Miss USA 2013: Top 6 Questions & Answers (+video)

The Miss USA pageant doesn't ask contestants to perform a talent or support a charity. But it does ask some challenging questions of its contestants. What did the celebrity judges ask the final six contestants – and how did the women answer?

(AP Photo/Jeff Bottari)
Miss Connecticut Erin Brady is crowned the winner of the Miss USA 2013 pageant by Nana Meriwether, Sunday, June 16, 2013, in Las Vegas.

1. Moms at work

Judge Nene Leakes (of "The Real Housewives of Atlanta") asked: "A recent report shows that in 40 percent of American families with children, women are the primary earners yet they continue to earn less than men. What does this say about society?”

Miss Utah, Marissa Powell replied:

“I think we can relate this back to education and how we are continuing to try to strive to . . . figure out how to create jobs right now. That is the biggest problem and, I think, especially the men are seen as the leaders of this, so we need to try to figure out how to create education better so we can solve this problem.”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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