MAKERS: Inspiring Women

Last Sunday afternoon, Holton-Arms staged our third annual Open Door Film Society event.  This year, we featured MAKERS and more specifically the new MAKERS film commemorating the 20^th anniversary of the Beijing World Conference on Women entitled Once and For All.  If you’re not familiar with MAKERS, here’s your opportunity.  Part of AOL, describing  itself as “a women's leadership platform that encompasses broadcast documentaries, web and mobile-first video content, and live events,” it’s a website that contains “the largest video collection of women’s stories.”  It has collected over 3,000 videos and chronicled more than 300 women’s stories.   That description alone should attract our attention.  The fact that Sammi Leibovitz, Holton class of 2006, as Vice-President and Creative Director at AOL, oversees MAKERS, guarantees we at Holton-Arms should be interested in this organization.  Sammi, a 2010 graduate of the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication at Syracuse University, joined us on Sunday to tell us a little about MAKERS and present the pre-release showing of the film.

I’ve known about MAKERS for a while and have kept meaning to explore it.  Sammi inspired me to dive in.  What a treasure trove it is!  I began with the Read tab, a collection of news pieces, not all from MAKERS.  The articles close to the top included one from xx about Bradley Cooper supporting equal pay for his female co-stars.  Another heartwarming story featured a firefighters who banded together to support a fellow firefighter in her fight against breast cancer.  Still another original piece offered advice for helping a friend in an abusive relationship.  If this variety hasn’t piqued your interest, perhaps an article entitled “6 ways women have broken the ice in professional hockey” or Vanity Fair’s recounting by Jane Fonda of Katherine Hepburn improbably mentoring a young Michael Jackson will.  Katherine Hepburn and Michael Jackson?  Really? My favorite, however, was a MAKERS list of quotes by famous men about feminism.  My two favorite quotations: "My advice to the women's clubs of America is to raise more hell and fewer dahlias," from the painter, James McNeill Whistler; and from Teddy Roosevelt:

Conservative friends tell me that woman’s duty is the home. Certainly. So is man's. The duty of a woman to the home isn’t any more than the man’s. If any married man doesn’t know that the woman pulls a little more than her share in the home he needs education. If the average man has more leisure to think of public matters than the average woman has, then it’s a frightful reflection on him. If the average man tells you the average woman hasn’t the time to think of these questions, tell him to go home and do his duty. The average woman needs fifteen minutes to vote, and I want to point out to the alarmist that she will have left 364 days, 23 hours and 45 minutes.

A man well ahead of his time.

Then I headed to the Watch section where are located the hundreds of videos of women pioneers, activists, and leaders.  I could spend days just watching these pithy, thought-provoking clips.  The women represent a huge range.  There are household names like Hillary Rodham Clinton, Condoleeza Rice and Madeleine Albright; Carol Burnett, Glenn Close, Misty Copeland, Katie Couric, Ellen DeGeneres, Lena Dunham, Ruth Bader Ginsberg & Sandra Day O’Connor, Nancy Pelosi, Michelle Rhee, Phyllis Schlafly, Martina Navratilova, Mia Hamm, Alice Waters, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and Oprah, to name a few.  Then there are others who would be familiar to some but not others such as Shirley Tilghman, former President of Princeton, Ruth Simmons, President of Brown, Sheryl WuDunn, a journalist, Rachel Simmons, author of Odd Girl Out, Danica Patrick, the NASCAR driver, Catharine MacKinnon, a feminist legal scholar, Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, Carol Gilligan, pioneering psychologist studying girls development, Susan Cain, author of Quiet, Sara Blakely, founder of Spanx, and Marin Alsop, the first female conductor of a major American orchestra, the Balitimore Symphony.  And then there are numerous women I’ve never heard of, mostly activists and artists.

I started with Kelly Clark, an Olympic snowboarder.  I only recognized her name because my son worked for her brother this summer.  The beginning of her story is about triumphing in a male world,” a pack of guys,” and winning a gold medal at the 2002 Olympics.  However, she didn’t train well enough for her second Olympics, and she finished a disappointing fourth.  In the aftermath of defeat, she redoubled her efforts and won a bronze the next time around.  She says that the bronze means much more to her than the gold “because I know what it cost me.”  Her advice, “Bend your knees and go faster.” 

