Читать книгу Dads for Daughters - Michelle Travis - Страница 13
ОглавлениеEven after three decades, Qusi Alquarqaz still adores being an electrical engineer. He always hoped that his two daughters would follow in his footsteps, but his plan was not to be. After his first daughter, Rawan, announced that she wanted to study fashion design and business, Qusi pinned his remaining hope on his younger daughter, Ryzan. She recently told her dad that she might go to law school to become an international lawyer. Qusi will support her no matter what career she chooses, but he still had a lingering desire to convince at least one daughter of the joys of being an engineer.
With almost thirty years of experience in the power industry, Qusi could make a persuasive case. “Wherever you look you will see engineering’s positive impact on humanity,” he told his daughter. He explained how engineers get to innovate, solve problems, and improve communities. He mentioned the prestige and good pay. He even played on her emotions. “Imagine how life would be like without engineers,” he said. “Engineers avert disasters and protect the world. Be part of that and create a change!” But none of his encouragement worked. His daughter’s answer was still no.
Qusi’s desire for his daughters to become engineers is unusual, which is part of the problem. A recent survey asked 770 parents in 150 countries about the careers they wanted for their kids, who were eleven to sixteen years old. Parents of boys were twice as likely as parents of girls to say that science and technology were the fields they most wanted their child to pursue. The disparity was even bigger for engineering in particular. While eleven percent of parents would choose engineering for their son, only one percent would choose it for their daughter.
Even though Qusi is among the one percent of parents who want their daughters to become engineers, he still couldn’t spark his daughters’ interest. He asked them why they weren’t drawn to engineering, and they said that none of their teachers ever talked about it as a career. That concerned Qusi, who thinks that schools should actively encourage students to become engineers. He also saw his daughters struggle to stay engaged with chemistry and math because the teachers weren’t using real-life problems or examples. When they couldn’t understand the theory, his daughters concluded that they weren’t smart enough for a math or science career.
Qusi also blames the male-dominated reputation of the engineering profession. “When people think about engineering,” he says, “they often think about hard hats, steel beams, winches, long hours, relocation every few years, and instability. There is a misunderstanding that engineering involves tedious or hard physical labor suitable for men only.” Lurking behind those misperceptions is a lack of female role models, which makes it harder to get girls excited about becoming engineers.
The data bears out Qusi’s concerns about the lack of educational pipelines for girls into STEM. Girls and boys perform similarly in math and science during primary school, but girls never participate in computer science and engineering at the same rate as boys. Although women are earning close to sixty percent of all bachelor’s degrees, they earn only forty-three percent of math degrees, thirty-nine percent in physical sciences, nineteen percent in engineering, and eighteen percent in computer science.
These disparities carry over into the workforce. In the US, women fill only a quarter of all STEM jobs. Sometimes art-related jobs are added to this group—changing the acronym to STEAM—which may raise the percentage of women slightly. But overall numbers hide the extremely low participation rates of women in engineering and computer science. Most of these women head into the social, biological, and life sciences, filling only eleven percent of jobs in physics, astronomy, and engineering. Women are particularly scarce in mechanical engineering, where they make up only eight percent of the workforce. Even worse, the percentage of women in computing jobs has actually decreased from thirty-seven percent in 1995 to only twenty-two percent in 2017. This is likely linked to the massive gender pay gap in the field. For those holding an advanced degree and working full-time in science or engineering, women’s median annual salary is over thirty-one percent less than men’s.
Perhaps most disturbing is that many women who earn STEM degrees don’t end up in STEM jobs. Thirty-eight percent of women who get engineering degrees stop being engineers or never take an engineering job in the first place. Almost half of women who enter the tech field eventually leave—a rate that’s more than double that of men. The exit rate is particularly high for women after having their first child because of the minimal support for childcare and nursing and the lack of flexible hours. This loss doesn’t just cost women, it also costs the tech industry itself. Silicon Valley tech companies spend more than $16 billion a year in turnover costs to replace and re-train workers to fill jobs that women and minorities leave.
Women’s exodus from the field—and their reluctance to enter—also results from a pervasive culture of sexual harassment. Dubbed “The Elephant in the Silicon Valley,” the full extent of sexual harassment in the tech industry is just coming to light as part of the #MeToo movement. In a recent survey of over 200 women who had been in the tech industry for at least ten years, a stunning sixty percent reported facing unwanted sexual advances at work. Ninety percent of the women had witnessed sexist behavior at conferences and company offsites, and one in three had feared for their personal safety in work-related situations. In another study of minority female scientists, every single respondent reported experiencing bias at work.
