girls

Like others who work in education, I was eager to see who President-elect Obama would select for his Education Secretary, and what that individual would represent. Obama’s selection of Chicago school superintendent Arne Duncan was announced yesterday.

I am heartened by the fact that Duncan represents a both-and approach to school reform, recognizing that both teacher improvement and social support for children outside of school will play a critical role in taking the US education system to a new level of excellence (we can hope, right?).

But I’m left with an important question: Will we see federal leadership for curricular reform? Peggy McIntosh recently pointed out to me that the central structure of the American education system (math, science, English, social studies, etc.) has remained unchanged since the 18th century. To be sure, approaches to these subjects are updated and the curriculum has certainly changed over time. Yet I’m also convinced from experience that the more things change the more they stay the same, and that the status quo reinforces traditional gender stereotypes (along with stereotypes about race and class).

For example, I noticed that my daughter’s kindergarten teacher had divided the girls’ and boys’ workbooks by color-coded baskets (red=girls, blue=boys: hm, at least it wasn’t pink!). I notice when I pick my daughter up from her after-school program that the room is frequently segregated by gender and toys (girls playing with dolls while boys play with Legos).

No doubt you’ve noticed that my examples point to classroom arrangements rather than classroom content, and you might think I’m being too nit-picky. After all, they’re just colored baskets, right? No way! I’m convinced that the classroom arrangements and curricular content reinforce each other (see my previous post where I mention a sex-stereotyping book series that my daughter discovered thanks to her first-grade teacher). It may be red baskets now, but when women still have to fight for equal pay for equal work (among other things), I want to be sure I’ve done my part to make a difference.

When I mentioned my concerns about the color-coded baskets during a conference, my daughter’s kindergarten teacher was shocked to think that she might be perpetuating gender stereotyping. She gave me examples of ways she challenged the students’ gender stereotyping in the classroom (talking about her own love of math, “requiring” girls to play in the block corner). The next morning the baskets were changed, with the kids finding their workbooks based upon the first initial of their last name.
I’m sure that won’t be the last conversation I have with a teacher about gender inequality in the classroom, but I hope that we can expect national leadership and fresh thinking about what goes on in the classroom. Any word on whether Duncan is a feminist? And GWP readers, have you taken any steps to make your sons’ or daughters’ classrooms more feminist learning environments?

-Allison Kimmich

I’m late to the table with this one, but in case you haven’t seen it (as I hadn’t til last week!) I bring you “The Girl Effect” — an amazing video. Pass it on!

Last week I sat down with a group of journalism students and they asked what we can do to make math cool for girls. “We simply need to make math cool in general, not just for girls,” I replied. The same goes for science. Science is portrayed as the only field that uses big words (it’s not like law is any better—have you ever tried to read the terms & conditions for Facebook?) and thus intimidates many to think one needs to be a rocket scientist to be well, a scientist. So when scientific studies are printed in the media that “prove” that working moms are happier than stay-at-home ones, or vice versa, or that feminism is to blame for the rise in women alcoholics, most people are unprepared to question the findings.

This lack of skepticism is scientists’ fault. Far too often we, (even though I haven’t been a practicing scientist in over a decade, I’ll lump myself in), don’t explain things in a simple way. It takes a long time to tackle those big words and we need to use them…when we talk to each other. But basic knowledge of science is a must in today’s society. Scientific literacy should be just as important to our education as knowing how to read and add together two numbers.

More and more I find that this scientific literacy is a must for women and girls in particular. As we have seen in the eight long years of the Bush administration women and girls health care has been politicized. Yes, most of the Bush administration has been politicized, but health care is especially touchy. I just heard a story of a friend whose pregnancy was going badly and instead of offering a termination immediately her doctor referred her to labor & delivery to birth the dying fetus. She said she couldn’t believe that she had the will to stand up at the time and tell the doctor he had better find someone to perform an abortion. This friend is one of the most vocal feminists I know and yet she knows that she almost folded under the cloak of “Doctor Knows Best.”

When the Bush administration says that climate change has nothing to do with polar bears dying, we have photos of dead polar bears. When the Bush administration says that the morning after pill is an abortificant we don’t have a photos to counter. That’s the tricky thing with science and health care.

Our only defense is to educate ourselves. We should know how to spot when the science is bad or when the reporting is bad. Debunking is a science and often our bodies are a battlefield. Ladies, suit up.

Image Credit.

For those of you in NYC, there’s a great film in town, playing tomorrow night. Join the Girls Education and Mentoring Services (GEMS) for a screening! Writes the NYTimes’ critic:

Notwithstanding the coyly suggestive title, “Very Young Girls” is very far from exploitative. Adopting a confessional, direct-to-camera interview style for most of its running time, this unvarnished vérité documentary about teenage prostitutes in New York City resolutely resists the urge to dramatize. The heartbreaking stories are drama enough.

Ignoring underlying issues of upbringing, class or race (only one of the film’s victims is white), “Very Young Girls” is still an effective scratch on the surface of a serious social problem. However hard it is out there for a pimp, it’s not nearly hard enough.

For more info, click here!

