And you, do you remember what you wanted to be as a child? According to the survey What do you want to be when you grow up ?, prepared by Adecco, the girls want to be teachers, doctors, youtubers or influencers. But why don't you engineer or pilot? The reality is that their aspirations are focused on the referents that are close, how could we tell the girls of the 21st century that there is an immense range of professions within their reach?
This is how Inspiring Girls was born, a foundation where hundreds of volunteer women seek to be the reference of teenage girls aged 14-15 to teach them that their Job opportunities are endless and that they can become scientific and even astronauts.
How was Inspiring Girls born?
It is an international organization born four years ago in the United Kingdom by the hand of the Spanish lawyer Miriam González Durántez. She is the former wife of Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg who, while campaigning with her husband, asked some girls what they wanted to be when they grew up. The answer left her frozen. None wanted to be a businesswoman or an engineer, they only focused on the closest referents of their environment and that was when he decided to start the foundation.
What's your objective?
Increase the professional ambition and self-esteem of girls of school age, as well as their job expectations, helping them to make visible the wide variety of professions and jobs that exist, without the fact of being a woman supposes any limitation provided they are based on work And in the effort.
This is how they inspire the girls of the future
The volunteers sign up for the project and are only asked for one hour a year to come to give a talk to the teenagers of a school.
“We ask them to be very generous when it comes to sharing their life experiences: how they felt at that age, what doubts they had, if they would have liked a woman to have come to talk to them, what problems have been encountered throughout his professional career, how they have been solved, who has helped them… ”, explains Paula Gómez, director of the organization in Spain.
In addition, in case of wearing a uniform, they are asked to bring it on so that the visual impact is even stronger. Something that works very well in cases of the army as Paula tells us, where the students came to think that it was a flight attendant instead of verifying that the one in front of them was a commander of the air army. Because even if they don't know it, they themselves are stereotyped and until they see a woman telling her that she is capable of piloting a fighter they don't think it's possible.
"We don't tell them what should be when we grow up, we just show them the wide variety of professions that exist because you can't dream about what you don't know," Paula Gómez tells us.
How do they get to girls?
In addition to the talks in schools are dedicated to make thematic events for those who choose a disruptive site with a specific topic and a volunteer related to it.
The first was in a boxing gym where they took 50-60 girls who placed in round tables. In each of them there was a volunteer who rotated every 10 minutes.
Thus, at the end of the day, all the girls had been able to speak with eight different women.
Some of those who have carried out have been related to the recycling, the environment or science in the Museum of Natural Sciences itself.
They also carried out one in the Amadeus company with the aim of treating the transport from the point of view of ICT. In particular, this was quite interesting for the young women who had never seen a female AVE driver, for example.
And children?
We also talk with Paula about whether they want to extend their project to the male gender at some point. He tells us that it is very important that they also see that women are capable of carrying out many different professions but that for now we have to go step by step.
"In adolescence it is shown that there is a decrease in self-esteem in both sexes but it decreases more in girls than in boys. We are targeting girls because unfortunately they are currently in a situation of inferiority. We have done many mixed events such as recycling The experience is that when there are only women in one room, they open up more and ask things that if there were children they wouldn't ask, "Paula tells us.
At present, where there is a great revolution in the women's sector for equality, she tells us that girls tend to be quite interested in the issue of conciliation and ask more intimate questions that they would not dare to do if there were boys in front.
Some have personal experiences with their partners where volunteers advise on their right to privacy and dignity. Possible situations that could lead to subjugations by their partners that they still do not distinguish and that an expert female voice can be very useful.
“What we want to do first is for a girl to be strong. To reach real equality you have to take a lot of steps but the zero step is for a girl to believe it. If a girl does not believe it, it is impossible to continue climbing stairs. That is our goal that a girl thinks she can get anywhere. "
Inspiring Girls in numbers
Since its inception, 90% of public schools have already been assigned in the United Kingdom, with 25,000 volunteers giving talks to 600,000 girls.
In Spain has been running the project for a year and a half and 53 schools have already joined and has 700 active volunteers.
In addition, this international project also works in Serbia, Italy, Chile, Colombia, Brazil and aims to reach Africa.
In 2017 they have had the collaboration of some large companies such as Acciona, Amadeus or Deloitte.
The importance of Inspiring Girls is to increase the references that current girls have so that they begin to see that they have many more opportunities than they thought. A clear example is found in Silvia Sanz Torre, orchestra director. She has given more concerts than a man and also has a children's orchestra. He says that there is nothing better to break the barriers than when he asks his students to draw an orchestra and put a woman in front, that is the way to break stereotypes and create referents.
