Young Women

Like a lot of young women, Kelsey Webb, 25, has been off and on birth control pills since she was 18. Every time she started taking them, she gained 5 to 10 pounds. "My normal weight is around 125 pounds. On the pill, I would get up to 130 or 135," says Webb, who is 5 feet, 5 inches tall. FOR THE RECORD: Birth control pills: A package of articles about birth control pills in the March 21 Health & Wellness section said Dr. Ricardo Azziz, an obstetrician and gynecologist specializing in endocrine disorders, is president of the Medical College of Georgia.

Kathleen Dier-Saltz and her husband, Larry, visited Portugal in September to celebrate his 60th birthday. In Braga, near the country's northwestern corner, the couple happened upon groups of college-age students, some dressed in elaborate uniforms. As Dier-Saltz watched the students, these two young women took a backward glance. The West Hills resident used a Nikon D3000.

A study on how people use social networking websites such as Facebook confirms what many of us suspected. Women who post loads of photos of themselves on their sites are conveying some strong personal characteristics, according to new research. These women are more likely to base their self-worth on appearance and use social networking to compete for attention. The study involved 311 men and women with an average age of 23. In order to better understand aspects of social networking behavior, the researchers looked at the amount of time subjects spent managing profiles, the number of photos they shared, the size of their online networks and how promiscuous they were in terms of “friending” behavior.

WASHINGTON -- President Obama on Friday castigated the Republican Party for what he said were dated views onwomen's healthissues, saying the recent debate over contraceptives was "like being in a time machine. "  Speaking at a women's conference organized by his campaign, Obama called the issue "illuminating. " "Republicans in Congress were going so far as to say an employer should be able to have a say in the healthcare decisions of its female employees," Obama said. "I'm always puzzled by this -- this is a party that says it prides itself on being rabidly anti-regulation.

Despite its rather tiresome and typographically unwieldy title,ABC's "Don't Trust the B - in Apartment 23" is among the least raunchy of this year's super-sized batch of female-centric comedies. It is also one of the funniest, which should make a point about the tantalizing though too often abusive relationship between shock and humor, and also the comedic value of the word "vagina," which will never be as high as the various slang terms for the word "penis. " (It may just be a syllable thing.)

Zsuzsa Bakonyi's biggest challenge as a nanny in suburban Indianapolis was trying to keep a straight face. She found it amusing that Americans fretted over foods and fitness, yet loathed getting out of their cars. There were drive-through banks, drive-through restaurants and even movie theaters where you watched from the parking lot.

Laura Linney's brief introduction to "South Riding," the three-part "Masterpiece Classic" series that debuts Sunday, includes an explanation of "the surplus two million"— women who were left without the numerical possibility of a mate after an equal number of British men were killed in World War I. Technically one of these women, writer Winifred Holtby we are told, "refused to be surplus" and at the end of her all too brief literary career (she died...

Nearly 70 young Vietnamese women swept past in groups of five, twirling and posing like fashion models, all competing for the hand of a Taiwanese man who had paid a matchmaking service about $6,000 for the privilege of marrying one of them. Sporting jeans and a black T-shirt, 20-year-old Le Thi Ngoc Quyen paraded in front of the stranger, hoping that he would select her. "I felt very nervous," she recalled recently as she described the scene. "But he chose me, and I agreed to marry him right away."

The streets of Juarez are swallowing the young and pretty. Monica Alanis, an 18-year-old college freshman, never came home from her exams. That was more than four months ago. Across town, 17-year-old Brenda Ponce didn't return from a job-hunting trip downtown. That was a year ago. Hilda Rivas, 16, was also last spotted downtown. That was 17 months ago. Two dozen teenage girls and young women have gone missing in this violent border city in the last year and half, stirring dark memories of the killings of hundreds of women that made Ciudad Juarez infamous a decade ago. The disappearances, which include two university students and girls as young as 13, have some crime-novel touches: mysterious dropped calls, messages left by third parties and unsubstantiated reports of the women being kept at a house.

Fewer U.S. women ages 15 to 24 are receiving reproductive healthcare, according to a new study. This includes services such as Pap tests, pregnancy tests, contraception prescriptions, tests for sexually transmitted disease and other gynecological and obstetric care. Researchers used data from the National Survey of Family Growth, which included 4,421 young women polled in 2002 or between 2006 and 2008. Almost 60% of young women had received reproductive healthcare within the last year, but use has fallen by 8% between the two time periods.