Not wanting to jeopardize their careers, thirty-nine percent of the women who experienced sexual harassment didn’t report it. That’s a rational decision in an industry where retaliation is rampant and women are viewed as outsiders. Sixty-six percent of the women said they were already excluded from social and networking events, and fifty-nine percent said they weren’t given the same opportunities as their male colleagues. For women who did report sexual harassment, sixty percent felt unsatisfied by the response they received. Many women leave the tech industry altogether after facing sexual harassment.
The result of the hostile work environment, pay disparity, and gender stereotypes isn’t just that women are being excluded from prestigious and satisfying jobs. It’s also that society is missing out on a vast source of talent and creativity. Researchers have found that greater gender diversity in tech companies leads to more radical innovation. A study of over 4,000 tech companies in Spain found that mixed-gender research and development teams were more creative, identified more novel solutions to problems, and had better decision-making processes than all-male teams.
Having women involved in early product development also helps ensure that products are designed with women consumers in mind—smartphones sized for women’s hands, artificial hearts that fit into women’s chest cavities, health apps that track menstruation, and virtual assistants that direct questions about sexual assault to appropriate resources. Design failures in all of those areas have been linked to male-dominated development teams. So ensuring equal opportunities for women in STEM isn’t just good for women, it’s also good for business.
After hearing his daughters’ explanations for their lack of interest in STEM careers, Qusi started thinking about how to create a better environment for female engineers. “It should be our goal and duty to make a place for women in engineering,” he decided. Qusi sees the problem as a pipeline issue: change education and culture from an early age, and that could change girls’ career paths. As a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Qusi has been increasing public awareness of how engineering, computing, and technology advance the public good, and of the importance of getting girls interested in science and technology to bring new contributors into the field. He’s also become a women’s mentor and an advocate for bringing women engineers into schools to share their experiences.
Several other dads of daughters have responded to Qusi’s plea by focusing even earlier in the pipeline. These dads have realized that welcoming girls into STEM requires a gender-bending cultural shift that empowers young girls to imagine themselves as engineers, mathematicians, techies, and scientists—as well as opens young boys up to the idea that STEM classes and careers are for everyone. Two dads have found creative ways to pique girls’ interest after learning from their daughters that nothing empowers girls quite like a girl superhero.
STEAMTeam 5
For Greg Helmstetter, becoming a dad was both a joyful and an unsettling event. When his daughter, Kamea, was born, Greg found himself wondering about the world she was facing. In imagining what she might grow up to be, he couldn’t help but worry about the power of technology to dictate job requirements or eliminate jobs entirely. He decided that teaching Kamea STEM skills would be the best insurance against an uncertain future.
This was an impressive goal for a dad who’s neither a scientist nor an engineer. Greg was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who moved to Arizona to become a partner in Monsoon Strategy, a business consulting firm. But even as a businessman, Greg decided that it was critical to surround his daughter with math, science, and technology. “Not to try to force her into these fields,” he explains, “but to give her the widest range of options possible.” Greg felt personally responsible for doing this well because he and his wife were homeschooling their daughter. “It’s on us if she’s getting taught well,” he says, which pushed him to think more creatively about how to get her interested in STEM skills.
Despite the best of intentions, Greg’s plan hit a roadblock. As he looked around at toys, children’s books, and TV programs, he found nothing depicting girls who were excited about using science, math, and technology. So Greg began inventing his own games and stories—often with his daughter’s Barbie dolls—to inject STEM concepts into playtime. Suddenly, Kamea’s Barbies weren’t just changing outfits, they were devising plans to catch ninja spies or launching a company to manufacture electric cars. In one of Greg’s stories, the Barbie dolls were the executives of a dog food factory and they used their profit from selling Mega Blok dog food to fund an animal shelter. Greg admits that at first, he was mostly just finding ways to make doll time more tolerable for himself, but he realized that he could use his stories to disrupt gender stereotypes and inject values.
Greg’s stories initially focused on his own entrepreneurial skills, but doll time soon became STEM-training time. Before long, the Barbie dolls were using technology, science, and math skills like superpowers to solve problems, rescue animals, and invent new products. Word of Greg’s girl-powered lessons soon spread through the playground network. Other parents of daughters started asking Greg where they could get copies of his stories. Greg saw a gaping hole that needed to be filled to enable young girls to see themselves as future scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and techies.
Greg enlisted the help of his business partner, Pamela Metivier, to co-found a publishing branch of their company to create children’s books that empower girls to become the next generation of STEAM leaders. They expanded Greg’s stories into an all-star cast of five girls, each with her own skillset and personality, with the goal of producing a five-book series. What young girl could resist a book series called STEAMTeam 5, in which ordinary girls use extraordinary STEAM skills to solve mysteries, fix problems, and make the world a better place?
The STEAMTeam girls are so hip—and so super-skilled—that they’re sure to inspire. There’s Sandia Scientist, who goes surfing with her dog Phyto, and who loves chemistry, biology, astronomy, quantum physics, and forensics. She’s always asking questions, doing experiments, and solving mysteries. There’s Treeka Technologist, who’s been programming and taking things apart since she was four, and who enjoys cryptology, puzzles, lock picking, and meditation. When she was little, she reprogrammed her talking teddy bear to respond “good idea, Treeks” to everything she says. They’re joined by Evelyn Engineer, who loves inventing and tinkering with cars, planes, and robots, and who can design a pretty impressive booby-trap. Ariana Artist is the team’s creative force, who loves drawing, sculpting, 3D animation, and making electronic music. Mattie Mathematician rounds out the team with her passion for numbers and logic.
While all the team members have unique super-skills, Greg made sure that the girls aren’t depicted as natural geniuses. The stories show how the girls developed their skills through hard work over time, and how it takes teamwork to solve problems. The books aren’t filled with explicit math and science lessons, but with entertaining stories about female role models to get girls excited about using STEAM skills. “They go on adventures and do fun things,” Greg explains, “and they happen to use STEAM skills because they’re good at them, and they’re good at them because they have passion.”
While Greg definitely wants to reach young girls who need to see themselves reflected in tech-centered stories, he also wants his books in the hands of boys, who need to see girls in tech roles from an early age. Greg’s all about promoting female empowerment, but he knows that men are still gatekeepers, so he wants just as many boys reading his books as girls.
Greg’s daughter Kamea still serves as “a focus group of one” to give feedback on his stories. Greg hopes that STEAMTeam 5 will inspire the next generation of girls to follow their passions in math, science, and technology. “STEAMTeam 5 is much more than just a book,” Greg explains, “it’s a movement designed to get girls interested in STEM/STEAM from a very early age, and to keep them interested.”
Ella the Engineer
Like Greg Helmstetter, New York native Anthony Onesto’s inspiration for changing the male-dominated tech culture came from his two daughters, Ella and Nicolette. Anthony was the Director of Talent Development for the digital marketing and consulting company Razorfish. While watching his daughters, he discovered a gap in the interest level that girls and boys have in technology. That prompted him to look around his own tech company, and he was startled to realize that only ten of the eight hundred coders were women. “That was my ‘what now’ moment,” he says. “How do we get more girls to get excited about coding?”
Anthony checked out the TV shows and media that his daughters watched, and just like Greg, he found an absence of role models depicting females in computer science and technology. This imbalance starts ingraining stereotypes at a very young age. When girls are asked to draw a scientist or someone who’s good at math, they’re more likely to draw a man than a woman. In talking with female engineers, Anthony heard the same message—no role models, no mentors, nobody to emulate. That’s when he had his “Ally McBeal moment.” He remembered that when Ally showed up as a clever and quirky attorney on the hit TV show in the late nineties, the number of girls who applied to law school skyrocketed. So Anthony decided it was time for a female tech-superhero to start changing the course of girls’ futures.
While Anthony is a big supporter of coding organizations that reach girls at an older age, he thinks that starts too late. “By then,” he says, “many young girls have completely written off the field, whether they realize it or not.” To reach younger girls, Anthony focused instead on comics. He couldn’t find a single female comics hero who solved problems using engineering, software, or technology, so it was time to invent one of his own.
Despite his success as an entrepreneur and executive, Anthony ran into some obstacles. For one thing, he’s not a professional cartoonist. By his own admission, he can’t draw and he doesn’t know how to tell a story. For another, he had no funding. But with passionate recruiting, Anthony built a team to create his vision, which is how Ella the Engineer was born.
