Women's rights a priority for Obama panel

— -- A new White House Council on Women and Girls is assessing every government agency to see if its programs do enough to benefit women. The first senior adviser on domestic violence and the first ambassador for women's issues around the globe are developing programs to prevent violence again women at home and abroad. First lady Michelle Obama is highlighting women's achievements, helping families and pushing girls to succeed.

The prospect of a woman in the Oval Office ended more than a year ago when Hillary Rodham Clinton conceded the Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama. But the women's groups who backed Clinton for president now say the man who vanquished her is running an administration more focused on women's issues and equality than any before it.

"This has been the most open White House to women's issues and groups," says Feminist Majority Foundation President Eleanor Smeal, a women's rights activist for four decades. "In the first six months, we have been brought in more than ever before. … It's very impressive."

Says Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW): "We clearly have a friend in the White House."

Last November, 56% of female voters chose Obama over Republican Sen. John McCain at the polls. The Obama administration's outreach to women — more than 60% of the nation's voters and now nearly half the nation's workers — started right away.

Just nine days into office, the president made a show of signing his first piece of legislation: the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act.

The law negated a ruling by the Supreme Court against a woman who had sued after discovering that her employer had paid her male colleagues more for years.

Signing the bill before the cameras in the White House's East Room, Obama said he did it to honor "women like my grandmother who worked in a bank all her life" and to lay the groundwork for "my daughters, and all those who will come after us, because I want them to grow up in a nation that values their contributions, where there are no limits to their dreams and they have opportunities their mothers and grandmothers never could have imagined."