11. WEEKS 1 & 2
WHAT IS GENDER
INEQUALITY?
WHAT IS YOUR SELF-IMAGE
AND WHERE DID IT COME
FROM?
WHAT IS BEAUTY AND WHO
DECIDES?
12. WEEKS 3 & 4
BUILDING STRONGER
SELF-ESTEEM:
NEGATIVE MESSAGES &
THOUGHT PATTERNS
FINDING YOUR AUTHENTIC
SELF
FRIENDSHIPS
CREATING A SUPPORT
NETWORK
MANAGING EMOTIONS
13. WEEKS 5 & 6
relationship skills
and dating violence
wrap-up-amy cuddy ted talk
on body language
finish craft
program evaluations
23. Credits
Special thanks to all the people who made and released
these awesome resources for free:
✘ Presentation template by SlidesCarnival
✘ Photographs by Unsplash
Editor's Notes
Welcome to Strong Girls School: Create a program addressing gender bias, inequality and self-esteem building for girls.
I’m Nancy Evans and I’ve been a Young Adult librarian at Levittown Public Library in New York since 2009. This is my second career-I was a staff accountant previously. I’ve been running Strong Girls School since 2014.
In 2012, I ran writing group that was coincidentally all girls. Maureen Johnson wrote a post “Why do we Photoshop People?” In response to a teen’s request to Seventeen magazine to stop photoshopping their models. We read it in my group and it sparked so much discussion that I knew there was a program there. I contacted Maureen Johnson and asked for permission to use the post and she said go for it. I started running Strong Girls in 2014 and I’ve been running it since.
My first versions of this presentation had page after page of statistics but then I read about death by powerpoint and I don’t want to cause that so I took them out. They’re out there and readily accessible if you want to read them or you need to justify the program to your administration or community. But I decided that a picture is worth a thousand words, so I chose a few.
Whatever you think of Hilary Clinton politically, I think we can all agree that this is not a fair way to judge her and it’s very disrespectful. Although women have been in the work force for a very long time now and attend college in greater numbers than men, a wage gap still exists.
This is a Bloomingdale’s ad from the 60’s that implies gang rape and worse, that she likes it and here’s a Belvedere ad from 2012 that’s suggesting date rape and was also meant to be funny. So programming like this is necessary and valuable.
Some reasons to run the program are: relationship building, not only between you and your patrons and with each other. One of the problems women face is that they very often undermine each other. There’s Queen Bee syndrome, where a successful woman will refuse to help other women be successful. The Workplace Bullying Institute found that female bullies bully other women 80% of the time and that number is rising. So we have an opportunity to teach girls to support each other. Helping the girls talk about issues that affect them and how they might handle them is empowering and a life skill. I was able to create a partnership with the Girls Inc chapter in my area thrtough this program. They had contacted libraries looking to run a free coding program for girls but they were looking to deliver it to 10 or more girls and were having trouble finding a library that could come up with that many. Since I had this core group, I was able to work with them and it went so well that they’ve continued to partner with me. They came in and did a public service announcement with my girls, which was on date rape and an International Day of the Girl program and another coding program. A few of my girls did an overnight camping trip with them too.
I conceived of this program as a small group, so it would be intimate and each girl could be heard. I started with a group of 8 and ended up with a regular group of 6. I originally thought I’d do it in 4 sessions but it wasn’t enough. I had to add in a session to cover healthy relationships and relationship violence, which I realized should have been inlcuded from the beginning. I never stopped running it, because when we reached the end of our sessions, the girls wanted to continue it as a club but if you don’t want it be an on-going thing, I’d hold at least 5 sessions.
I used a combination of worksheets, to get the girls thinking about things and discussion. I made my own worksheets because I’m a type A personality, but looking back, you really dont need to do that. There’s plenty of material out there. I have some folders with the worksheets I made in them and I’m happy to email them to anyone who wants them. The girls had a lot to say about everything. We watched you tube videos and had 2 guest speakers. One was a college student who spoke about navigating friendships and one was a woman in her early 20’s who had been bullied in high school. They were one of the girls favorite parts of the program. I found that if they had a craft to work on while we discussed, it made it easier to talk, so we worked on aa altoid tin of motivational quotes each week.
