Strong. Smart. Bold.

These three small words ignited a movement over 100 years ago to educate girls and prepare them to be self-sufficient and successful women.

Today, Girls Inc. is a leading youth development organization that inspires all girls to be strong, smart, and bold through life-changing programs and experiences that help girls navigate gender, economic, and social barriers. Research-based curricula, delivered by trained, mentoring professionals in a positive all-girl environment equip girls to achieve academically; lead healthy and physically active lives; manage money; navigate media messages; and discover an interest in science, technology, engineering, and math.

Across the United States and Canada there are over 80 affiliate Girls Inc. organizations that are changing the lives of the girls in their communities. Here in the Big Apple, Girls Inc. of New York City (GINYC) alone reaches over 3,000 girls at 15 sites across the five boroughs.

This month in honor of Women’s History month GINYC has teamed up with eight amazing partners to inspire women to be strong, smart, and bold too! All month long we have been raffling off amazing prizes on our newly updated Facebook page to raise awareness about what we do while giving our supporters the chance to win prizes that will leave them stronger, smarter, and bolder than ever before!  

STRONG

Girls Inc. of New York City encourages girls to be physically active and healthy by participating in both traditional and nontraditional sports. In our Sporting Chance programs girls build a foundation for enjoying physical activities and adventure throughout their lives like our track team whose motto is “Prepared, Positive, Committed.” These three simple words provide the foundation for the girls as they build confidence through running and leadership.

To encourage women to unleash their STRONG we raffled off free gym passes to New York Sports Club, a self-defense class from Female Awareness, and a Sole Sisterhood premium running t-Shirt from Run Girl Run.

SMART

Girls Inc. of New York City believes girls have the right to prepare for interesting work and economic independence! From coding their own websites to investing in the stock market and starting their own businesses like Tyra, one of our 6^th grade students who makes unique gifts and favors out of duct tape, we put girls on track for successful careers.

To encourage women to unleash their SMART we raffled off prizes to inspire women to find their inner entrepreneur like 3 months off Prosite.com where you can create and customize your own personal creative portfolio website, an art deco inspired necklace from women-run and owned online jewelry boutique Peppermint Chic, and original duct tape flowers pen’s from Tyra’s DT Arrangements.

BOLD

Girls Inc. of New York City knows a community of support goes a long way!

To encourage women to unleash their BOLD we are raffling off a number of prizes to our supporters this week to connect with us more deeply like a Girls Inc. of New York City tote bag and mug, free download of our anthem I AM ME (Strong, Smart, & Bold) and new dance remix by DJ Franchella, and two free tickets to a Girls Inc. of NYC wine tasting event at Moore Brothers Wine Company where you can mix and mingle with our Junior Board to learn more about what we do while you enjoy delicious wines.

It’s not too late to enter to win! Just visit us on Facebook to enter our BOLD sweepstakes and while you’re there take a minute to be inspired by our amazing programs and girls.

We know that advancing the rights of women and girls is a job that we cannot do alone and are forever thankful for each and every person who becomes part of our community by liking us on Facebook, following us on Twitter, subscribing to our YouTube channel, or signing up for our newsletter. These small but important actions go a long way to helping us inspire all girls to be strong, smart, and bold.

Together we know that we will create a world where every woman and girl can unleash her strong, smart, bold every day!

Photo via Girls Inc of New York City.

This post was originally published at AAUW and is cross-posted with permission.

Last week we celebrated the birthday of one of history’s greatest scientific minds, Albert Einstein. It is a perfect time to highlight a lesser-known side of Einstein: that he was an advocate for Jewish women scientists and a friend to AAUW.

The story begins on April 18, 1938, with a letter addressed to then-AAUW Director Kathryn McHale concerning a woman named Marietta Blau. The letter was signed Albert Einstein.

At this time, the women of AAUW were receiving numerous requests to help women academics who were trapped in Nazi-controlled countries. In 1941, spearheaded by International Relations Secretary Esther Brunauer, AAUW created the War Relief Committee to try to aid more than 100 women threatened by war and oppression, whether to support their research or to aid with immigration — which often meant finding them jobs in safe locations. The committee found an ally in Einstein, who had avoided Nazi persecution by leaving Germany and wanted to help scientists of Jewish descent do the same.

Blau was one such refugee, an Austrian physicist who was doing groundbreaking work in radioactivity. But, Einstein wrote, “She is of Jewish race and has therefore to leave Austria.” Brunauer wrote back, “We will do whatever we can.” However, there was little AAUW could do. Though Blau was able to escape to Mexico, she was unable to come to the United States until 1944.

Brunauer’s reply to Einstein also mentions Austrian physicist Lise Meitner. In 1939, chemist James Franck called Brunauer to say that Meitner had lost her research position because of her Jewish ethnicity. Brunauer wrote to Einstein along with several heads of colleges and chemistry departments informing them of Meitner’s plight.

There were no positions for Meitner in America, but she escaped to Stockholm for a lesser position than what she had before. But even without sufficient resources, she continued her research. In 1939, Meitner published her discovery of nuclear fission and changed science forever.

Though the War Relief Committee sometimes faced insurmountable challenges, there were successes too: AAUW International Fellowships were granted to refugees like chemist Gertrud Kornfeld and archaeologist Elisabeth Jastrow to help them continue their work.

Another success story is that of Hedwig Kohn, a prominent German physicist who was threatened with deportation to Poland, which in the words of Professor Rudolf Ladenburg, who advocated for Kohn tirelessly, meant “practically death.” With help from Hertha Sponer, herself a German refugee physicist aided by AAUW, Brunauer secured a position for Kohn at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. With only weeks to spare, Kohn was cleared to enter the United States.

These inspiring stories demonstrate AAUW members’ history of devotion to aiding women in need, as well as supporting the international scientific and research community. So today, as we remember Einstein’s contributions to science as the man who developed the theory of relativity, let’s also honor him for the part he played in the admirable efforts of the AAUW War Relief Committee.

Photo via AAUW.

This post is originally published at Changemakers and is cross-posted with permission.  It is the last post in a three-part series with the theme, “What is a challenge to the women in your community and what solution have you found from within your own context and resources to address that challenge?”

My colleague Panthea Lee told the following story at TEDxDumbo this fall. It is such a compelling human story at the intersection of technology, gender, and urbanity that I thought it should be shared in with the community of readers at She Will Innovate. Stay tuned to the TEDxDumbo website for the video of Panthea’s talk.

I get to work for a firm that is deeply interested in how to improve our urban environments. Specifically, we want to improve the interactions people have with the institutions that serve them, and in the process, improve the lived experience, both here in the United States and abroad.

We have at our disposal the technologies, relationships, and human capacity to make this happen. The city, for us, is opportunity.

But recently, we were reminded of just how vastly different the lived experience could be for residents, even of the same city.

Fatou, not her real name, is a bright young woman from Benin. Several years ago, an American preacher on mission in Benin offered to adopt Fatou and take her to America.

She, and her family, were overjoyed: maybe she would become a doctor, and would be able to send for the family in the future. Fatou moved in with the preacher and his wife in Queens, and they insisted she call them “mother” and “father.”

Fatou was pleased about this; she felt special, taken care of. They started her on English lessons to help her adjust to her adopted homeland, and to allow her to enroll in school, a longtime dream for Fatou.

But even from the outset, some things seemed strange to her. For the first few months, “to keep her safe,” her mother always held her by the wrist whenever they left the house.

Her belongings were regularly searched for any outside material, and, when found, were promptly thrown away. Once her English was good enough, she began working long hours at a school the family owned.

She was never enrolled in school herself, as had been promised, and when she inquired about her education, her new parents told her she was being ungrateful. The preacher, her adopted father, started doing “bad things” to her, acts she still struggles to talk about.

Fatou’s passport was taken from her “for safekeeping.” Once her visa expired, her adopted family refused to apply for another, thus entrapping Fatou, now an undocumented alien.

Although Fatou called her adopted caretakers “mother” and “father,” and attended church with them every Sunday, she also worked punishingly long hours every day, first at their school, then at home, when the preacher wanted her alone. The signs were clear: she was a victim of human trafficking.

In the year 2012, in the city of New York, stories like this are all too tragically common. Which begs the question: what does technology and empowerment mean to someone trapped in the equivalent of modern-day slavery?

When we think of City 2.0, many of us think improved services, technological innovation, and Smart Cities. There are many new tools that indeed comprise the new cityscape and help us in our day-to-day lives. These tools, however, did not help Fatou in hers; in fact, they often made life more difficult for her.

Services like HopStop or Google Maps help us plan our commutes and make sure we arrive at meetings on time. Fatou’s traffickers used these tools for another purpose: to make sure Fatou was home from work at exactly the time she was supposed to be.

Advancements in technology have accustomed us to cheap communication around the world, allowing us to connect with loved ones more easily and frequently than ever before. For Fatou, the ease of communication was stressful, as her family in Benin wondered why she was always so reluctant to call them.

The truth was that Fatou was ashamed, and she knew her family would be beside themselves if they knew what had happened to their daughter. Despite the ease of connection in the modern day, she wanted to disconnect instead.

And while many of us work to streamline the connections in civic service delivery –– standardizing data formats, making sure they are accessible across platforms and government agencies –– the thought of linked and trackable data was terrifying to Fatou. Every interaction with a formal institution was seen as a booby trap.

As an undocumented individual, Fatou was terrified that one look at her papers –– any of her papers –– would mean it was all over. Thus, whether it was not seeing a doctor when she got sick, or crossing to the street when she saw a police officer, Fatou was constantly trying to escape from connected and institutional service systems.

We are seeing women use technology at ever increasing rates, but what does it mean when the fundamental security, freedom, and dignity of the most vulnerable amongst us cannot be secured?

My firm got to know Fatou, and many others like her, through work we did recently with Safe Horizon, an amazing victims’ assistance agency here in NYC. When we think about how to provide women with the technology they need to exercise the leadership and change they want, let us remember who we are leaving out.

We have made great strides in data-driven urban planning, but as we imagine and build our way to smarter futures, we must remember that many still live “off the grid.” Thus, we must be imaginative and proactive in engaging with those who are not represented in data we have.

As humans, we are biased to look for information in places where information is quick to find and easy to work with—these days, that largely means digital and online.

Next time you’re looking at a dataset, beyond looking at the demographics that arerepresented, look for the gaps –– the gender ratio, the ethnicities, the age groups, the neighborhoods, the income levels that do not appear. Ask yourself: what, or who, might exist in the negative space?

Once you know what data or populations you are missing, find ways to get this information: to meaningfully help victims of human trafficking, for example, consider going to community organizations that have a history of serving these populations. Be forewarned: in the digital age, much of their data is not machine-readable.

You may need to pick up the phone or go to their office. While not the most efficient means, it will yield rich, useful insights about populations that are worth considering as we build our future.

A lot of our work at Reboot involves ethnographic research –– we listen to the stories of people who often do not get to tell their stories; we live where they do, and we sit and observe. Ethnography means literally “a portrait of people.”

By talking to thousands of people worldwide whose lived experiences are so different than our own, we have learned to recognize our own flawed assumptions, and to try and paint deeper, more accurate portraits of people, their situations, and their needs. We then take these portraits to policymakers who can act to improve their situations, or use them to design new services to help these oft-overlooked people get what they need.

Our ethnographic work has also taught us to see the gaps in our data-driven portraits of people and place, and to advocate for a more balanced approach to understanding each other and to build alternative futures. We now have the opportunity to determine what the cities of the future will stand for, and how they will treat their citizens, both women and men.

