Tennis player Iga Swiatek has been leading the sport for quite some time, holding the top women’s ranking for well over a year straight. During her matches, she has frequently handed out bagels and breadsticks on the court. These food items aren’t literal, but can instead be found in the scores of her outmatched opponents. A bagel is when a player is shut out in a set 6-0, while a breadstick is when they only manage to grab a single game, losing 6-1.

As a result, fans have recently taken to talking about Iga’s Bakery. Charmingly, the star herself is unwilling to engage with it:

“I don’t want to talk about the bakery. Twitter can talk about it, but I’m just going to be focused on tennis.”

It’s admirable that Swiatek doesn’t want to engage with this, but the rest of us can certainly marvel at her dominance.

Last Thursday, Stéphanie Frappart made history by serving as the first female head referee in a men’s World Cup match. She actually led a trio of women, who were served as the first all-female on-field crew in the men’s World Cup. The best part? It was really no big deal.

In taking charge for Germany’s showdown with Costa Rica in the final round of games in Group E, Frappart became the first woman to officiate in a men’s World Cup and it felt decidedly normal.

Frappart is used to making history: she was the first woman to referee in men’s Ligue 2, then Ligue 1 in France and the first woman to referee in the Champions League and Uefa Super Cup.

In recent years, more and more women have served as coaches and officials in men’s sports, and it’s an excellent thing to see.

Last month, on Southwest flight #3658, Captain Holly Petitt and First Officer Keely Petitt made history. With Holly at the helm, and Keely acting as her co-pilot, they became the airline’s first-ever mother-daughter pilot duo.

Holly began her career as a flight attendant, before deciding she’d rather be a pilot. I have to imagine that is not a transition that’s made very often. Keely, meanwhile, knew she wanted to fly in her mother’s…wing…steps (?) from a very early age. Now, they’re plying the skies together.

Back in 2018, New Zealand MP Julie Anne Genter cycled to the hospital 42 weeks into her pregnancy, to have labo(u)r induced. That was impressive, but last weekend, she topped it. This time around, while actively in labo(u)r, she made the trip via bicycle again. From her Instagram post:

My contractions weren’t that bad when we left at 2am to go to the hospital – though they were 2-3 min apart and picking up in intensity by the time we arrived 10 minutes later.

Now that is some real bad-assery.

Dr. Khama Ennis is the chief of emergency medicine at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Massachusetts. Despite that impressive accomplishment, she’s had to put up with far too much nonsense over the years.

Once, as I walked past a patient’s room, I heard the family berating their nurse, demanding to be seen by a doctor because they had been waiting for hours. I popped in to reassure them that I was, in fact, their doctor. I’d already been in the room several times. I had done a rectal exam. All I could think was, “Why would you let me do that if you didn’t think I was your doctor?”

I wonder how much of what Dr. Ennis has experienced can be attributed to racism, how much to sexism, and how much to a combination of the two. But mostly, I marvel at how she powers through.

In the 1970s, Rosemary Mariner finished college at just 19, in order to become part of the first group of women to earn their wings as United States Naval Aviators. Not long after, she became the very first female jet pilot in the American military. She was far from the last. At her funeral last week, a missing woman salute was performed by an entirely female flyover crew.