This One’s for the Girls

By Kristin Schepici

In the words of Martina McBride, “This one’s for the girls,” and last night’s screening of the documentary Girl Rising with my fellow Women in Leadership Institute^™  colleagues inspired and reminded us of just how important it is to empower women leaders.

In every girl’s story told, it all comes back to the power of education and the basic human desire to learn and better themselves. And it’s not easy. The documentary opens with Alicia Keys giving the voice over as a young orphaned girl picks through a dump looking for cans and plastic. This girl like the others throughout the movie has a dream, which most American’s take for granted with our access to free public education. They just want a chance to go to school. In most of the world school is not free and girls have a one in four chance of being born into poverty. And more than that, females are still brutalized and treated as second-class citizens in many cultures. Over the course of the movie we meet girls and women who literally “rise up” from poverty, ignorance, and in many cases, horrible injustice.

According to Girl Rising the highest ROI for developing countries is educating females yet no one is more vulnerable in the world than a female from a developing country. It was startling to see the stories of pain and injustice many women and girls of the world face.

Girl Rising really makes you put things in perspective and realize that most of our “problems” are pretty shallow first world dilemmas compared to what our sisters across the ocean are dealing with on a daily basis. There is still a lot of work to be done and remaining quiet about it won’t help. After seeing this documentary it really reinforced my passion with working with Linkage and the Women in Leadership Institute^™.

So, what are you doing to empower women today?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJsvklXhYaE