[Cool Chicks] Some Epic Poetry Slamming

I started a new role at Google this week, so I've been extra busy (re: sorry, for ignoring you, blog).

I ran into these 3 AMAZING college women, slamming some good, feminist truth.

Definitely worth spending the 7 minutes watching.

Sassy Octogenarians

These ladies are sassy -- they love fashion, life and basically, just being awesome.

The documentary "Fabulous Fashionistas" explores the lives of 6 women between the ages of 75 and 95.  It's free to watch on YouTube and totally worth it.

PS - Did you know this woman is 80 now & just released a new album?

Advertising Technique: Social Commentary

I love how this commercial by Goldieblox doesn't tiptoe around the issue at hand.  

Girls toys suck.

Let's make them better (to the beat of the Beastie Boys).

Advertising Technique: Elicit Empathy

Source: Design Taxi

"The distress we see someone experiencing — the compassion we feel for them — isn’t determined by the objective facts on the ground; it’s determined by who’s looking. … It’s not the severity or the objective facts of a disaster that motivate us to feel compassion and to help — it’s whether or not we see ourselves in the victims." - David DeSteno

If facts alone were convincing, the world would look very different.

We'd take global warming seriously.
Hunger would be a thing of the past.
And, cigarettes would not be on the shelf.

Instead, we need stories to be convinced.  We need to feel a connection.

That's why I really like this Equal Pay campaign by Publicis & the International Women's Media Foundation.  

"According to statistics, women’s earnings in the US “were 77% of men’s in 2011”, while in Switzerland, women earned “roughly 20% less than equally skilled men in comparable positions”. 

If this fact really resonated with us, we'd be a lot more vocal.  In reality, progress has stalled.

To bring the stat to life, they launched an "Equal Pay Day" where men received 20% less money when they took out money from an ATM.  They got to actually walk in someone else's shoes for the day. 

See the video below.

Advertising Technique: Shocking Truth

Source: Design Taxi

Most people have an unconscious bias against women in the workplace.  Fact.

Even cultural nuances like selecting your sex on an immigration form (M comes before F), referring to a mixed group as "guys" or calling a group of grown women "girls" hint at sexism.

The Ad Agency, Ogilvy & Mather, highlighted rampant sexism in its new ad campaign for UN Women.  They used real Google searches and showed the "auto complete" results.

Here's how autocomplete works:

"As you type, autocomplete predicts and displays queries to choose from. The search queries that you see as part of autocomplete are a reflection of the search activity of all web users and the content of web pages indexed by Google."  

It's a good proxy for the most popular queries using the start of the sentence as a reference.

After seeing this ad, I assumed it was only applicable to more restrictive societies.  I'm in the US this week and tried it out myself.  Here's some of my results:

Those are some pretty telling results.

We shouldn't work, vote or go to college.
We should stay home.
We can't have it all.

If you really want to know someone, look at their Google search history.
If you really want to know public opinion, look at Google autocomplete.

There's still a long way to go in the women's rights movement.

Even Janis Joplin had "girl problems"

When I tell people I'm from Texas and sense judgement in their eyes (re: my entire time in San Francisco), I like to say "Janis Joplin is from there."  

She was a bad ass.
"The Queen of Psychedelic Soul"
#46 on Rolling Stones List of Greatest Artists of All Time
A member of the rock-and-roll hall of fame
A trailblazer for female rock musicians.

"Janis put herself out there completely, and her voice was not only strong and soulful, it was painfully and beautifully real. She sang in the great tradition of the rhythm & blues singers that were her heroes, but she brought her own dangerous, sexy rock & roll edge to every single song. She really gave you a piece of her heart. And that inspired me to find my own voice and my own style." 

- Stevie Nicks

She was also very vulnerable.  
I forget that legends can feel the same emotions as mere mortals.

I'm currently reading "Just Kids" by Patti Smith (a must read), and she describes her last interaction with Janis before her death.  