Through intentional, thoughtful, inclusive design, we can define the values that guide our cities and represent us as a people.

-

About Reboot:

Reboot is a service design firm that uses ethnographic approaches to help leading institutions develop solutions that improve lives and livelihoods.  Kate Krontiris serves as a Principal at the organization.

Image credit Daniel Milford Flathagen via the Creative Commons License.

This post is originally published at Changemakers and is cross-posted with permission.  It is the second post in a three-part series with the theme, “What is a challenge to the women in your community and what solution have you found from within your own context and resources to address that challenge?”

I recently had the pleasure of meeting 11-year-old Raven Holston-Turner. The day I met her, she had henna tattoos all over her hands and was handling a digital soldering iron.

A native of Detroit, Raven solders badges that light up, creates gigantic puppets, and sews Indian saris.  She says that when she first started soldering — at the Mt. Elliot Makerspace in the bottom of a local church — she couldn’t stop.  “I just kept soldering and soldering and soldering,” she said.  Raven thinks that the coolest thing she has ever made was an enormous puppet for Mardi Gras festival and while she is working on a robotic arm right now, her next project is going to be a remote-controllable RC car.

Among the things she learned from making these various inventions is patience: “something doesn’t just build itself overnight, you’ve got to build it yourself,” she says.  She’s also learned that if something breaks, you don’t just go buy something else.  “If you break it, you fix it.”  When I met Raven about a month ago, her dream was to study journalism at Harvard University. In her free time, she writes stories and reads books — oh, and takes for a ride in the park a bike that she constructed herself.  Even though she has now taught over 200 people how to solder and displayed her inventions across the United States, Raven says that her heroine is still her mom.

She’s not all that different from Kelvin Doe, even though he’s about 5 years older and from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

What is notable about Kelvin, aside from his sweet smile and humble personality, is the fact that he built an entire FM radio station and a generator all from spare parts.  When the generator is not being used to provide electricity to his home in Sierra Leone, it powers his radio broadcasts. Kelvin is a DJ — his professional name is “DJ Focus” — and he keeps a regular schedule of parties and events, for which he uses his custom-made music mixer, salvaged CD player, and hand-hacked antennna to make sure that the whole neighborhood can tune into the fun.  The community has come to expect regular radio content from DJ Focus, so he has hired a few of his friends to serve as reporters and station managers.  This cadre of crew members interviews fans at local sports games and manages operations for the station.

At some point in his development as an inventor, Kelvin got sick of paying for batteries, so he opened up one he had lying around to inspect the contents.  He saw various kinds of metal and some acid, and decided he could replicate the mechanism himself.  After scrounging for the component parts in the garbage bins by his house, Kelvin dumped the materials in a tin container, let it dry, and secured entire thing with tape.  After a few attempts, he had successfully created his own battery.  Kelvin’s mom is certainly grateful, since it is the voltage from this battery that keeps her mobile phone fully charged.

I had the opportunity to get to know Kelvin and Raven when they were invited to present their inventions at the World Maker Faire this September (you can watch Kelvin, Raven, and their peers describe their inventions here).  Kelvin’s visit was facilitated through Global Minimum, an organization that launched a national high school innovation challenge for which Kelvin and his teammates were among the winners.

The World Maker Faire is a two-day event that convenes “makers” from all over the earth to show off the useful, kooky, colorful, technical, and jaw-dropping contraptions that they have come up with.  “Invention, creativity, and resourcefulness” are the values that drive its creed and evidence of that can be found in every demo booth, populated by participants who represent a rainbow of ages, ethnicities, genders, talents, and nationalities.

What binds these individuals together, however, is a deep sense of pride in being a maker.  These are people who see a need for something in their own lives — or the lives of their neighbors, or schoolmates, or industry peers — and instead of complaining, or buying something, they make it.  They make alternative energy, and bicycles, and computers, and crafts, and food, and furniture, and GPS devices, and robots, and tools, and toys, and wearable devices, and magic.  They make these things from the parts they have around them, or from ideas they brainstorm with friends, or from inspiration they find online.  They make their inventions individually and in groups, at school and at home, with all the perfect equipment or with just the bare minimum.  They think into the future for the rest of us, and they help us realize that we need not be bound by the constraints we imagine for the world.

Raven, Kelvin, and their peers are scientists, engineers, and artists and they represent what we aspire for future generations of young people: that they may be “makers” of whatever craft they pursue, that they may have access to the resources that will fuel their creativity, and that they may flourish in a world that realizes their talents and puts their capabilities to full use.

If you enjoyed this blog post, make sure you share you join the discussion with our Thought Leader Kate Krontiris in the Speak Up Space.

Reboot is a service design firm that uses ethnographic approaches to help leading institutions develop solutions that improve lives and livelihoods.  Kate Krontiris serves as a Principal at the organization.  Prior to Reboot, Kate built a portfolio of work around judicial innovation at Google Ideas, a new think/do tank that explores the role that technology can play in tackling some of the toughest human challenges. In 2010, she led a team of US Department of State and NGO professionals to develop the concept of “mobile justice,” using connection technologies to link survivors of sexual violence to judicial systems.

Photo credit ericskiff via the Creative Commons License.

This post is originally published at Changemakers and is cross-posted with permission.  It is the first post in a three-part series with the theme, “What is a challenge to the women in your community and what solution have you found from within your own context and resources to address that challenge?”

A reminder from the field: Always test assumptions.

Earlier this year, alongside a colleague from the Global Health Project at the MIT Sloan School of Management, I worked to determine how LifeSpring, a maternal health hospital in Hyderabad, India, might utilize mobile technology to gather data about its outreach efforts.

