly the opposite is true.”

The condemnation of a weakened America with its implied argument for an aggressively nationalist foreign policy was to some extent the intellectual’s version of “America First” – the worldview that would help carry Donald Trump to the White House and form the basis of President Trump’s first year of foreign policy decisions.

Now as the piercingly intelligent and fiercely uncompromising Bolton prepares to take the helm of the White House national security apparatus as the president’s third national security adviser, Washington is in an uproar.

The majority thinking among Democrats and many Republicans alike is that Bolton’s replacement of H. R. McMaster, who frequently clashed with the president, coupled with the nomination of the hawkish Mike Pompeo to follow Rex Tillerson as secretary of State, portends the most single-mindedly aggressive and nationalist national security team since at least President George W. Bush’s first term.

Most foreign policy experts consider Bolton – whose go-to solution to national security challenges tends to be the military – the exact wrong choice to guide an impulsive and brash but untested president at a particularly dangerous moment in world affairs.

But others, even if not happy with the choice, see reason to hope that the glimmers of foreign-policy realism Bolton has exhibited – plus the moderating influence of less-extreme voices around the president – will prevail.

Iran, North Korea, Russia

For those who are cringing at Bolton’s rise, it’s above all the international context that makes Trump’s hawkish shift of his national security team so frightening. In the coming weeks the president will determine the fate of the Iran nuclear deal, is planning to sit down to talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, and must decide whether or not to renew arms control negotiations with Russia.

“The president has three humongously important decisions coming up in a very short span of time, and John Bolton has a very stark and aggressive prescription for each of them – and none of which involves much if any diplomacy,” says Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association.

Like Trump, Bolton believes fervently that the Iran nuclear deal, Obama’s signature foreign-policy achievement, should be scuttled. Going farther, he has said US policy on Iran should be regime change. That view harks back to Mr. Bush’s Iraq war – for which Bolton, at the time in charge of the State Department’s weapons of mass destruction nonproliferation efforts, was perhaps the administration’s loudest cheerleader.

On North Korea, Bolton has publicly stated his support for Trump’s decision to sit down with Mr. Kim – but only because what he predicts will be fruitless talks can make way quickly for the preemptive military strikes on the North’s nuclear installations (and, yes, even regime change) he says are the only solution.

As for arms reduction talks with Russia, Bolton is a strident critic of Obama’s New START accords and has said that rather than limiting its own arsenal, the US should just allow the aging arsenal of an economically weakened Russia to deteriorate.

“In each of these cases,” argues Mr. Kimball, “if the president followed Bolton’s prescription it would lead to war and to foreign-policy disaster for the United States.”

Benefit of strategic vision

Yet even if no one seems to doubt that the hawks have landed, there are nevertheless some voices suggesting that there could be distinct benefits to Trump’s overhaul of his national security team.

Some analysts (and even some generally horrified foreign diplomats) are holding out hope that Bolton will be able to give some order and intellectual underpinning and strategic vision to the president’s unpredictable actions. Others assume that a Secretary of State Pompeo – a former House member from Kansas who has built a close relationship with Trump as CIA chief – will know how to develop a strong relationship with Congress and to represent the administration’s policies effectively, something Mr. Tillerson never did.

Even some analysts who dislike the Bolton choice say the initial sky-is-falling (or raining hawks) reaction to Trump’s tweet Thursday evening announcing his choice to replace McMaster may be overstating the martial tilt of the national security team.

“I don’t go quite as far in the vein of the conventional wisdom out there in terms of the uber-hawkishness of this team,” says Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy issues at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Actually I’d say Bolton is the only obvious hawk on it.”

Secretary of Defense James Mattis “projects confidence without swagger, I wouldn’t consider him a hawk,” he says. (Some reports over the weekend had Secretary Mattis confiding in associates that he doesn’t expect to have an easy time working with Bolton).

“And we’ll have to see about Pompeo, but remember it’s easy to be a hawk when you’re at CIA,” Mr. O’Hanlon adds. “It’s not so easy when your role is to find solutions to the problems you’ve been so aggressive about.”

Influence on expulsion of Russians?

Bolton has clearly exhibited disdain for international organizations (including the United Nations, where he served as US ambassador under Bush) and treaties limiting American power – a stance that jibes with Trump’s visceral instincts. But Bolton is a staunch defender of the NATO alliance, and in recent years has argued for a tougher NATO approach to a revanchist Russia – an area where he would seem to clash with the president.