The girls had a lot to say about gender inequality-dress codes at school that only applied to them and other unfair treatment. We talked about self-image and how it’s formed and beauty standards, pressure to look a certain way and advertising.
Negative thought patterns was a big issue for my group. They beat themselves up mentally over everything-not doing well on a test, not being pretty enough, not being popular enough. One week, I had a white board and I asked them to tell me some of their good qualities and they really struggled. The thing that was most surprising was not one of them said that they were smart. So I ended up making the handout “So You Think You’re Not That Smart”, letting them know that most Americans read at an 8th grade level and that there are lots of different types of intelligence. I think the kids have been very affected by standardized testing and their environment is so competitive that they think they’re never good enough. We
We watched the Amy Cuddy TED talk about body language, which I think is really helpful. I handed out program evaluations and that’s when I found out that the girls didn’t want to stop, so we’ve continued the group. It has become a little challenging now with new girls coming in amd me not wanting to re-cover the material for the original group so I’ve been covering the material more informally than I originally did. I stop it over them summer but I think that next year, if the original girls come back, I’ll see if they’d like to lead the program at least for the 5 or 6 sessions and have it more structured like it was. I think it would be empowering for them.
These are a few of the videos we watched- Emma Watson’s UN speech on gender equality, how the ideal woman’s body type has changed throughout history and Lizzie Velasquez’s TED talk.
Lizzie Velasquez has a disorder that keeps her from accumulating body fat. Someone put up a video of her on youtube and called her the world’s ugliest woman. There were thousands of horrible comments-people telling her to kill herself and calling her a monster. My group was really impressed and motivated by her TED talk.
There are so many resources available. It’s really more a problem of narrowing them down than anything else but these are some I like. The Dove Self-Esteem project has a toolkit that’s all ready to go. I didn’t love all of it so I spent a lot of time trying to contact them and get permission to modify it and they couldn’t figure out what I wanted so I finally decided I was being overly responsible to to just say adapted or modified from and give them credit.
A mighty girl is a great website with a lot of resources and they have a daily motivational woman on their facebook page.
These are some of the crafts we’ve done.
If you run it as a club, there are lots of extension activities you can do. My girls wrote a reader’s theater script, which was a lot of fun for them and acting it out helps them find their voice.
If you were paying close attention when I first spoke, you noticed that Maureen Johnson’s tumblr post came out in 2012 but I didn’t start this until 2014. Although I was very excited about it, I got cold feet. I’d graduated from library school with tons of ideas and I was really surprised when I wasn’t allowed to carry things that I didn’t think were a big deal, like a Banned Books display or a Hate List book discussion. I became a lot more cautious so even though I really wanted to run this program, I was afraid of being disappointed again. Then I decided that if I wanted to have a Strong Girls program, I had to model being one, so I went ahead and wrote it up for the next newsletter and no one stopped me. No one from the community complained and I had a lot of statistics to defend the need if they did and it’s been such a positive experience. What I was really afraid of was not being told no because I had quite a few by then or having it fail, because I’ve experienced that too but being disappointed again-of being really excited about something that I couldn’t go forward with. I wrote about this experience for VOYA, hoping that if other librarians are afraid to take a risk, maybe they’ll try.
When I graduated from library school, I knew I would work in youth services and I had this idea that I would do great things. I wasn’t really sure what I’d do or how I’d do them. I found out that it’s not so easy to do great things. When I started this program, one of my girls was a very shy high schooler who had been bullied for her entire school career. She was in a relationship with a boy where she was doing things she didn’t really want to do. She wasn’t being forced but she was being used and hoping to be converted to a girlfriend. Every week she would complain and ask the group for advice. It was because of her that I made the presentation on healthy relationships. Every week, we’d advise her to end it. It got to the point where I was going to ask her to stop discussing it because she wouldn’t take the advice and everyone was frustrated. She walked in one week and as soon as I saw her, i Knew something had changed. She always had very timid body language but she was standing straight and proud. She said “I ended it with him. I blocked his number and told him if he contacts me, I’ll tell an adult and I feel great!” I realized that this was a great thing. If these kinds of things are going to be my great things in my career, I’ll take it.