In the past few years, many mobile-based solutions have been developed to support health workers in low-resource contexts. (Some are better than others.)

Many at LifeSpring, including outreach workers themselves, agree that the hospital could benefit from digitally collecting information about its clients. These records could help assess the effectiveness of outreach efforts by capturing indicators, such as the number of women who visit for prenatal care—a key goal of communications campaigns.

It might have been a good idea but, for some reason, nobody was very excited about trying it. The reason: Most existing mobile health (mhealth) solutions are built on SMS (short message services, or simply text message) platforms, and LifeSpring was not confident about its outreach workers’ ability to use text messaging – or even about their ability to navigate and comprehend a text-based data collection system.

Even with the possibility of visual and/or audio prompts within a Hindi- or Telugu-language platform, the hospital was skeptical.

But technological capacity and textual literacy are not new concerns in mhealth, and LifeSpring nevertheless wanted us to explore the feasibility of a mobile solution to support its outreach efforts. To do so, we needed to better understand the intended users of a mobile data collection program.

Outreach workers are mostly middle-aged women who visit low-income neighborhoods to share information about LifeSpring Hospital with potential customers and check in on pregnant women that are due to deliver soon. We needed better intelligence about these women’s needs, behaviors, and capacities related to their responsibilities and to their use of technology.

We needed to better understand the skills and activities required of them in their roles as outreach workers, the data they currently collect, and their opinions about how technology may improve or hinder their work. We thus shadowed the outreach workers and conducted in-depth interviews with them.

Synthesis of these interviews in aggregate, as well as interviews with organizational stakeholders, was also done to help us understand Lifespring more broadly, including its capacity and will to implement a mobile solution.

One user we spoke to was a woman we will call Pooja. Having been with LifeSpring since its founding some seven years ago, she rotates among 25 different colonies (neighborhoods) associated with five different branches of the hospital, spending most of her time out of the hospital, interacting with new and returning customers. She returns daily to the hospital to share information with nurses and assist with customers in labor.

Pooja, like other outreach workers, has not received formal training for her position; rather, she has learned on the job, from other workers. Pooja is fluent in spoken Telugu, Hindi, Urdu, and reads and writes in English.

She is not unique: many workers we spoke with could also converse in three or four languages, and almost all of them write in English. In spite of this, Pooja and her fellow outreach workers were described by their Lifespring colleagues as low-literacy.

Pooja owns a basic Nokia mobile phone, which she uses mostly for personal communications, but she also uses it to contact her customers. She only uses the phone’s calling function and does not text message, although she says she would be willing to learn.

Based on what Pooja and some fellow workers said about their existing mobile habits, and what her hospital colleagues assumed about outreach workers like her, it seemed that LifeSpring’s outreach program was ill-suited for a mhealth solution. The major barriers, according to both groups, would be outreach workers’ low-literacy and lack of use of phone features beyond voice calls.

I am convinced that the most useful thing we did in this project was to test these assumptions.

We got in touch with Dimagi, a firm that develops user-friendly mobile data collection tools. With their help, we loaded a demo application onto basic mobile phones.

The SMS-based application had a series of Hindi-language forms with visual prompts designed for low-literacy users, and we proceeded to test it with outreach workers to understand their capacity and desire to use such a tool.

With a bit of basic explanation about navigating the application, most outreach workers we tested with – even though they only used their mobiles for voice calls at present – were able to read the prompts (“Full name,” “Husband’s name,” “Age,” “Date of last menstrual period,” etc.) and type in their responses. Simply through prototype testing, we were able to identify ready champions among the outreach workers; imagine what a full communications and training campaign could do.

The quick comprehension and ensuing confidence of the outreach workers reaffirmed the importance of testing assumptions. Though a full and tailored solution still needs to be developed for LifeSpring, we were happy to celebrate a small success at this point in the process.

We revealed new opportunities for LifeSpring by overcoming initial assumptions and biases about populations viewed as low-literacy, and recognizing that they – like the rest of us – are eager to embrace new tools.

Reboot is a service design firm that uses ethnographic approaches to help leading institutions develop solutions that improve lives and livelihoods.  Kate Krontiris serves as a Principal at the organization.  Prior to Reboot, Kate built a portfolio of work around judicial innovation at Google Ideas, a new think/do tank that explores the role that technology can play in tackling some of the toughest human challenges. In 2010, she led a team of US Department of State and NGO professionals to develop the concept of “mobile justice,” using connection technologies to link survivors of sexual violence to judicial systems.

Photo credit whiteafrican via the Creative Commons License.

So, your six-year-old daughter has been dreaming of becoming a computer scientist. And, as much as you tell her that she will be able to do anything she wants to do, what you’re not telling her is the reality of the gender gap within every STEM field in this country. In fact, any field to do with science, technology, engineering or math has been dominated by men, and shielded from women, for centuries, and the effects of this remain today. According to a 2011 report from the U.S. Department of Commerce, highlighted by Forbes, only one out of every seven engineers is a female, and there has been no employment growth for women in the STEM fields since 2000.

The reasons behind this gap are varied, but we do know that a presence of more females in the STEM fields is a huge need. A lack of encouragement of girls to pursue math and science most definitely persists even at the grade school age. This subtle gender bias, mixed with a lack of female role models in STEM fields as it is, can change the direction of thousands of girls’ lives who may have once wanted to invent the next technological breakthrough. “The reason there aren’t more women computer scientists is because there aren’t more women computer scientists,” said Jocelyn Godfen, director of engineering at Facebook, summing up the problem to Forbes.

While the reality is a bit sad as we stand today, what we can do is come to a more solid understanding of the huge lack of female input in these very important fields and why this needs to change.

First and foremost, we need more women in the STEM fields so we can recruit the most talented people possible. If we are silently limiting half of the population, we are only living up to half our potential. As Myra Sadke, author of trailblazing 1973 book, Sexism in School and Society, and long-time researcher and advocate for women in the math and sciences once stated, “If the cure for cancer was in the mind of a girl, we might never discover it.”

