NEW YORK
At The Nightingale-Bamford School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, educators from across the nation gathered to learn the best practices to elevate young girls, particularly those from minoritized backgrounds, into successful futures.
“While American women have advanced in the last 175 years, we haven’t come close to achieving equity,” said Laura Rebell-Gross, senior managing director of Girls’ Education with the Student Leadership Network, a nonprofit organization working for educational equity. “Disparities exist across every discipline and women’s achievements still go unrecognized.”
The conference, Closing the Gap: The Role of Girls’ Education in Creating a More Equitable World, focused on the unique burdens confronting young women of today, and the biases in technology and AI that are impacting the present and future.
Despite girls and women often outperforming boys and men at both secondary and postsecondary institutions, Rebell-Gross said statistics regarding women’s representation in the workforce and beyond are staggering.
“Women make up just 15% of textbooks, 8% of public statues, less than one third of Congress, and the wage gap has barely budged. The disparities are much starker for women of color,” said Rebell-Gross.
Women make up half the workforce, she continued, yet they hold only 26% of executive positions—women of color hold only 5%. A 2019 study from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management found 60% of U.S. companies do not have any female board members.