Ella the Engineer is a comic book hero who uses coding, hacking, and programming skills to solve problems that young girls can understand. Anthony’s hope is that by creating a techie supergirl who other girls want to emulate, more girls will get interested in pursuing technology careers. “Imagine you give a young girl an opportunity that had not been presented to her before,” he explains, “a path to a career that is both rewarding and successful. A place where it was rare for her to play. A place where the opportunities seem endless these days.”
Ella the Engineer is named after Anthony’s youngest daughter, who helped him pitch the idea at a TEDxYouth event. Both of his daughters, Ella and Nicolette, as well as Anthony’s son, Frankie, serve as advisors for the comic books to make sure that the stories are reaching their intended audience. Anthony describes his daughters as both his initial “case study” and his “personal focus group,” and he’s happy to report that they’ve enthusiastically endorsed his storylines.
The comics include a pitch-perfect villain—Glitch—who wreaks havoc by placing bugs and viruses into codes in everyday technology. Ella the Engineer uses her super-coding skills to hack into systems, reprogram malfunctions, and save the day. Ella is helped along the way by her trusty computer Mack, her loyal tablet Tabby, and her smart aleck iPhone Smarty. Together, they make an irresistible team. While the comics contain puzzles and cryptograms for girls to practice their skills, Anthony’s primary goal was to make the stories entertaining. “I wanted to not only show a hero who was a female lead and a computer science coder,” Anthony explains, “but I also wanted to show kids that technology is actually intertwined into everything that we do.”
Because Anthony wants to reach as many girls as possible, his comic books are available free online. Ella the Engineer also has her own Facebook and Twitter accounts where she posts news about girls and women in technology. Anthony wants girls to understand the social importance of software development and coding and spark creativity and confidence in building STEM skills. Most importantly, he wants girls to see STEM careers as inviting and fun.
The comic book series is part of a larger vision for expanding opportunities for girls in technology. Anthony envisions a tech world that’s filled with skilled, imaginative, and successful women engineers who build, lead, and grow technology companies—“because they had a hero in Ella.”
Since creating Ella, Anthony helped found SmartUp, a peer-to-peer learning platform that allows tech companies to share knowledge. He also became the General Manager of the Konrad Group, a digital innovation company. He’s now thinking about “Ella 2.0.” His dream is to get Ella the Engineer a movie gig so he can magnify her positive impact. He says he’ll know that he’s succeeded when he someday sees a giant, inflatable Ella floating past cheering crowds in a Thanksgiving Day parade.
In the meantime, Anthony has begun a new campaign for Ella the Engineer called STEM Figures, which connects the Ella comics with real-life female tech role models. Anthony is interviewing prominent women in the STEM field, including chief technology officers and tech entrepreneurs. He asks them what triggered their passion for math, science, or technology as young girls. Their stories are highlighted on his website, and they’ll be woven into plotlines that will let Ella connect with the same events that got these successful female leaders excited about STEM careers.
Anthony is collaborating on this project with Jewelbots, which are programmable friendship bracelets that teach girls how to code. The bracelets are open source devices that let girls practice basic programming skills. Girls can program the bracelets to light up when a friend is nearby, send secret messages, or flash a rainbow when a group of friends get together. Anthony plans to have Ella the Engineer use her own Jewelbot to call upon the particular female STEM leader whose story inspired the comic episode. When Ella hits a roadblock, she can press her Jewelbot and the female STEM icon will appear in cartoon form to guide her through the challenge.
Ella the Engineer has already had an impact on Anthony’s own daughters. His older daughter, Nicolette, decided to apply to her high school’s STEM track. While Anthony’s younger daughter, Ella, has proudly taken the books to school for show-and-tell, Anthony suspects that her spitfire nature will lead her to become a CEO. She’s definitely learned from Ella the Engineer the importance of understanding technology for being an effective company leader one day.
How Dads Can Get Started
Luckily, if you’re a dad who wants to fuel your daughters’ interest in STEM, you don’t have to create a new book series or comic superhero to have an impact. In addition to STEAMTeam 5 and Ella the Engineer, several other children’s books about girls in STEM are finding their way into bookstores. Check out Andrea Beaty’s trilogy: Rosie Revere, Engineer; Ada Twist, Scientist; and Iggy Peck, Architect. Or try Tanya Lee Stone’s Who Says Women Can’t Be Computer Programmers? and Kimberly Derting’s Cece Loves Science.