A stronger presence of women in the STEM fields would also allow for a more well-rounded perspective in future innovations and technologies. When your scientists and inventors are solely men, there are just some elements of experience that they will not be able to bring to the table, and their solutions for society will only be best fit for the male half.

The need for women in STEM fields will also help to work against stereotypes about the math and sciences, in general. Engineers, programmers, and mathematicians are often presented as dweeby men, when, in fact, brilliant minds in these fields run the gamut of all colors, genders, sizes and social prowess. The ability to make STEM fields seem more accessible to anyone and everyone could do so much for science and humanity, as a whole. In fact, the Obama administration has recently announced an expansion of Title IX efforts in the math and sciences to meet the growing disparity between the genders represented in these fields.

Could this be a signal that the lack of women present in STEM fields is about to change? We can certainly hope for the best as we continue to push for more equal voices in these hugely important fields.

Nadia Jones is an education blogger for www.onlinecollege.org. She loves writing about education news and reform and exploring the possibilities of new learning models. Please contact Nadia with comments and questions at nadia.jones5@gmail.com.

Photo credit vauvau via the Creative Commons License.

There are a few lessons we can take away from Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) recent outrageous remarks, the first being that you can lack total empathy and be mind-numbingly dense, yet still somehow be an elected official crafting legislation in Congress in 2012.  Another is that many Americans truly don’t understand how and where babies come from. Millions of Americans are parents to multiple children, they have been pregnant themselves and given birth. How many of us though, could explain how human reproduction works, beyond saying that a lady and a guy have sexual intercourse?

I reckon that if put up to the task, a random American on the street could not explain step-by-step ovulation, production of sperm, fertilization, and implantation of the zygote in the uterus and the subsequent stages of pregnancy and childbirth. Isn’t it odd that we can put people on the moon, yet we can’t accurately describe how we reproduce ourselves?

Americans can no longer be in the dark about how our own bodies function. It’s too dangerous. We continue to have important policy discussion about health care, which rightly includes sexual health.  Americans–including our elected officials–are making critical decisions that affect us all, based on urban legends, half truths, and pseudo-science. Sadly and hilariously, Rush Limbaugh insinuated during one of his harangues about Sandra Fluke in March that each time a woman has sex, she has to take a contraceptive pill. Unfortunately, too many Americans are getting their sex education on the playground during recess from people like Limbaugh.

Education, health, and sexuality are linked. American children have a right to a free public education which includes health education; sex education is a vital part of health curriculum. Comprehensive sex education is important for everyone, including groups particularly at risk, such as teens exposed to domestic violence. Additionally, the threats of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and HIV/AIDS are often left behind in the debate about sex education in America because there is a tendency to focus solely on intercourse and pregnancy prevention. While a focus on unwanted pregnancy is necessary it takes away from other discussion including those around oral sex and STD prevention. According to a recent analysis from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), “Although there has never been data to support it, there has been the perception that many teens engage in oral sex as a ‘risk-free’ alternative to intercourse. But the CDC analysis shows that sexually active young people are likely to engage in both activities.”

Americans should expect more. Whether we admit it or not, we are keeping scientific facts from our children and providing information that is at best, half of the story or just downright inaccurate.

According to the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) “for over twenty years the federal government has sunk millions of taxpayer dollars into abstinence- only- until- marriage programs. These programs often replace more comprehensive sexuality education courses and rarely provide information on even the most basic topics in human sexuality such as puberty, reproductive anatomy, and sexual health, and they have never been proven effective.”

The SIECUS convened a task force which brought together experts in the field; they identified six key concept areas for inclusion in sex education programs: human development, personal skills, sexual behavior, sexual health, and society and culture.

Here are some scary stats on what is being taught in our classrooms now: 86 percent of all high schools taught abstinence as the most effective way to avoid pregnancy and STDs; 82 percent taught about risks associated with multiple partners; 77 percent taught about human development topics (such as reproductive anatomy and puberty); 79 percent taught about dating and relationships; 65 percent taught about condom efficacy; 69 percent taught about marriage and commitment; 48 percent taught about sexual identity and sexual orientation; and 39 percent taught students how to correctly use a condom.

This is not acceptable and we can do better.

We have a road map for a successful, evidence-based,  inclusive, age appropriate, and accurate sex education curriculum. Now, we have to have the courage to get our politics out of our science. If we don’t, we run the risk of another generation of Americans living in the dark, unable to be an expert on their own bodies. And unfortunately, the willfully misinformed and undereducated will continue attempting  to force their own incompetence and misunderstanding on your body.

Photo Credit Horia Varlan via the Creative Commons License.

This post is originally published on Changemakers and is cross-posted with permission.

At a conference promoting women in technology last year, Eventbrite co-founder Julia Hartz noted that her board included three male members, a testament to the success of women engineers and managers. When I followed her remarks by introducing Harvey Mudd College president, Maria Klawe, I elicited some laughs by commenting that I had the dubious honor of being the only male on the she++ executive team.

Situations and reactions such as these raise some important questions: Why am I helping organize a conference promoting women in technology? More broadly, what role do men play in this transition, and how should we react to the increasing number of women engineers?

In a way, being a college student has increased my awareness of this issue. Even at Stanford, perhaps the most interdisciplinary university in the world, we joke about the fuzzy-techie divide; that is, the lack of interaction between the humanities and engineering.

If we look deeper, we notice that part of that divide is driven by demographics. Girls tend to major in psychology, human biology, and related fields. Guys, on the other hand, dominate science and engineering. These are individual decisions, not the result of a calculated plan.

This segregation, however, is a self-reinforcing process. Engineering lab groups and computer clusters share a largely male culture. Vice versa for female environments.