(And thanks to GWP friend Patti Binder for the heads up.)

It’s hard to know these days whether to see the glass half-full or half-empty: Obama won a historic election powered by the youth vote and women.

On the other hand, it’s hard to know when the economy is really going to hit bottom.

Maybe we should be relieved that we’re heading into this season of gratitude. To be sure it may take us all a little longer to count our blessings this year, or to figure out what counts as a blessing these days, so here are some thoughts from my Girl Talk perspective.

I’m thankful for:

1. Blue Sex—Margaret Talbot has a fascinating analysis of some recent and forthcoming research about teens, sex, and religion in the New Yorker. Talbot takes her title, “Red Sex, Blue Sex,” from sociologist Mark Regnerus’s research. I can’t do justice to the full article here, but I was especially struck by what Regnerus identifies as a new “middle-class morality.” According to Regnerus middle-class, well-educated young women “are interested in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family. Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.”

This is great news for middle-class, well educated young women (and their parents).

But I’m even more excited about what it suggests for young women who are not middle-class, and for those of us who do education and advocacy work to support all girls and young women, because we can work together to create the potential for a “bright future.” I know that the Girl Scout Council of New York has just such plans in mind for its career exploration program that will be launching in Bronx middle schools.

2. Sasha and Malia Obama—My eight-year-old daughter was already a passionate follower of the Presidential campaign and the election itself; she and her best friend bet a quarter on the election outcome (my daughter came home with an extra quarter in her pocket on November 5), and she participated in a mock-election at her YMCA camp on election day. Now that she has peers in the White House, I’m willing to bet that national politics will stay on her radar screen, even if our attention is on the possible first pet or how the girls will get to school for now.

3.  The Little House on the Prairie Series—Reading is part of our family routine every evening, and we finished the Little House on the Prairie book series with my daughter about a year ago. I am especially grateful for the hardy, adventurous, strong-willed Laura Ingalls character now that our reading as turned to the offensive My Weird School series, with its sex-stereotyped characters, from the brainy, obnoxious girl to the bored and distracted boys. I’ve used these books as a way to talk about sex-stereotyping, and the ways it hurts girls and boys, but surely we can do better than this!

So GWP readers, do you have any tween books to recommend? Help me out and I’ll add those to my gratitude list too.  And I’m eager to know: What’s on your gratitude list these days?

And, yes, given the economic meltdown, for everyone’s no doubt.  But here are a few items that caught my eye:

In technology…

According to an article in Saturday’s New York Times, women are veering away from computer science in droves.  The stat:

• Twenty-five years ago, more young women in colleges and universities were drawn to computer science than today.

What up?  Read the article, and do check out the amazing work that GWP’s own Science Grrl is doing on this front.  Paging Science Grrl!

And at Citibank…

In case you missed it, check out the article on how the chaos on Wall Street has cost Sallie L. Krawcheck’s career, cutesily titled  “When Citi Lost Sallie.” (Thanks to Purse Pundit for the heads up).

And in Afghanistan, a horrible blow for girls’ education.  This whole thing about the acid attacks on school girls in Kandahar makes me just weep.

Sorry to be a downer today.  I’ll be back with more cheery news, I hope, soon.

Girl with Pen is extremely pleased to bring you the inaugural post from Allison Kimmich, Executive Director of the National Women’s Studies Association. Allison will be posting her column, Girl Talk, which explores truths and fictions about girls, the third Wednesday of every month. -Kristen

As a feminist, and as a professional advocate for feminist education in my work at the National Women’s Studies Association, I felt faint one day three years ago when my then-five-year-old daughter told me that “girls don’t do math.”

Well, it turns out that my daughter was right. Last week the New York Times reported on a study that points to U.S. failures in math education. The article notes that the United States does a poor job of educating both boys and girls in math, but that we especially miss opportunities to encourage girls who could be excellent mathematicians unless they are immigrants or daughters of immigrants from countries where math is valued.

Or as one of the study’s lead author Janet E. Mertz puts it, “We’re living in a culture that is telling girls you can’t do math—that is telling everybody that only Asians and nerds do math.” Neither the study nor the article explores in detail what it is about American culture that undervalues math education, but the American Psychological Association Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls produced a report last year that offers some insights. The report notes that self-objectification (buying sexy clothes or asking parents to do so, and identifying with sexy celebrities) can “detract from the ability to concentrate and focus one’s attention, thus leading to impaired performance on mental activities such as mathematical computations or logical reasoning.”

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Here are some quick hits of issues on the Sex and Sensibility front that caught my eye this week:

1. When Sex and Politics Meet: Amy Schalet, whom Virigina referenced in her post on Juno and teenage love back in January, is at it again with a brilliant article in the Washington Post. This time she has a question for Sarah Palin:

Should public school students be taught that contraception and condoms can prevent unintended pregnancy and disease?

But beyond this, she addresses how parents should address the question of sexuality with their teenage children. A question near and dear to my heart, Schalet makes a great historical argument on the changing role of sexuality in young people’s lives:

Simply put, the circumstances and aspirations of young people have changed since the 1950s, but our society’s narratives about the place of sexuality and the nature of relationships do not reflect these changes. And we pay a price for that inability to talk realistically about teenage sexuality and love.