Marissa Mayer , the first female engineer at google who is now the CEO of Yahoo! shares her experience as a Stanford and silicon valley female computer scientist.  Mayer, who didn’t even know how to turn on the computer she bought at the Stanford bookstore as a freshman in 1993, probably succeeded because she seems to be, to use her words, “gender oblivious.“  She loved the problem solving in computer science, the fact that there is “no formula, no recipe, no memorization,” each problem offers a fresh start.  She urges girls and women to ignore the fact that boys have played video games and coded from a young age.  She believes that “If you can push through that feeling of being scared, that feeling of taking a risk, really amazing things can happen.”

I heard Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator from New York, speak several years ago and was very impressed, so I wanted to watch her clip.  As it turns out, Hillary Clinton’s 1995 speech in Beijing, the one featured in the film we saw on Sunday, proved a turning point in Gillibrand’s life.  She was working as a securities lawyer for a big New York law firm, but listening to Clinton made her think: “I’m not accomplishing anything here; I’m not making a difference; I’m not helping people.”  Clinton “inspired [her] to try to focus [her] career more on public service.”  Her first attempts to enter public life failed, but refusing to give up, she appealed to Andrew Cuomo, then HUD Secretary, for advice and he hired her.  Her experience in Washington convinced her to run for Congress and she moved back to Upstate New York where she had grown up.  Despite warnings that her opponent, the incumbent, was a “bit of a bully,” she persisted and as a Democrat won a seat in a heavily Republican district in 2006.  When Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, the Governor of New York appointed Gillebrand to take her place.  She later won a special election with 63% of the vote.  Her advice:  “You can do anything you set your mind to as long as you work hard and stay focused.”  And from her grandmother, never give up; you should “keep fighting; . . . sometimes, even if you’re not successful you do great good by just fighting for what you believe in and trying to make a difference.”

Given that she graduated from Holton, I had to watch Julia Louis-Dreyfus.  She has much to say about working on “Saturday Night Live” (which she hated), “Seinfeld,” and the power of comedy bring about change.  She sounds most like a Holton girl in her praise of Kari Lizer, the Executive Producer and creator of the “The New Adventures of Old Christine.”  Louis-Dreyfus observes, “We were both highly organized, shows got done in the most organized fashion you can’t even imagine; scripts were ready well in advance; people got home in time to get dinner on the table; there was a great amount of calm and organization on the set and I definitely attribute that to a woman running the whole kit and caboodle.”  On the topic of women in Hollywood and her own career, she says, “I am certainly aware that women need to be better represented in Hollywood.  But I’ve never let it get in my way; I’ve gone for the jobs what I’ve wanted and I’ve stuck to my guns.”  Sounds like our motto, Find a Way or Make One” to me!

All these women epitomize what Joanna Barsh, Director Emeritus at McKinsey & Company, who spoke at the first MAKERS national conference in 2014 calls “triumphant outliers.”  They have achieved that status by pushing themselves, persisting even after defeat, and believing that if you just keep trying – moving past fear or discrimination, you can succeed.  In the meantime, "bend your knees and go faster."MAKERS

A Kenyan Success Story: Girls Education as the Key to Social Change and Economic Development

Today, we celebrate the fourth annual International Day of the Girl.  As the Head of School at an all-girls, grades 3-12 school enrolling 660 female students, I’m proud to say that every day is the day of the girl.  However, I can only describe my students as privileged.  Most of them live in one of the wealthiest and best educated counties in the U.S. with one of the finest school systems, and they attend a school long recognized for its commitment to academic excellence and for preparing leaders, women who, as our philosophy statement says, “will make a difference in a complex and changing world.”  Many, many girls around the world, especially in developing countries, can hardly imagine enjoying such good fortune.  As we turn our particular focus on girls around the world today, we should focus above all else on the importance of education.  Ensuring that girls receive an education, that they at least finish high school, leads to a number of important results, results that impact the girls individually, their communities and even their countries.  It is for this reason that United Nations has set forth as the fourth of the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals “Ensure Inclusive and Equitable Quality Education and Promote Lifelong Learning Opportunities for All.”

In many parts of the world, girls still receive less education than boys.  Indeed, of the 130 million children not in school globally, 70% are girls.  That amounts to 62 million girls worldwide.  The reasons girls don’t attend school are numerous.  In many countries, school costs money, or if it’s theoretically free, students still need to purchase books and other supplies.  In addition, when children are in school, they are not contributing, in the short term anyway, to family income.  When a family has very limited resources, school sits low in their priorities; if they have money to send some children to school, but not all, the boys will usually go. 

