If You Have a Daughter, Please Spend 3 Minutes Watching This Video For Her Sake
"This is Ellie. She is 5 years old."
That's how this video starts, but if every mom simply substitutes their own daughters' names and ages, it's as if the next three minutes were made just for them.
Because, like Ellie, there are certain things your child knows and some things she doesn't. She knows she's smart, fast, and strong. She knows anything is possible. She doesn't know, however, that the world can be a difficult place for girls. For instance, she doesn't know that:
- Only 11 percent of practicing engineers and one-fifth of head chefs are female
- Women make up just 5 percent of the artists in the New York Metropolitan Museum's modern art section
- By middle school, girls earn higher grades in science but feel less confident than boys
- By age 11, 30 percent of girls will try a diet
- 60 percent of girls give up doing something they love because they don't like the way they look
Before you start feeling defeated, the thing to remember is . . . she doesn't know those things yet, and maybe she won't have to.
The video — made to introduce Kazoo, a "new kind of magazine" for girls, on Kickstarter before its launch this Summer — should be mandatory viewing for any parent of a daughter because it reminds us all that, in this ever-changing world, the possibilities for her are endless if we keep it that way.
This post was originally published on March 20. 2016.