Indeed some analysts were already seeing a hint of Bolton’s influence (he won’t officially step into his White House role until April 9) in Trump’s decision Monday to expel several dozen Russian diplomats, plus a dozen “intelligence operatives” assigned to Russia’s UN mission, and to close Russia’s consulate in Seattle over the poisoning by a Soviet-era nerve agent earlier this month of a former Russian spy and his daughter in Salisbury, England.

In announcing the measures, administration officials underscored that the actions were taken “to demonstrate our unbreakable solidarity with the United Kingdom” as well as to impose “serious consequences” on Russia for “its continued violations of international norms.”

Looking back over recent decades, O’Hanlon says there have been several cases of presidents who either didn’t take their national security adviser’s advice or who weighed those of the secretaries of State and Defense more heavily. And especially in the case of Trump, a president who seems to act based on what he sees on television, he says Trump may have picked Bolton more for his aggressive style in frequent TV appearances than for his policy prescriptions.

“This is a president who seems to know what he likes when he sees it,” O’Hanlon says, “so he may be bearing down much more on the style he’s seen Bolton display on Fox TV.”

Indeed Trump recently picked TV talking head and free marketer Larry Kudlow as his new chief economic adviser. But as some economics analysts pointed out, the choice is unlikely to mean that Trump, who recently announced a raft of anti-free-trade measures, including steel tariffs and billions of dollars in trade measures against China, is suddenly buying whole hog into Mr. Kudlow’s anti-protectionist philosophy.

What Bolton testified about UN

O’Hanlon says it’s clear that Bolton harbors a disdain for international organizations that would bind the US in pursuing its national interests. But at the same time he recalls an experience testifying before Congress on UN peacekeeping in the late 1990s when Bolton, also testifying, displayed an appreciation for some UN work.

“A member of Congress who was looking for some UN bashing was frustrated when I pointed out cases where UN peacekeeping had been vital and successful, so he turned from me to Bolton,” O’Hanlon recalls. The questioner “used kind of a dismissive tone in asking ‘Do you agree with Mr. O’Hanlon that the UN has in some cases been successful?’ but Bolton answered, ‘Yes basically I do.’”

The Arms Control Association’s Kimball says he hopes that when it comes to Bolton that Trump “doesn’t go with every position he presents, otherwise it’s likely to lead to exactly the kind of disastrous wars [Trump] condemned as a candidate.”

But he says it would be folly to discount the influence of the people the president keeps closest to him on national security issues.

“These people are the gatekeepers to the information the president gets, and the national security adviser in particular is supposed to be a fair arbiter of the alternatives presented to the president,” he says.

Bolton was once again on Fox News after being picked by Trump, and he insisted he would be an “honest broker” who would present the president with a panoply of options on any given issue. But Kimball isn’t buying it.

“I just don’t see someone with as strong views as Bolton has,” he adds, “making space for alternatives he has so consistently rejected as weakness.”

CBS News/60 Minutes/AP

This image released by CBS News shows Stormy Daniels, left, during an interview with Anderson Cooper which aired Sunday on '60 Minutes.' The adult-film star, as well as former Playboy model Karen McDougal, claim to have had affairs with Donald Trump in 2006, before he was president.

The parallels between President Trump and President Clinton – and their extramarital entanglements – are well-documented.

Neither has ever pretended to be a choir boy. Both had reputations as womanizers before they were elected president, but many of their voters either didn’t care or looked the other way. The women involved seemed to be bit players in the dramas that engulfed the powerful men they had attracted. They were tagged as bimbos, gold-diggers, liars, or naive. Women who claimed unwanted advances, or outright assault, were disbelieved or worse.

How times have changed. Adult-film star Stormy Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, both of whom claim affairs with Mr. Trump in 2006, refuse to be shamed or silenced.

Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern whose affair with Mr. Clinton nearly led to his downfall 20 years ago, says she now understands that she too can own her truth.

And even as Ms. Daniels rejects the #MeToo label for herself, the rise of the female empowerment movement embodied in that hashtag has come to the fore in the presidential arena. For Ms. Daniels, whose line of work is shunned by much of society, it manifested in her brazen interview with Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes” Sunday night.

“She owns what she is,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. “She says, ‘I’m not just an adult film star, I direct them. I’m one of the most successful women in this field.’ She kind of claims it, which means you can’t slut shame her.”

Some observers have opined that Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, has nothing to lose. But in fact, the financial stakes are high. She is suing to get out of a nondisclosure agreement that she signed on the eve of the 2016 presidential election: her silence on the affair in exchange for $130,000 (a payment that may be a violation of election law). Daniels claims the agreement is null and void, as Trump didn’t sign it. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, says she faces $1 million in damages for each violation of the agreement, now totaling upward of $20 million. The case is being litigated.