This makes it increasingly difficult to feel comfortable in the other’s area. More importantly, such unintentional segregation reduces the variety of opinions and perspectives when tackling important problems in medicine, online privacy, and energy.

At its heart, the issue is not about being male or female. It’s about contributing our diverse backgrounds to solving some of the most monumental challenges we face.

So I feel that it is important to encourage women to explore engineering, and to provide support where we can. The rise of women engineers, I believe, is a benefit to society as a whole.

And how should we look at engineering as a career? It seems that we are constantly being bombarded with articles highlighting the economic incentives to pursue technological majors.

This feels like a fundamentally wrong attitude. Although we cannot disregard our finances, we should pursue higher education because we hold a deep interest in solving problems.

Engineering, in particular, is a way to help society, it’s not just a career path. Truly innovative ideas lie at the intersection of engineering and social issues. This is what she++ does.

And there is no doubt about it: When women are offered the chance to succeed, society as a whole comes out a winner. Recognizing the growing importance of technology and digital media, Intel and Changemakers have partnered for the She Will Innovate competition to make sure that women are not left behind.

Tech innovation creates a tremendous opportunity to bridge the gender and technology divide, especially in the realm of high education. Besides, isn’t it more fun to have some gender balance?

Darren Hau is she++ Director of Speakers. He says: “Women provide invaluable skills and attitudes that complement those of men.  As an aspiring engineer interested in social change, I believe that greater representation will lead to more thoughtful and balanced discussion on a range of technical and social issues.  We have the potential to be more innovative, more collaborative, and create a more positive impact on the world”.

 Photo Credit Argonne National Laboratory via the Creative Commons License.

“I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.” -The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

 As a student ambassador at university, I was occasionally asked to run workshops for high school students in the surrounding areas. One school event, designed to encourage an interest in the sciences, really opened my eyes to one particular barrier to higher education that young girls seem to face.

I walked into the classroom, already brimming with swarms of students. My task was to run through workshops with different classes on how to build a remote-control Lego robot. Fun stuff. Seriously. Having previously built my own robot, I briefly demonstrated its sole function; gliding across the room without crashing into any of the previously assembled Lego obstacles.

Fired-up, the boys were keen on testing their robot-making skills (or was it the Lego?).  Fighting over the pieces and fiddling with the remote controls, one of the groups’ robots was assembled at an impressive speed.  “Science is fun” was the message I was selling and these boys were certainly buying.

Some of the girls in the room, however, looked slightly less than keen on the pile of Lego before them.  They were polite but would have clearly rather been elsewhere. No older than 15, these girls looked at least 20 to me. Dolled up and hair teased, their make-up was caked to perfection, school skirts rolled up daringly high (a trick that all British schoolgirls know). Whatever I was trying to sell to these girls, external packaging was clearly a priority and these robots, with their lengthy assembling instruction manuals, colourful wires and nifty remote controls, just were not making the cut.

Pushing the Lego aside, two girls began to play with their hair instead, soon moving on to a full-blown make-up session (more make-up? Really??) right in the middle of my workshop. “I like your shoes, Miss” was the only thing one of the two had said to me the entire lesson. I wanted to scream at these girls. The truth is, they reminded me of the “pretty” and “popular” girls at my high school that ended up pregnant at 16 and living on benefits soon after. It wasn’t my job to discipline these students and there wasn’t a teacher in sight. It was my job, however, to sell them the fruits and merits of higher education and I was failing miserably.

You don’t need to probe too deep into the media to find hordes of women whose fame and success have come from arguably little besides their physical assets. The media’s fixation on a woman’s looks rather than her skills or talent is robbing these young girls of their future. Who cares if you can build an impressive Lego robot in 15 minutes if you can make a sex-tape, build a reality television “empire”, date a rockstar, and earn a million dollars instead? (Yes, we’re talking to you Miss Kimmie K.) Why give up the “dream” of starring in a reality-TV show about beautiful people that live beautiful lives and have beautiful friends, for the less glamorous mounting levels of student debt and sleepless nights in the library? As Janet Street-Porter puts it: “Education and achieving qualifications, or practical skills if you’re not academic, might seem redundant when you consider how much money these high-profile women make from the way they look”. While these attitudes may seem far-fetched or horribly exaggerated to some, I have experienced them first-hand having been to a school where not enough girls, in my opinion, aspired to aim higher than the basic standard of education.

Just last month, a school in Leeds caused controversy by giving make-up lessons to girls as young as 14. Furthermore, a recent BBC study showed that despite more women than ever pursuing careers in a variety of fields, one in ten girls in the UK wants to be a hairdresser (coincidence?) and one in six girls dismissed work in the sciences, engineering and technology as “jobs for the boys”. Don’t get me wrong, we need our hairdressers as much as we need engineers, but my concern is that these figures reflect the fixation of young girls on what Girlguiding UK’s Tracey Murray has described as the “glitzy champagne lifestyle” that we see so much of in the media.

On top of this, as last year’s Miss Representation documentary showed, when it comes to reporting the news on women in the public eye who haven’t gone the sex-tape/ bare-it-all route, it comes with little surprise that the biggest headlines focus on how trendy (or not so trendy) they are or whether they’re wearing hair extensions this month or their colourful H&M sweater that you, little-miss-average-Joe, can afford too. For example, can we please learn to admire the immaterial aspects of Michelle Obama’s role-model status before chronicling endless analysis on her hair or choice of clothing?

You’re wrong if you think this is simply an attack on the girls’ make-up or short skirts (having grown up in a culture that shuns some of my own clothing, believe me, I’m all for wearing what you please). On the contrary, this is about young girls understanding that they have options and can aspire to be more than the hottest girl in school. We need to ensure that young girls realize that their full potential lies beyond achieving those all-important shiny locks of hair or finding that perfect shade of lipstick. Women of all ages need to work together to broaden the horizons of young female students and awaken the ambitions they might not realize that they could have.