You can also follow the GeekDad technology blog and podcasts created by engineer dad Ken Denmead. Ken has a series of GeekDad project books for parents and kids, including The Geek Dad Book for Aspiring Mad Scientists. Another great resource is Mike Adamick’s hands-on guide, Dad’s Book of Awesome Science Experiments, which shows dads how to teach daughters chemistry with soap clouds, human biology with marshmallow pulse keepers, and physics with straw balloon rockets. If you need downtime while still being a stellar dad, have your daughters watch the PBS television show SciGirls, which highlights real tween girls using STEM skills to answer questions in their daily lives.
For dads who are looking for a perfect birthday present for daughters or their friends, there are terrific STEM-related games available online from The STEM Store. One of the best new toy lines was created by Debbie Sterling specifically for girls to practice STEM skills. Debbie studied mechanical engineering and product design at Stanford University, where she was shocked to see so few women in her program. Like Greg and Anthony, she decided there must be a way to get more girls excited about engineering.
Debbie spent time perusing toy stores, where she discovered that toys are highly sex-segregated. Even worse, she discovered that all the cool building and design toys are housed in the boys’ section. She funneled her irritation into a new obsession: “disrupting the pink aisle.” Debbie’s goal was to design toys that would counter gender stereotypes and introduce girls to the joys of engineering. The result was an award-winning set of construction games with the girl-power title, “GoldieBlox.”
Described by the Boston Globe as “an alternative to toys more concerned with looks than brains,” the GoldieBlox construction kits allow kids to build contraptions to solve relatable challenges. In one set, girls help Goldie build a belt drive spinning machine for Goldie’s dog, Nacho, to chase his tail and entertain the neighborhood pets. Another set lets girls design mansions with trapdoors, bridges, and balconies. There are even sets that teach girls how to safely launch female action figures careening down ziplines, skydiving, or speeding across aerial cable cars.
Debbie’s husband Beau Lewis was so inspired by the concept that he left his job at the video production company Seedwell to join GoldieBlox as a co-founder in 2013. Beau has an engineering degree from Stanford, and he worked as a Program Manager at Microsoft and Zillow. Although he wasn’t yet a dad, the mere thought of someday having a daughter was enough to motivate him to leave a lucrative tech career for the chance to make STEM-related toys for girls.
Debbie and Beau’s passion and teamwork have taken the toy market by storm. GoldieBlox quickly expanded into books, apps, videos, and merchandise to inspire girls to become future engineers. Goldiblox has won multiple awards, including Parents Magazine’s FamilyFun Toy of the Year, and it became the first small business to have a Super Bowl TV ad after winning an Intuit contest that paid for a coveted thirty-second spot. But even with all of these accolades, Debbie and Beau’s greatest reward is knowing they’ve built a platform to empower girls to pursue STEM careers.
In addition to filling girls’ environments with STEM-inspired books, games, and toys, education experts say that dads can make a difference by engaging daughters in STEM-related outings and activities. By taking daughters to science and tech museums, going to the planetarium, and building things together in the backyard, dads can inspire an interest in STEM and grow daughters’ confidence in math, science, and technology skills. Dozens of creative ideas for at-home science projects for girls can be found at the Go Science Girls website.
For dads who work in the STEM field, volunteering with an organization that teaches girls computer programming and other technology skills can also have a major impact. There are many organizations to choose from, including Girls Who Code, TechGirlz, Girl Develop It, CoolTechGirls, EngineerGirl, and Black Girls Code. Edward Stein is an EIT Director of Distribution Systems for Cardinal Health who carved out time to volunteer as a Program Planning Team Lead for CoolTechGirls, which provides mentors, internships, and career resources for girls who are interested in science and technology. “My thirteen-year-old daughter Megan is a big motivation for me,” said Edward. “I enjoy providing her with opportunities to see herself in a future STEM career field which CoolTechGirls provides a forum for.”