Janis was in New York playing in Central Park and then met up with other artists afterwards for drinks at the Remington.  She spent most of her night talking to a good-looking guy who eventually left with a prettier groupie.

Janis started crying and said, "This always happens to me, man.  Just another night alone"

Patti took her back to the Chelsea Hotel and listened to her bemoan her fate.  She then wrote her a poem:

I was working real hard 

To show the world what I could do 

Oh I guess I never dreamed 

I'd have toWorld spins some photographs 

How I love to laugh when the crowd laughs 

While love slips through 

A theatre that is full 

But oh baby 

When the crowd goes home 

And I turn in and I realize I'm alone 

I can't believe 

I had to sacrifice you

In response, Janice said, "That's me, man.  That's my song"

I guess we're all more alike (and vulnerable) than we think.

[A Poem for a Sunday] Power

Power by Adrienne Rich

Living in the earth-deposits of our history 

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth 
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old 
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic 
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate. 

Today I was reading about Marie Curie: 
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness 
her body bombarded for years by the element 
she had purified 
It seems she denied to the end 
the source of the cataracts on her eyes 
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends 
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil 

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

Is a child in the US equal to a child in Africa?

I saw the documentary "Girl Rising" tonight at a Room to Read event.  I was in charge of the registration desk -- with great power comes great responsibility some would say.

It was a well-made documentary, complete with good storytelling and solid cinematography.  I even started getting teary-eyed at the end.  

As the lights turned on, I immediately felt a pang of cognitive dissonance (i.e., the discomfort from holding 2 conflicting beliefs or values).  I looked around and saw an auditorium full of upper-middle class, nicely dressed women living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world.  Yes, we "care" about causes, but not enough to really sacrifice our comforts or conflicting belief in the power of capitalism.

The documentary made a strong case for educating children in developing countries.

Here's the sad stuff I learned:

• 66M girls are out of school WW (UNESCO)
• 33M fewer girls are in primary school than boys (Education First)
• 150M girls are victims of sexual violence per year (UNIFEM)
• 14M girls under 18 will be married this year -- that's 26 girls per minute (UNFPA)
• #1 cause of death for girls 15-18 is childbirth (WHO)

Here's the education stuff I learned:

• A girl with an extra year of education can earn 20% more as an adult (the WorldBank)
• If India enrolled 1% more girls in secondary school, their GDP would rise by $5.5B (CIA Factbook)
• Girls with 8 years of education are 4 times less likely to be married as children (National Academy Press)
• A child born to a literate mother is 50% more likely to survive past the age of 5 (UNESCO)
• School is not free in 50 countries WW (UNESCO)

Okay, now get ready for a little market sizing.

Assumption 1: Let's say we agree that the 66M girls should be in school

Assumption 2: And, that a child, regardless of nationality, has the same innate value

In the United States, 6M children are enrolled in private school, paying an average tuition cost of $10K.  Technically, none of the students need to go to private school since public school is free.  It's a luxury.

That's $60B spent on over-and-above schooling.  According to the Girl Rising website, it costs $50 to pay a girls' fees for a year, in places like India, Peru and Sierra Leone.

That's enough to pay for 1.2B children to go to school -- way more than the ones that can not attend right now.

Which, brings me back to the title of this post.  Our actions are not connected to our beliefs.

We believe an American child is in fact worth
(a lot) more than an African child.

Girls <> Boys in Media

We've launched a new learning & development program at Google about "unconscious biases" where I learned that a 1% bias against women can lead to major organization stratification (i.e., why CEOs are men).

It's great that Google is training us.  I find it fascinating and have a moderate bias myself.

There is one thing missing from the training -- biases in our business.

All it takes is 1%

Here's a riddle for you.

A father and a son get in a car accident.  The father dies, but the son is sent to the hospital with serious injuries, needing emergency surgery.

The doctor comes in and says, "I can't operate.  It's my son."

How is this possible?