Ms. McDougal, the former Playboy model whose interview with Mr. Cooper aired on CNN last Thursday, is also suing to get out of a nondisclosure agreement. Hers is part of a larger deal with the company that owns the National Enquirer, whose publisher is a friend of Trump’s, that included exclusive rights to her story. The article was never published, in a practice called “catch and kill.”

Trump representatives have denied both the affair with McDougal and the encounter with Daniels. But the two televised interviews have allowed viewers to see these women speak, and to draw their own conclusions.

In the wake of the “Access Hollywood” tape, numerous women have also stepped forward to accuse Trump of unwanted sexual contact and harassment, which Trump denies. One, former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos, last week beat back an effort by Trump’s lawyers to block legal action in a defamation suit she filed in New York.

All the alleged sexual misbehavior by Trump took place before he became president, while Clinton’s most famous case took place during his presidency. It was Clinton’s lying under oath about his relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that led in part to his impeachment.

But the more important distinction is the context in which these cases have played out in cultural discourse – and in the approaches of the women themselves. Twenty years ago, when it was revealed that Clinton had had a long-term affair with Lewinsky, the 20-something intern was publicly shamed and ostracized. And she suffered mightily for it, facing a diagnosis several years ago of post-traumatic stress disorder, she writes in the March issue of Vanity Fair.

Lewinsky has also come to understand that the relationship she long saw as consensual wasn’t really – and that she, too, can be a voice in the #MeToo chorus.

“Now, at 44, I’m beginning (just beginning) to consider the implications of the power differentials that were so vast between a president and a White House intern,” she writes. “I’m beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot.”

Lewinsky also speaks of how painfully alone she felt back in 1998, and how, despite the cyberbullying rampant today, social media can also be a force for good.

“Virtually anyone can share her or his #MeToo story and be instantly welcomed into a tribe,” she writes.

One of the arresting moments of Daniels’s “60 Minutes” interview was her rejection of the #MeToo label in her one encounter with Trump – despite her description of giving in to sex with the future president against her wishes.

Daniels agreed that people were trying to use her for their own purposes. But, she continued, “I’ve never said I was a victim. I think trying to use me to further someone else’s agenda does horrible damage to people who are true victims.”

Yet Daniels used the language of countless sexual-assault victims who blame themselves for putting themselves in a compromising position: “I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone's room alone,” she said. “You deserve this,” she added, speaking of herself. Still, she also described behavior toward Trump in the hotel room that most people would find extremely forward.

Daniels left much unsaid in the interview, including evidence that Trump knew about the hush agreement. Her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, told CNN Monday that new evidence is likely to be revealed during the next weeks and months ahead.

The aggressive public relations approach by Daniels and Mr. Avenatti has all the markings of a Trump-ian “slow reveal” that keeps the media on the edge of their seats. To some, Daniels is outdoing Trump at his own game: Be brash, be aggressive, use all the leverage you have. On Monday, Daniels announced plans to sue Mr. Cohen for defamation.

“Her whole thing is, she’s not going to be bullied by this president,” says Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University.

Daniels may have a big payday in mind; for weeks, she has been storming the country, making paid appearances at clubs. But if nothing else, and regardless of what one thinks of her line of work, she has been fearless and unapologetic.

McDougal, too, in a softer way, says she’s trying to reclaim her life. “I had to stand up for myself,” she said in the CNN interview, as she described what she called a “real relationship” with Trump lasting into 2007, despite his marriage to Melania and the recent birth of their son.

The Zervos case may in fact be the most consequential, as it is already proceeding in court – and brings echoes of the sexual harassment suit filed against Clinton 20 years ago. Then, as now, the argument that a sitting president can’t be sued in a civil case for nonofficial actions was rejected. Ms. Zervos claims that Trump sexually assaulted her in 2007; she sued for defamation last year after he called her a liar.

Perhaps all these cases featuring the businessman-turned-TV-star-turned-president are so exotic as to be unrelatable to most women. But they are being fought at a time of rising female empowerment – with implications for Trump himself and the midterm elections in November, when a record number of women are running for office. And that is no coincidence.

Isabelle de Pommereau

School principal Sven Kubick observes a minute of silence in one of the classrooms at the Albertville School in Winnenden, Germany, in memory of the victims of a school shooting that left 15 pupils and teachers dead nine years ago.

Amid the grief and shock that hung over Germany in 2009, after a student stormed into his own school in Winnenden and shot dead 15 peers, staff, and others, was also a nagging question for psychiatrists like Joachim Nitschke.

