• There are currently 17 countries with women as head of government, head of state, or both, which, according to the UN, has more than doubled since 2005.

• Of the 157 million women currently living in the US, nearly 85.4 million (54%) are mothers.

• Generally considered to be the world's first novel, The Tale of Genji was written in Japan around AD 1000 by Murasaki Shikibu.

• In the culture of the Tiwi of northern Australian, all females must be married at all times.

• The first female governor of a US state was Wyoming governor Nellie Tayloe Ross, elected in 1924. Wyoming was also the first state to give women the right to vote, enacting women's suffrage in 1869.

• Jeannette Rankin, a Republican from Montana, was the first woman elected to serve in the US Congress. She was also the only member of Congress to vote against entering the second world war.

• The probability of a woman giving birth to a baby girl instead of a baby boy increases significantly the nearer the mother lives to the equator, research has shown.

• In 2008, US army general Ann E Dunwoody became the first women in US military history to reach the rank of four-star general.

• The sign sometimes used to represent the female sex (♀) is also the symbol for the planet Venus, and is believed to be a stylized representation of the Roman goddess Venus's hand mirror.

• Mary, Queen of Scots, was said have been a golf enthusiast, and possibly coined the term "caddie", from the word "cadet".