Vinjeru Mkandawire is an aspiring journalist who writes for several publications on women’s issues, African affairs, and student politics. She founded the blog That African Kid in 2010 and is a moderator of the long-running forum Malawi Talk. Born in Malawi, she has lived in Zambia, Swaziland, and now the UK. You can find her on twitter at @Vin_Mkandawire.

Image Credit bdesham via the Creative Commons License.

This week the Georgia State Legislature debated a bill in the House, that would make it necessary for some women to carry  stillborn or dying fetuses until they ‘naturally’ go into labor. In arguing for this bill Representative Terry England described his empathy for  pregnant cows and pigs in the same situation.

I have a question for Terry England, Sam Brownback, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry and too many others: I have three daughters, two of them twins. If one of my twins had been stillborn would you have made me carry her to term, thereby endangering both the other twin and me? Or, would you have insisted that the state order a mandatory fetal extraction of the living twin fetus from my womb so that I could continue to carry the stillborn one to term and possibly die myself? My family is curious and since you believe my uterus is your public property, I am, too.

Mr. England, unlike the calves and pigs for which you expressed so much empathy, I am not a beast of burden. I am a woman and I have the these human rights:

The right to life.
The right to privacy.
The right to freedom.
The right to bodily integrity.
The right to decide when and how I reproduce.

Mr. England, you and your friends do not get to trade these rights, while “dog and hog hunting,” in return for a young man’s chickens.

My human rights outweigh any you or the state corruptly and cynically seek to assign to a mass of dividing cells that will eventually turn into a ‘natural’ person. Personhood-for-zygote based bills and related legislation, like Georgia’s and hundreds of others, bills and laws that criminalize pregnancy and abortion and penalize women for being women, violate my human rights.

Just because you cannot get pregnant does not mean I cannot think clearly, ethically, morally, rationally about my body, human life or the consequences of my actions. Just because you cannot get pregnant does not mean that I do not have rights when I am pregnant. I have responsibility but am powerless. You have power but are irresponsible with my rights.

By not trusting me, you force me to trust you. And YOU are not trustworthy.

I gestate humans, you do not. I know how it feels to be pregnant. You do not. I know what happens to a fetus in a womb. You do not. I have carried three fetuses to term. You have not. What I experience when I am pregnant is not empathy. It is permeability. The fetus is me. And the state is you, apparently. But, no matter what you say or do I have fundamental human rights. What makes you think that you, who cannot have this fully human experience, can tell me anything about gestation or how I experience it? Especially when you compare my existence and experience to that of brutish animals.

The rest of the civilized world thinks this country has lost its mind. It’s no wonder. Look at this list of frenzied misogyny:

1. Making women carry still-born fetuses to full term because cows and pigs do. This week, Mr England, you supported a bill, the net effect of which, taken tandem with other restrictions, will result in doctors and women being unable to make private, medically-based, critical care decisions and some women being effectively forced to carry their dead or dying fetuses. Women are different from farm animals, Mr. England, and this bill, requiring a woman to carry a dead or dying fetus, is inhumane and unethical. By forcing a woman to do this, you are violating her right not to be subjected to inhuman treatment and tortured. And, yes, involuntarily carrying a dead fetus to term, although not torture to you or to a pig, is torture for a woman. It is also a violation of her bodily integrity and a threat to her life and as such violates her right to life.

2. Consigning women to death to save a fetus. Abortions save women’s lives. “Let women die” bills are happening all over the country. There is no simple or pretty way to put this. Every day, all over the world, women die because they do not have access to safe abortions. Yet, here we are, returning to the dark ages of maternal sacrifice. Do really have to type this sentence: this is a violation of women’s fundamental right to life.

3. Criminalizing pregnancy and miscarriages and arresting, imprisoning and charging women who miscarry with murder, like Rennie Gibbs in Mississippi or at least 40 other similar cases in Alabama or like Bei Bei Shuai, a woman who is now imprisoned and charged with murder after trying to commit suicide while pregnant. Pregnant women are becoming a special class subject to “special” laws that infringe on their fundamental rights.

4. Forcing women to undergo involuntary vaginal penetration (otherwise called rape) with a condom-covered, six- to eight-inch ultrasound probe. Pennsylvania is currently considering that option along with eleven other states. Trans-vaginal ultrasounds undertaken with out a woman’s consent are rape according the legal definition of the word. This violates a woman’s bodily integrity and also constitutes torture when used, as states are suggesting, as a form of control and oppression. Women have the right not to be raped by the state.

5. Disabling women or sacrificing their lives by either withholding medical treatment or forcing women to undergo involuntary medical procedures. We impose an unequal obligation on women to sacrifice their bodily integrity for another. For example, as in Tysiac v. Poland, in which a mother of two, became blind after her doctor refused to perform an abortion that she wanted that would have halted the course of a degenerative eye disease. If my newborn baby is in need of a kidney and you have a spare matching one, can I enact legislation that says the state can take yours and give it to her? No. We do not force people to donate their organs to benefit others, even those who have already been born. One of the most fundamental of all human rights is that humans be treated equally before the law. Denying a woman this right is a violation of her equal right to this protection.

6. Giving zygotes “personhood” rights while systematically stripping women of their fundamental rights. There is too much to say about the danger of personhood ideas creeping into health policy to do it here. But, consider what happens to a woman whose womb is not considered the “best” environment for a gestating fetus in a world of personhood-for-zygote legislation: who decides the best environment — the state, her insurance company, her employer, her rapist who decides he really, really wants to be a father? Anyone but a woman.