Dr. Nitschke spent a career working in a high-security hospital for the dangerously mentally ill, usually sent by the police or the court system.  “It occurred to me we always reacted too late,” says the forensic doctor. “We needed a different approach.”

Stirred by the Winnenden attack, he started a clinic where patients are treated at home, with doctors and social workers visiting them, instead of being institutionalized. He has since treated 200 cases, and Bavaria is creating four new centers, modeled on his clinic.

It’s just one of the ways that Europe preempts tragedy at the hands of those suspected of being dangerous to society because they are mentally ill or deeply emotionally troubled.

Europe has suffered much less gun violence than the United States, in part due to the types of weapons-restrictions laws that American students demanded in the “March for Our Lives” protests in cities across North America Saturday. But there is a mental health care component as well. A big part of prevention in countries like Germany (where mass shootings have occurred) and Switzerland (where gun ownership is widespread) revolves around the psychological clues that potential perpetrators leave and the responsibility society has to recognize and report them, so they can be helped before harm comes to anyone.

Schools needed to 'be more awake'

Winnenden is an idyllic southern German town of rolling vineyards and half-timbered homes. And now it’s also infamous, after Tim Kretschmer entered the Albertville School and killed 12 people, before killing three more while on the run, this month nine years ago.

It wasn’t so different from what happened in Parkland, Florida, at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last month, says Gisela Mayer, whose daughter Nina, a teacher trainee, was one of the victims at Winnenden.

One thing that always ties mass shootings together, she says, whether in Winnenden or Oslo or Parkland, is access to weapons. But another is psychological cues of emotional distress, which Ms. Mayer took on with her non-profit Foundation against School Violence, part of a wider German response around psychology and prevention when it comes to violence. “There are warning signs, but nobody detects them,” she says.

That’s what a 3 million euro, German government-sponsored research project sought to change. For three years, a team of police officers, psychiatrists, and researchers combed through the personal histories of perpetrators of mass shootings in Germany from 1993 to 2013 to build a sharper profile of the perpetrators. They found that while the perpetrators were not mentally ill in the pathological sense of the term – they were not psychopaths, for example – they were deeply emotionally troubled. Most were ostracized and hateful of everything.

Schools needed to “be more awake,” says criminologist Britta Bannenberg of the University of Giessen near Frankfurt, who coordinated the research project. Crisis intervention teams were established in schools in various regions in Germany. Dr. Bannenberg herself created a national, voluntary hotline for people concerned about the potential for violence. When a distraught parent calls up, she and her team refer them to the right person, including the police, who can go to the person’s house and check for weapons, or search the computer for suspicious websites.

Experts say that privacy and doctor confidentiality have been issues in Germany, including the case of the Germanwings pilot who slammed into the Alps, killing everyone on board. But that is changing. The key to the German approach is making sure that no opportunity for detecting troubled youth is overlooked – by parents, teachers, or students. And if warning signs are seen, a whole team of people, with a range of expertise, can be brought in: teachers and parents if emotional support is needed, police if there's need for legal action, and mental health experts should treatment be necessary.

Swiss screening

That link between health professionals and authorities is a key to gun safety in Switzerland, which unlike most of Europe has one of the highest per capita rates of gun ownership in the world – after the US and Yemen, according to the Small Arms Survey. The prevalence of guns here is rooted in Swiss tradition of compulsory military service for men. That means most Swiss gun owners are psychologically screened.

There have been mass shootings in Switzerland, including one in 2001 that took 14 lives in the local parliament in Zug, but never in a school.

In Switzerland, doctors are encouraged to inform the police if they believe a person could be a danger to himself or someone else. In that case, police, under the Swiss Weapons Act of 1999, have the right to investigate and take an individual’s arms away, says Lulzana Musliu, a spokeswoman for the Federal Office of Police in Bern. (Germany has similar laws.)

Philip Jaffé, a forensic psychologist in Switzerland, says this underlines a responsible gun culture, based on trust, on display in his country. “Confidentiality ends with the level of threat that the person may represent, which makes a lot of sense,” he says. “Who can evaluate the threat level better than a physician?”

There is no national arms registry in Switzerland – the idea was rejected in a 2011 referendum – but there is an information system where all refusals for firearm permits, including for psychological or criminal reasons, are listed. The police have access to this information system, which is consulted each time someone wants to purchase a firearm. “If, for example, I am in Zurich and I want to get an arm, but they can see I’m a violent person, I have beaten up my wife, I won’t get the arm, and not in another canton either, because all of the systems of the police are linked,” Ms. Musliu says.

Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

Gaston Poyet, who has run this family store in an arcade in downtown Bern, Switzerland, sells a hunting rifle to a customer who turns his “clean” criminal record over. All the paperwork will then go to the police of Bern. He says when his father opened this store in the 1950s, all they took down was a name.

Fewer people fall out of the social safety network in much of Europe, including Switzerland and Germany. “We know to a large degree people with mental illness [in Switzerland] have services that take care of them, they don’t generally fall between the cracks,” says Dr. Jaffé. “There is not a big population of drifters.”

Of course there are always exceptions and room for mistakes, says Gaston Poyet, who owns a family-run gun shop in the upscale center of Bern. He accepts a steady tightening of gun control measures and background checks in Switzerland over the past two decades, a far cry from when his father started the business in the 1950s and hardly a question was asked. “People today are quicker to hurt somebody,” Mr. Poyet says.

Preemptive prevention

That is where Germany is trying to make a difference. Dr. Nitschke says only 2 percent of those diagnosed with mental illness are considered a danger to a public. But there are many vulnerable members of society, especially impressionable teens who are deeply disturbed and could become a threat.

At Friedrich Schiller High School in Ludwigsburg, about 12 miles west of Winnenden, Marion Werling-Barth is carrying out her role in prevention with her class, “Becoming an Adult.”

The class, which is offered in every secondary school in the region, is part of a package of initiatives by the state of Baden-Württemberg after the Winnenden shooting, including hiring more school psychologists. It also established crisis intervention teams in most of its 3,850 public schools. Ms. Werling-Barth is one of hundreds of “prevention advisers” and is not just in charge of her students’ emotional well-being; she is charged with calling a psychologist or the police if need be.

On this day she starts her class with the memory of the shooting in Winnenden, and tells her pupils about the boy who had no one he trusted, who felt “rejected.”

Every year on March 11, Albertvillle School pupils organize a memorial ceremony. This year the candlelight march was also dedicated to the American youth planning to head to the streets in Washington on Saturday.

Tenth grader Lisa Gärstlauer wasn’t at the school yet nine years ago. But what she’s learned over the past years is that to prevent another tragedy, the most important thing is to better bond with her classmates. “There should be no bullying anymore,” she says.

Ms. Mayer agrees. “Feeling ostracized is the worst injury you can suffer from in this society. You don't belong and start hating everything. Hatred turns into revenge,” she says.

One of the classrooms where students were killed remains the way it was on March 11, 2009 at 9:33 am. There are pieces of paper with the names of the victims, as well as a candle and flowers, on each desk. On the wall hang words from French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's “The Little Prince”: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.”

But one thing is gone. The bullet hole that hit the wall. To have left it would have focused attention on the perpetrator, not the victims.

National Photo Company Collection/Library of Congress/Reuters

Women scientists (standing) Nellie A. Brown, (seated l. to r.) Lucia McCollock, Mary K. Bryan and Florence Hedges work at a laboratory, circa 1910-1920, in this Library of Congress handout photo. The numbers of women in fields of science are rising but many of the old barriers remain.

Once, when Alison Coil was on a grant review panel, an unusual situation arose: Applications had come in from two people at similar points in their career on similar topics. One was from a white male, the other from a woman of color.

Dr. Coil, an astrophysicist at the University of California in San Diego, remembers the reaction as being mixed. While the women on the panel generally liked the female applicant’s proposal, one white man called it “too ambitious.” The woman didn’t get the funding.

“All it takes, when funding is scarce, is one person raising one concern to knock someone out of first place,” says Coil, who was particularly disturbed at the fraught stereotypes involved in dismissing a woman of color for being “ambitious.”

With movements like #MeToo and #EqualPay putting fresh attention on how women fare in US workplaces, gender equity is getting renewed attention in a wide range of fields. In the sciences, where in some disciplines women hold between just 10 and 20 percent of jobs, there’s been a growing recognition for years – backed by numerous studies – of the biases and barriers that can hinder women’s advancement. As awareness and attention has increased, so too have efforts to address not just sexual harassment, which many women scientists face, but also the subtle but deeply entrenched ways in which women – and minorities – find their work devalued. But in many institutions, women still struggle to get male peers and supervisors to acknowledge the problem. 

“The gender biases that pervade all of society can be especially extreme in all fields of endeavor where brilliance is the main idea,” says Risa Wechsler, a cosmologist at Stanford University. Dr. Wechsler cites a 2015 study in which practitioners in different fields were asked whether intrinsic ability or hard work was required for success. “The more brilliant you think you have to be, the more the field is populated by white guys,” she says.

