new york
The Nightingale Bamford School on Manhattan's Upper East Side draws educators from across the country to learn best practices for preparing young girls, especially those from minority backgrounds, for future success.
“While American women have made progress over the past 175 years, we are still far from achieving equity,” said the senior director of girls' education at the Student Leadership Network, a nonprofit organization that advocates for equity in education. Managing Director Laura Rebel Gross said. She said, “Inequalities exist in all fields, and women's achievements continue to go unrecognized.”
meeting, Closing the gap: The role of girls' education in creating a more just worldwe focused on the unique burdens young women face today and the biases of technology and AI that are impacting their present and future.
Despite girls and women often outperforming boys and men in both secondary and tertiary institutions, Revelle-Gross says the statistics regarding women's representation in the workforce and other fields are surprising. He said that it should be done.
“With women represented in just 15% of textbooks, 8% of public statues, and less than a third of people in Congress, the pay gap has barely improved. For women of color, the gap is even more pronounced. ,” Rebel Gross said.
Although women make up half of the company's workforce, only 26% of executive positions are held by women, and only 5% are women of color, she continued. A 2019 study from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management found that 60% of U.S. companies have no female directors.
Conferences and the conversations they start are “a way to bridge the gap one school, one program, one teacher, one student at a time,” Rebel-Gross said.
Dr. Ruha Benjamin, author, sociologist, and professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University, will speak about technology and equity.
“Any conversation about technology has to start with the societies that produce it, the existing forms of stratification that are encoded in digital systems,” Benjamin said.
Benjamin encouraged listeners to think carefully about the labor behind the apps they use every day, whether it's Amazon or a food delivery service. What dignity are these workers afforded, she asked, and who benefits from their efforts? While some technical biases are clearly obvious, others can affect users without them even realizing it. This has become what Benjamin calls “the new gym norm.”
“We assume technology is in the driver's seat, propelled by its own will. But the human behind the screen is missing from that script,” Benjamin said. “Values, ideas, ideologies, assumptions, and aspirations are encoded in our digital fabric. As it stands, only a tiny fraction of humanity encodes their vision into the world we have to live in. We live in someone else's imagination.”
Benjamin said she wants students and educators to be creative in questioning and critiquing technology and coming up with solutions. The technology is adjustable. Benjamin said AI and other technologies produce less biased results when given data based on the real experiences of users rather than programmers.
“If inequality is woven into the very fabric of our society, then each twist, spiral, and code is an opportunity for us to weave new patterns, practices, and politics,” Benjamin said. Ta. “Once we accept that we are pattern makers, that vastness comes back.”
Dr. Lisa Hinkelman shares research results from her nonprofit ROX.
“Social media is impacting everything from how people feel about their bodies and relationships to what they think is possible,” Hinkelman says.
Hinkelman said that if girls' lack of self-confidence is not addressed early in life, “girls' challenges become women's challenges.” “Higher education institutions need to be aware of what their pipeline looks like, where it starts, and what challenges girls still experience as freshmen and enter college. It is important to understand.”
Leanne Harder can be contacted at: [email protected].