Girls Who Code is an excellent place for dads of daughters to get started. Founded in 2012, Girls Who Code seeks to close the gender gap in technology through education, mentorships, and school-to-work pipelines. Girls Who Code has reached almost 90,000 girls across all fifty states, and half of the girls in its programs are from minority or low-income families. The organization has nearly 5,000 college-aged alums who are choosing computer science or related fields as their majors at fifteen times the rate of the national average. At that pace, Girls Who Code could equalize women in entry-level tech jobs by 2027. Men can volunteer to facilitate a Girls Who Code after-school club for sixth- through eighth-grade girls or teach at a summer camp. Summer courses cover a range of topics, including website design, wearable technology, and iPhone app development.
TechGirlz also offers volunteer opportunities for dads of daughters. This organization focuses on engaging middle-school girls to build technology skills through free, interactive classes called “TechShopz.” TechGirlz makes it easy for dads to run a workshop with online “TechShopz in a Box.” These toolkits include workshop plans, curriculum, materials, and teaching guides that enable anyone to run a workshop for middle-school girls in their area. Dads of daughters can select from a wide range of TechShopz topics, including programming and coding skills, podcasting, website design, mobile apps, digital mapping, graphics and animation, game design, circuitry, network communication, artificial intelligence, robotics, and virtual reality. By open-sourcing their workshop plans, TechGirlz has tripled its enrollment, reaching over 10,000 middle-school girls around the country. Men can also sponsor a TechGirlz summer camp, assist with curriculum development, or help with outreach to tech professionals.
For dads of daughters who are in decision-making positions at technology firms, girls’ coding organizations also offer opportunities for corporate partnerships. Girls Who Code has a pipeline-to-work initiative called #HireMe which allows partner companies to post job openings and internships and receive resumes from girls trained through Girls Who Code. Dads can also partner their companies with Girl Develop It, which offers software development classes to women. With programs in fifty-eight cities and over 55,000 members nationwide, Girl Develop It is always on the look-out for corporate sponsorships.
Increasing the pipeline of girls into STEM can also indirectly address the hostile work environment that plagues the tech industry. When women are equally represented in tech jobs and leadership roles, cultural shifts will likely follow. In the meantime, dads of daughters who work in the tech industry can help change their workplace culture by speaking up, empowering women to speak up, and taking women seriously when they do.
Dads of daughters are already showing themselves to be among the strongest male advocates for women in the STEM field. In 2013, researchers identified forty-seven men who were known for being gender diversity advocates in leadership positions at tech firms. Among the men in this group who were fathers, ninety-six percent had at least one daughter. When asked what had motivated them to become active in gender diversity efforts, many of them cited pivotal learning experiences with their daughters.
Mentoring women in STEM careers can happen informally on the job, or men can join an established mentoring program like the one created by Girls In Tech that focuses on professional women’s career development. The Million Women Mentors initiative for advancing women in STEM careers also provides opportunities for dads to share their expertise, or dads can participate in the Men as Diversity Partners initiative created by the Society of Women Engineers.
In all of these ways, dads of daughters have opportunities to welcome girls into STEM, support women scientists, engineers, and mathematicians, and accelerate innovation. The first step is finding ways to replace the pervasive princess icon with far more powerful and exciting STEM role models for girls to emulate. That was one of Beau Lewis’s primary motivations for leaving his tech job to co-found Goldiblox with his wife. Beau’s inspiration came from the mere thought of being a potential father of a daughter. In explaining why he joined the movement to advance girls in STEM, Beau channeled the thoughts of many dads of daughters by writing a letter to his future daughter apologizing in advance for all of the ways that we inadvertently direct girls away from STEM careers and vowing to make a difference:
Dearest Zelda (daughter),
I’m afraid there is a 99.99 percent chance you won’t grow up to be a princess.
I’m afraid I would rather you become an engineer.
I apologize that I wanted to have a boy.…
I was afraid you wouldn’t want to build a treehouse with me.…
I was afraid that you wouldn’t like ninja turtles and hot wheels.…
I was under the impression that female role models existed to balance out the Barbie beauty queens, and that Bob the Builder and Lego Man weren’t the only options.
I apologize that our country has fallen behind 200 other countries where girls are actually testing better than boys in math and science.
I apologize that I haven’t done more to help improve the world for women.
I was under the impression that little girls grew up and had the same opportunities as men in the US workforce.…
I was afraid that being a feminist was not for men.
I was afraid that helping little girls might seem creepy.
I am done apologizing.
I am no longer afraid nor easily impressed.
I am inspired.…
I am doing something to make sure my daughter will know that she is more than just a princess.
Love,
Beau (Dad)