That notion was memorably articulated by Lawrence Summers over a decade ago when he was president of Harvard University and speculated – in widely disparaged remarks – that perhaps “issues of intrinsic aptitude” were responsible for the relatively low number of women in top positions in science. It surfaced again this past summer in the internal memo written by a Google software engineer in which he claimed that “biological differences” are a major reason why there are so few women in tech.

No data have borne out those claims. Numerous studies, meanwhile, have shown ways in which women tend to be viewed differently, even if they have the same accomplishments as male colleagues.

Thierry Gouegnon/Reuters

Dr. Celine Nobah (r.) of the Association of Women Researchers in the Ivory Coast (AFEMC-CI) stands beside a canoe as she conducts research to ensure that fish in the lagoon Ebrie are safe for consumption, in Nbadon, Abidjan on March 4, 2013. In the United States, women of color face a 'double jeopardy' in many fields of science, reporting feeling unsafe both because of their gender and their race.

In one 2012 study, faculty were asked to rate the application materials of students applying for a laboratory manager position, who were randomly assigned either a male or female name. They consistently rated the “male” students as more competent than the identical “female” students, and selected a higher starting salary and offered more mentoring to the male student.

Another study found that letters of recommendation for male and female medical faculty differed significantly when it came to the terms used to describe the candidates, the length, and the doubts raised.

Change comes slowly

A big frustration, say many women scientists who have been involved in efforts to fight biases, is the unwillingness on the part of many men to acknowledge the problem. It’s a challenge that may be particularly acute in the sciences, they say, because it attacks such a central core of the discipline: the notion of objectivity.

“If you think you’re objective, and your work is based on objectivity, and there’s this myth of meritocracy, then of course you’re not going to want to hear this,” says Coil.

And almost every woman scientist has had to contend with the widespread notion that she must have been hired mostly because of her gender.  

“Women are sometimes explicitly told that, and people of color are definitely told that – that you only got in because you’re a minority,” says Coil. “All it takes is someone saying that to you once in a year to make you question yourself. But what data shows is that on the whole, the bar is higher” for women and minorities.

In terms of barriers, and implicit biases, the same issues emerge repeatedly: Women are asked to do more “soft” tasks – serve on more committees, mentor more students, be “the” female representative. But they don’t get credit for those activities in fields where research and publishing is prized. Women who co-author publications don’t get credit for their work, while male co-authors do. Women are less likely to be nominated for awards or considered for leadership positions or invited to present at conferences.

“So much of your reputation and advancement is based on invitation and recommendation,” says Wechsler. “It’s essentially an old boys’ club.”

But as awareness of these biases increases, things are also starting to change, some women say – maybe not broadly, but in pockets and bright spots at a range of institutions.

At the University of Michigan, many faculty are now required to take workshops that discuss unconscious bias and how to mitigate it. Among other things, search committees there now try to set out a specific list of what they’re looking for and what they want to prioritize before looking at applications. 

More science departments around the country are taking a hard look at how they evaluate applications and grants, and making sure they don’t just solicit a token woman or minority applicant, but have a significant number.

The Hubble Space Telescope has started randomizing its review process for applications to use the telescope, changing the order of names so that it’s not clear who the principal investigator is and using initials rather than first names. That has helped reduce the bias it used to have in which men had a higher rate of success with their applications than women.

After the 2016 election, a number of women came together to form “500 Women Scientists” – a grassroots group whose initial goal was to get 500 signatures to an open letter reaffirming their commitment to speaking up for science as well as underrepresented groups. They passed that goal within hours, and now have over 20,000 women who have signed in support, many of whom participate in local “pods” that offer support to each other and take on activism in various ways.

“Change that is sustainable and sticks takes a long time,” says Jane Zelikova, one of the co-founders of 500 Women Scientists, who says she oscillates between being angry and being optimistic. She recently managed to use data to convince a male engineer, who had been skeptical of bias, that asking questions in a different way really can make a difference. “It’s a slow process,” Dr. Zelikova says. “He still pushes back on other things.”

Scientists too

More overt harassment, too, is getting attention in the sciences – including the role it can play in discouraging promising women from certain careers or driving them out of their field.

Two years before the allegations against Harvey Weinstein helped launch the MeToo movement, the astronomy field was shaken when one of its biggest stars – Geoffrey Marcy, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley – had to resign from his job after multiple accusations of sexual harassment from students, stretching back over decades.

This past fall, another well known scientist – geologist David Marchant – was found by Boston University to have sexually harassed a graduate student during field research in Antarctica. He is appealing his termination, though his initial appeal was denied.

