Good things happen in India when women are in charge, Stephanie Nolen reports for the Toronto Globe & Mail.

The trouble is, that's too rarely the case.

New research has “found that teenage girls — and boys — in villages run by women come to believe that girls should stay in school longer, marry later, get jobs (that they choose themselves) and spend less time on domestic work — and the change was driven by the "role model effect," of seeing a woman exercise power, Nolen writes.

However, despite a law passed in the 1990s to reserve a third of the positions on village councils for women, in many cases men continue to buck the system by ruling from behind the scenes, according to another study.

Moreover, other forms of egregious inequality — class and caste — are still a mammoth obstacle for Indian villages.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — Police in Malawi have caught a gang accused of terrorizing women wearing pants.

Local media reported that 15 men were arrested Wednesday for stripping women wearing pants, short skirts and leggings, in the capital Lilongwe. The women were in some cases stripped naked and groped.

There have been similar reports of attacks on women in the northern town of Mzuzu.

The city of Beit Shemesh has witnessed some ugly scenes in recent weeks.

First, ultra-Orthodox men sought to impose greater segregation between men and women in public, including men-only sidewalks and separate seating on buses. Then, when the national media descended, crowds reportedly hurled stones and abuse at television crews and police.

Thousands of Israelis responded with a mass rally, where ultra-Orthodox, liberal and secular expressed their anger at the rising current of extremism.

But the latest protest against sexism had an altogether funkier feel. Last weekend, Haaretz reported, some 250 women made their way to the city center to make their point via the medium of dance.