Child marriage also obstructs girls’ educational attainment.  Around the world, over 700 million women married before they were 18 and of those a third did so before they were 15.  When girls marry, they leave school.  Moreover, teenage mothers are more likely to die in childbirth and their children are also more likely to die than if they waited until their twenties to give birth.  As we’ll see shortly, child marriage also perpetuates poverty and lack of education in the succeeding generation.  According to the UN, when girls in developing countries attend school for just seven years (which doesn’t even include high school), they marry on average four years later and have two fewer children.

Reducing the size of families impacts poverty levels as more resources are available per child.  Ultimately, limiting population growth has the effect of raising national per capita income levels and promoting overall economic growth.   However, educating girls has even more impact than simply lowering the number of children born.  Again, according to the UN, every year a girl attends school, she increases her earning power by 10-20%; secondary schooling increases earning power even more: 15% to 25%.   Moreover, women invest their earnings back into their families at a rate of 90%.  Finally, women who receive an education are more likely to insist that their children do so as well.  The combination of marrying later and having fewer children, enjoying greater earning power, investing that money back into her family, and encouraging the next generation to go to school all point to female education as the key to overcoming poverty and promoting economic growth in the developing world.

We are all familiar with the powerful impact that Malala Yousafzai is having on the world.  She has come to world prominence thanks to an ironic combination of her father’s commitment to girls education, to the violence and misogyny of the Taliban, and her own extraordinary courage and commitment.  Malala, however, is not alone and if you read the twitter feed today for #dayofthegirl or #IDG, you will see examples of many women and girls making a difference around the world.  Several weeks ago, at Holton-Arms, my school, we had the opportunity to hear firsthand from one of those people, Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya.  Ntaiya, a Maasai who grew up in a village in South Kenya, was engaged to be married at 5.  As a young teenager, she was expected to undergo female circumcision and then get married.  However, Ntaiya successfully negotiated with her father, agreeing to the circumcision if he would allow her to finish high school.  She managed to receive a scholarship to what was then Randolph-Macon Women’s College.  She convinced the village elders to let her go, promising to return to her village to share the benefits of her education.  After college, during which she became the first youth advisor the UN Population Fund, she earned a doctorate in education from the University of Pittsburgh.  Training in hand, she fulfilled her promise to the elders by founding the Kenya’s first girls boarding primary school.  The Kakenya Center for Excellence, which opened in 2009, now enrolls 170 girls in grades 4-8 and Ntaiya plans to add a secondary school. 

The Kakenya Center for Excellence has already achieved success on several fronts.  The school gives preference to the most destitute students, many of whom are orphans, providing them with full scholarships.  Not surprisingly, these students came to school with weak academic backgrounds. The class of 2014, the first graduating class, entered reading on average at a second grade level and scored below the district average on national exams.  That class finished their Kakenya Center for Excellence careers testing second in five subjects out of the 133 schools in the district, and one of them achieved top ranking in the county.  All the graduates from 2014 and 2015 were admitted to secondary school, and 44% of them enrolled in Kenya’s most prestigious schools.  Parents of Kakenya Center for Excellence students must sign an agreement that prohibits female genital mutilation and child marriage; as a result all the Kakenya Center for Excellence girls have avoided these fates.  In addition, the school is having an impact on local mores.  The village chief who in 2006 proclaimed, “girls are for marriage, so there is no need to educate them,” now serves on the Board of the Center. In a statement indicative of the social change Ntaiya and her school are engendering, a Maasai father promised, “Culturally, girls aren’t supposed to inherit anything from the family. I want, while I am alive, for my daughter to inherit an education from me.”

Kakenya Ntaiya’s story demonstrates what a difference educating one girl can make.  The girls at her school aspire to be doctors, lawyers, and pilots; they also expect to make a difference in their communities.  There are many ways for us to promote girls education around the world, including donating to organizations such as Save the Children or the Kakenya Center for Excellence itself.  In supporting this effort, we would be joining Michelle Obama and the Peace Corps, who have launched a program called “Let Girls Learn,” in making girls education a priority. We currently have the largest generation of girls in history, and 600 million of them live in the developing world where opportunity is too often limited. These girls deserve – indeed, demand – our attention and support.