Two ingredients make the academic sciences, in particular, ripe for sexual harassment, says Meg Urry, an astrophysicist at Yale University and a former president of the American Astronomical Society. Many of the fields are heavily male-dominated, and there’s a significant hierarchy and power imbalance. “That puts young women in a vulnerable position when they enter a science,” Dr. Urry says.

'What about all the women ...?'

During the fallout from the Geoff Marcy case, one of the things that most bothered Urry was the number of astronomers who talked about what a loss to the field Dr. Marcy’s resignation was. “I’m thinking, what about all the women who didn’t contribute because they left the field” due to Marcy, says Urry. “For every one of these serial predators there are a dozen, maybe several dozen, women whose trajectories have been stopped or badly altered. That’s a huge impact.”

A study published last summer that looked at workplace atmosphere for women in astronomy found that nearly 40 percent of women reported being verbally harassed within the last five years, and 9 percent reported being physically harassed. The problem was particularly acute for women of color, of whom 40 percent reported feeling unsafe at work within the last five years. 

“They faced a double jeopardy, not only feeling unsafe because of gender, but also because of race,” says Christina Richey, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist who was one of the authors of the study. “Talk about death by 1,000 cuts. For them it was 2,000 cuts.”

Gilda Barabino, a chemical engineer and dean of the Grove School of Engineering at The City College of New York, says she’s had situations in which white women have dismissed her experience as an African-American woman in the sciences as less important, saying that “gender trumps race” when it comes to discrimination – not something she has always found to be true.

But Dr. Barabino has also found some promising solutions – particularly in the support women can give each other. Years ago, she and a social scientist used a National Science Foundation grant to bring a cohort of women of color in engineering together. Over the course of several years, those 20 women not only came together in the circumstances Barabino organized, but continued to support each other, call each other, and even collaborate on work. Many years later, she says, many have moved into leadership roles and at least 18 are still very active professionally.

“Everywhere I go I make a suggestion to come together as a group,” says Barabino. “I speak to the power of sharing stories and having supportive networks.” When she went through school and rose in her career, there were no support networks, Barabino adds, and she was mostly working just to ensure professional survival.

Now, “there’s a glimmer of hope and some light when you see that the numbers are increasing, or are more than when I went through,” she says. “At the same time, I don’t see systemic change happening.”

At the Fairmont San Francisco, the well-heeled visitors arriving through the front door aren’t the only guests staying at the five-star hotel. On the hotel’s rooftop terrace, above the rush and bustle of San Francisco’s city streets, a fainter hum can be heard – the buzz of bees.

Beekeeper Spencer Marshall pries open a white, wooden box that houses thousands of bees and pulls out a frame that vibrates with life. The makeshift hive sits nestled among garden boxes overflowing with lavender and rosemary, a delicate contrast to the jagged skyscrapers that loom in the distance.

Bees have become more commonplace residents at hotels, especially in San Francisco where ten hotels maintain hives on terraces and rooftops. Urban beekeeping allows hotels to market sustainability, harvest honey, and raise awareness for the particular challenges bees face. Rooftop apiaries have been popping up across the country in the past decade, from San Francisco to Chicago to New York.

“When companies have honeybees, it helps in a few different ways ... by bringing awareness to the fact that our bees need flowers that are clean and free of pesticides in order to feed and that our bees need habitat,” says Becky Masterman, extension educator and program director of the University of Minnesota Bee Squad in St. Paul. 

Bailey Bischoff/The Christian Science Monitor

Beekeeper Spencer Marshall of the Fairmont hotel holds a frame covered in honeybees, pointing out various details including a mite and a queen honeybee.

Urban beekeeping has been on the rise for the past decade, says Dr. Masterman. “The popularity has been growing ever since the news started reporting high numbers of bee losses in 2006,” she says. That year, honeybee losses increased dramatically, up to 30 to 90 percent of each hive, due to the presence of mites, destructive pesticides, declining habitat, and a mysterious phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder, where worker bees fled hives in devastating numbers.

Bees are an essential element of agricultural economies, especially in California, which produces one-third of the vegetables in the United States and two-thirds of its fruits and nuts, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture.  

Wild bee species play a significant role in this process but the US agricultural industry has come to rely on commercial bees for much of its pollination needs. At pollination time, commercial beekeepers provide truckloads of European honeybees, Apis mellifera, which are not native to North America. Persistent losses of these commercial hives could eventually be felt at the grocery store.

“The costs of our fabulous fruits and vegetables that the bees pollinate could potentially go up over time because the pollination costs are higher,” says Masterman.