Of course, with all the hoopla around Sarah Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy. In my opinion, this is a topic that is off-bounds, in my opinion, in any facile understanding of Palin’s VP suitability, but totally in-bounds in questions of conservatives’ and republicans’ generally obtuse and unrealistic (read: abstinence only) approach to teenage sexuality and public sexual health education. And Schalet makes a valid point on this topic:

The Palins, of course, deserve credit for their public embrace of their eldest daughter, which shows that, ideology notwithstanding, parents still love their daughters even if they have sex. If that embrace allays fears that prompt girls to keep sex a secret from their parents, then the Republican Party may have, inadvertently, facilitated the honest conversations we need to move beyond the myth-only approach to adolescent sexuality.

Given Palin’s especial appeal for the conservative Christian base, I wonder whether Palin speaking openly and warmly about her unmarried daughter’s pregnancy does indeed represent a turning-point in public discourse on the realities of teenage sex and love.

2. And about those realities of sex and love: Part of what I love about the feminist blogosphere community is that it acts in many ways like the consciousness-raising groups of the 70s, except with a very different purpose and outcome. Instead of sharing lived experiences that make women realize we all have similar ideas and problems, what often happens is that we realize the diversity of the female experience.

This happened recently in the comments section of a post Courtney did at Feministing on whether it is feminist to demand a female orgasm. The discussion was extremely interesting, and even got a bit brutal with arguments on what a woman should or should not demand from a sexual partner, and whether we should even attempt to write such rules. I’m starting off with my comment and then a few other representative comments:

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Sex and Sensibility: Quick Takes
by Kristen Loveland

Hi to all from your Sex and Sensibility lady here. Here are a few things that caught my eye this past week:

1. The Truth About Teen Girls: Belinda Luscombe has an awesome article in Time Magazine talking about how, despite the proliferation of sexual imagery in the teenage world, maybe we shouldn’t be twisting our knickers in such a knot over their alleged sexual promiscuity. To wit:

“With the pornucopia of media at teens’ disposal in the past decade and a half, on cell phones and computers as well as TVs, early-adolescent sex should be having a growth spurt. But the figures don’t necessarily support one. Despite a minor increase in 2006, the rate of pregnancies among teen girls has been on a downward trend since 1991. Another indicator, the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, is alarmingly high: nearly 1 in 4 girls ages 14 to 19 and nearly 1 in 2 African-American girls, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But this is the first year such a study has been completed, and the study doesn’t separate 14-to-16-year-olds from 17-to-19-year-olds, so it’s still unclear which way that trend is heading.”

Keep reading this fantastic article here and thanks to Deborah for sending this to me!

2. I Am Charlotte: The Series: While on the one hand it appears that there are finally a number of voices asking us to put on the breaks for a second and contemplate what the actual sexual experiences of teenage girls are, it looks like Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons is going to be made into an HBO series. Charlotte Simmons the book has often been noted as over-stated and over-bearing in its condemnation of college sexuality. As the New York Magazine Book Review put it at the time:

“Wolfe’s vision of eroticism is ultimately too dark. When, in Charlotte Simmons, an older man has sex with a younger woman, it is, of course, cynical. But when a younger man has sex with a younger woman, it is equally cynical. Indeed, all the sex in Wolfe’s imagined university is rotten. All intimacy is rotten. At the end of the novel, Charlotte falls in with a new man. He comes from a very different walk of life than Charlotte does, and to all appearances he adores her. One might reasonably see this turn of events as a triumph—love conquering differences, love opening doors. But Wolfe intends for us to see it as a defeat: The man is not suited for his clever country heroine; she has forgotten, he suggests, that “she is Charlotte Simmons”; she has lost her identity.”

To put it mildly, I’m not overly-optimistic about the way the series will portray yet another young woman who has lost her character to the hedonistic offerings of that Gomorrah now known as the American university.

3. The Old is New Again: And finally, on a slightly different note, Ann over at Feministing recently wrote about John LaBruzzo, a state legislator from Louisiana, who wants to pay low-income women to be sterilized. Something that is consistently overlooked in mainstream’s take on what it means to be Pro-Choice is that it is just that: the choice to have or not to have a child. As a political position, it is both concerned with those woman who, for x, y, and z reason, choose not to have a child, and with those from whom the right to have a child is coercively taken away. There have been a number of studies and histories done on sterilization abuse which, particularly in 1970s America, targeted poor and minority women, and included everything from outright nonconsensual sterilizations, to unclear statements signed on the hospital bed before an abortion, to, well, something like LaBruzzo’s brilliant idea. The government has no place in coercing a targeted group of women into permanent reproductive decisions.

GWPenner Elline Lipkin is trying to collect girls’ responses, as well as responses from their mentors, for her forthcoming book with Seal Press on Girls Studies by October 15th. Please take the survey for girl mentors, pass it on, and pass the other survey links onto the girls in your life!”

Survey for Girls Mentors

Survey for Girls ages 6-10

Survey for Girls ages 11-18