7. Inhibiting, humiliating and punishing women for their choices to have an abortion for any reason by levying taxes specifically on abortion, including abortions sought by rape victims to end their involuntary insemination, imposing restrictive requirements like 24 hour wait periods and empowering doctors to lie to female patients about their fetuses in order to avoid prosecution. In Arizona, Kansas, Texas, Virginia, Colorado, Arkansas and other states around the country bills that make women “pay” for their choices are abounding.

8. Allowing employers to delve into women’s private lives and only pay for insurance when they agree, for religious reasons, with how she chooses to use birth control. In Arizona, which introduced such a bill this week, this means covering payment for birth control as a benefit only when a woman has proven that she will not use it to control her own reproduction (ie. as birth control). As much as I am worried about women and families in Arizona though, I am more worried about those in Alabama. You see, as recently revealed in a public policy poll in Alabama, conservative, evangelicals who support “personhood” related “pro-life” legislation and are fighting for their “religious liberty” — 21 percent think interracial marriage should be illegal. So, what if they decide that an employee involved in an interracial marriage should not, by divine mandate, reproduce? Do they switch and provide birth control for this employee? Do they make contraception a necessary term of employment for people in interracial marriages? This violates a woman’s right to privacy. My womb is one million times more private than your bedrooms, gentlemen.

9. Sacrificing women’s overall health and the well-being of their families in order to stop them from exercising their fundamental human right to control their own bodies and reproduction. Texas just did that when it turned down $35million dollars in federal funds thereby ensuring that 300,000 low-income and uninsured Texas women will have no or greatly-reduced access to basic preventive and reproductive health care.

10. Depriving women of their ability to earn a living and support themselves and their families. Bills, like this one in Arizona, allow employers to fire women for using contraception. Women like these are being fired for not.

You presume to consign my daughters and yours to function as reproductive animals.

This is about sex and property, not life and morality. Sex because when women have sex and want to control their reproduction that threatens powerful social structures that rely on patriarchal access to and control over women as reproductive engines. Which brings us to property: control of reproduction was vital when the agricultural revolution took place and we, as a species, stopped meandering around plains in search of food. Reproduction and control of it ensured that a man could possess and consolidate wealth-building and food-producing land and then make sure it wasn’t disaggregated by passing it on to one son he knew was his — largely by claiming a woman and her gestation capability as property, too.

This is not about freedom of religion. If it were, we would, for example, allow Christian Scientists to refuse to pay for coverage of life-saving blood transfusions for employees. Religious freedom means I get to chose whether or not to be religious and if so, how. It does not mean that I get to impose my religion on others. Paying for insurance is part of the way we compensate employees, even when they use their insurance in ways we don’t agree with and are in contravention of our own personal beliefs. I think that it is stupid, dangerous and immoral to chain smoke, especially around children whose lungs it irreparably harms. But, I still have to pay for an employee to have access to lung scans, nicotine patches and oxygen tanks. I do not get to say that my religious beliefs, which include keeping bodies as healthy as possible, make it possible for me to withhold payment of this employee’s insurance. Guaranteed coverage of contraception and reproductive health care has overwhelming benefits for society, including reducing unwanted pregnancies and abortions. By inserting your religious beliefs so egregiously into government legislation and my life, you are imposing your religious beliefs on me. You don’t like mandated insurance coverage for basic reproductive health humans with two X chromosomes? I don’t like being bred by state compulsion like Mr. England’s farm animals. I have a MORAL OBJECTION to being treated like an animal and not a human. You do not have to use contraception, you do not have to use birth control. But, that does not mean you have any right to tell me that I cannot if I chose. That is my right.

Property, control, sex, reproduction, morality, defining what is human. Sounds a lot like issues surrounding slavery 170 years ago. It is no surprise that of the 16 states that never repealed their anti-miscegenation laws, but rather had them overturned by the Supreme Court in 1967 more than half have introduced personhood bills. Like anti-miscegenation laws, anti-choice laws and bills that humiliate women, that treat them like beasts, that violate their bodily autonomy, are based on ignorance, entitlement and arrogance. These laws are not about “personhood” but “humanity.” That women of color are massively, disproportionately affected by these assaults on their bodies and rights should also come as no surprise – their rights and their bodies have always been the most vulnerable assault.

This is about keeping women’s wombs public and in other people’s control — the exact opposite of private and in their own control.

And, yes, I do know how complicated the ethics, bioethics and legal arguments related to these decisions are. You, apparently, do not. If you were truly concerned with sustaining life and improving its quality or in protecting innocent children, you would begin by having compassion and empathy for living, born people that require and deserve your attention. You feed them, educate them, lift them from poverty and misery. You do not compound these problems as you are with twisted interpretations of divine will. Only after that do you have the moral legitimacy to entertain the notion of talking to me about my uterus and what I do with it. By then, fully functional artificial wombs should be available and you can implant your own, since you are so fond of animal analogies, as was completed with this male mouse. What you are doing is disgraceful, hypocritical and morally corrupt.

And, no, I am not crazy. I am angry.

Mr. Santorum, Mr. England and Mr. Brownback and Mr. Perry you should consider not clinging so dangerously and perversely to the Agrarian Revolution ideas. Birth control and safe abortions are life-saving technologies. These archaic bills and laws, wasteful of time, money and lives, obscure an enduring and unchangeable truth: safe and effective family planning is the transformative social justice accomplishment of the 20th century. They will not go away. This is a revolution, too.

In a 1851 speech in which she argued for equal rights for women, Sojourner Truth said the following: “The poor men seems to be all in confusion, and don’t know what to do. Why children, if you have woman’s rights, give it to her and you will feel better. You will have your own rights, and they won’t be so much trouble.”

Do you, Terry England, Sam Brownback, Rick Santorum and friends even know who Sojourner Truth is?

This piece originally appeared on The Huffington Post, and is cross-posted with permission.

Photo credit: Isis via the Creative Commons License.