Mr. Marshall has served as the Fairmont’s bee whisperer since 2010. Initially doubtful that the urban location would offer enough resources to sustain the bees, he says he has been pleasantly surprised with the results. Each year, he harvests 1,000 pounds of honey at the Fairmont, which currently hosts nine hives and up to half a million bees. “It was an experiment and the experiment was a total success. These bees do incredible,” says Marshall.

For the hotels, the bees offer more than honey. More guests are looking for places to stay that are committed to sustainability and locally sourced food, says Melissa Farrar, director of marketing communications for the Fairmont. The hotel chain plays host to 40 honeybee apiaries and wild bee hotels around the world. At the Fairmont San Francisco, harvested honey adds flavor to salad dressings, ice cream, and honey madeleines at the hotel.

Just down the hill from the Fairmont is the Clift hotel, which introduced bees to its 16-story-high roof in 2016. The Clift, which hosts three hives on its rooftop, features honey with cheese and charcuterie board appetizers, denoted by a small depiction of a bee next to each item on the menu.

Bailey Bischoff/The Christian Science Monitor

Honeybees zip around the roof of the Clift hotel on which sits three honeybee hives. The Clift is part of a network of 9 San Francisco hotels that share apiary resources, best practices, and a beekeeper.

Beekeeping also gives hotels the opportunity to work together. Michael Pace, area general manager at the Clift, has since helped bring beekeeping to other hotels through the Hotel Council of San Francisco’s sustainability committee. Currently, nine participating hotels share resources, best practices, and a beekeeper. “On the street level, all the hotels are competing with each other, ... but then on the rooftop,” says Mr. Pace, “we’re all sharing resources ... and we help each other out.”

Both the Fairmont and the Clift offer tours of hive spaces to interested guests, some of whom start their own hives. The Fairmont has also hosted school groups from preschoolers to high school photography classes. “[G]iving back what we’ve taken away is really the goal. [At] hotels – you have so many people coming and going – it’s a great platform to educate guests,” says Ms. Farrar.

For Pace, the beekeeping is part of a larger trend toward more sustainable, environmentally aware travel. “Maybe we can just do one little thing as hoteliers to ... help people appreciate that nature’s important, that we take care of the environment. And if you want to eat fruits and veggies ... you need bees in the background.”

AP Photo

A demonstrator in Lima, Peru, holds a sign that reads in Spanish "Let them all go," during a protest against the country's political class, a day after the March 21 resignation of Peru's President Pedro Pablo Kuczynsk.

In mid-April, leaders of the Western Hemisphere, including President Trump, are due to meet at a summit with the theme “democratic governance against corruption.”

The host nation, Peru, will have much to offer on that topic.

Last week the Peruvian president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, resigned over corruption charges. He was forced out by crusading prosecutors, aggressive journalists, and a rising middle class that wants honesty and transparency in their elected leaders. The new president, Martin Vizcarra, vowed to deal with corruption “at any cost.”

“Don’t lose faith in our institutions,” pleaded Mr. Vizcarra, the former vice president who has a relatively clean reputation. “Let us show you that Peru is bigger than its problems.”

Peruvians are indeed “bigger” in making demands for clean governance. The disapproval rating of Peru’s Congress is 81 percent. And almost all of the country’s leading politicians and former presidents have been linked to a scandal sweeping much of Latin America. Construction giant Odebrecht of Brazil has confessed to paying bribes or giving illegal campaign money to politicians in at least eight countries from Argentina to Mexico.

The mass exposure of corruption, which began in 2014 with Brazil’s probe of contract rigging at its state-run oil company Petrobras, has led to reforms in several countries and other actions that suggest the region wants to tighten up the rule of law and end a culture of impunity.

Companies are beefing up their anti-corruption efforts, for example, by hiring more “risk compliance” officials. And more citizens, now aware of how bribery influences infrastructure projects, are holding officials to account for government spending.

“[M]any countries have taken important and public steps to acknowledge and address the scandal,” said David Malpass, undersecretary for international affairs at the United States Treasury in February. “If the public reckoning taking place in several countries helps lead to stronger checks and balances, it will ultimately strengthen democratic foundations.” Any strengthening of institutions against corruption, he added, will require the “integrity and the faith of the public.”

Such public sentiment is reflected in a 2017 survey by the watchdog group Transparency International. The poll found 70 percent of people in the region say they are willing to get involved in fighting corruption.

At the coming Summit of the Americas, all the world may witness how much leaders in the region are responding to the Odebrecht scandal – and to people’s demands for openness and equality before the law in governance.