What a girl wants: Maybe romance. Marriage would be great. Kids? Awesome. But increasingly these days, a top priority for young women is also their careers, so much so that they're surpassing even their male counterparts in their desire to make a buck. Two-thirds of gals aged 18 to 34 said that advancing in their profession and making good money was very important, if not one of the most important things in their lives. Less than six in 10 young men said the same, according to a report this week from the Pew Research Center . Fifteen years ago, only 56% of young women felt the same way, compared to nearly the same number of men. Among older women, 42% now value their careers highly, compared to just 26% in 1997.

Despite its rather tiresome and typographically unwieldy title,ABC's "Don't Trust the B - in Apartment 23" is among the least raunchy of this year's super-sized batch of female-centric comedies. It is also one of the funniest, which should make a point about the tantalizing though too often abusive relationship between shock and humor, and also the comedic value of the word "vagina," which will never be as high as the various slang terms for the word "penis. " (It may just be a syllable thing.)

NEW YORK - It started with a story for a magazine. In 2008, during a trip to Japan, New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear decided to write about cellphone novels, a phenomenon - involving young women writing largely for young women, posting fiction from their phones to media-sharing websites - that was then shaking up Japanese publishing. "It seemed like a great way to explore the literary culture," she remembers, although by the time she got home, the parameters had shifted, with the effects of the global economic crisis rippling through the American book industry.

Five men were charged with murder Saturday in the abduction, torture and killing of two Michigan women. The victims -- 18-year-old Abreeya Brown and 22-year-old Ashley Conaway -- were taken Feb. 28 from their home in Hamtramck at gunpoint and were stuffed in the trunk of a car, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said in a statement Saturday. The young women were found March 25 in a shallow grave in a wooded area of northwest Detroit, both bound and shot in the head. The five charged with their murder, all from Detroit, are Brandon Cain, 26, Miguel Rodriguez, 24, Reginald Brown, 24, Jeremy Brown, 19, and Brian Lee, 25. Neither of the suspects named Brown are related to victim Abreeya Brown.

Two more young women who disappeared in the mid-1980s and were feared to have fallen victim to the drug-fueled "Speed Freak Killers" have been identified from the gruesome trove of remains unearthed last month at an abandoned well near Stockton, the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Department said Friday. The two teens bring to four the number of victims identified from a toll believed to be at least a dozen and perhaps as many as 72, according to the death row inmate who is guiding authorities to the crude graves.

The pair of college friends can't suppress a conspiratorial giggle when they talk about the passion that's consuming them. "It's an amazing feeling," says Nawal, as her close friend and fellow schemer, Lina, listens closely in a cafe here in the Syrian capital. "It's like you've broken all the injustice and fear. " Some college students gate-crash parties. These two young women ditch classes and roam the streets of Damascus and its suburbs, searching for protests calling for the ouster of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

An early menopause is often in store for women under age 40 who have chemotherapy for breast cancer. Women can choose to have some eggs removed in advance of the treatment in order to preserve some chance of having a baby later, but that can be a difficult and complicated process. Now, however, there may be a medication to treat these women to avoid premature menopause. A study published Tuesday found a drug called triptorelin (a hormone analogue, which mimics the actions of a hormone)

What a girl wants: Maybe romance. Marriage would be great. Kids? Awesome. But increasingly these days, a top priority for young women is also their careers, so much so that they're surpassing even their male counterparts in their desire to make a buck. Two-thirds of gals aged 18 to 34 said that advancing in their profession and making good money was very important, if not one of the most important things in their lives. Less than six in 10 young men said the same, according to a report this week from the Pew Research Center . Fifteen years ago, only 56% of young women felt the same way, compared to nearly the same number of men. Among older women, 42% now value their careers highly, compared to just 26% in 1997.

The No. 1 song in the United States, according to iTunes' singles chart and the Billboard Hot 100, is "We Are Young" by Fun., a New York-based pop-rock group with a flair for anthemic choruses and a precious approach toward typography. (Yes, the period is part of the band's name.) As the latest entrant in a hit parade otherwise dominated by up-tempo dance music, "We Are Young" feels pretty anomalous; it comes from a different, decidedly slower place than Rihanna's "We Found Love" or "Sexy and I Know It" by LMFAO.

The gig: Jackie Sorkin, the self-appointed "Candy Queen," founded the event-planning business the Hollywood Candy Girls in 2009. Working alongside a cadre of young women (and one Eye Candy Boy), she's designed hundreds of sweets-centric parties for the likes of Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry and the only celebrity to ever leave her starstruck, Oprah Winfrey. Although Sorkin is tight-lipped about numbers, she said her profit has grown each year. "People think this is all magic," said Sorkin, 32. "They forget that it's a business and you have to work really, really hard.