July/August 2000

Jane Fonda Speaks on Global Education for Girls and Women

Every month, the Harvard Graduate School of Education invites a number of educators, researchers,community activists, and policymakers, from across the country to talk about such topics as school violence, multiple intelligences, teaching science, and the politics of school reform. We are pleased to be able to provide you with an edited transcript of some of these talks.

Below is an edited transcript of a talk that took place at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on March 15, 2000. For easier reading, we have divided the transcript into the following sections:

Dean Jerry Murphy's Introduction
Jane Fonda's Talk
Questions from the Audience
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Dean Jerry Murphy's Introduction

Jerry Murphy: Good evening. My name is Jerry Murphy, I'm the dean of the School of Education. It is a pleasure to welcome you all here to the Askwith Education Forum - and a special word of welcome to our honored guest, Jane Fonda.

Tonight we gather to hear Jane Fonda speak about girls I want to say that the timing could not be better because just a week ago, the faculty of the education school voted unanimously to establish a new master's degree program in Gender Studies. This is the first program of its kind in the nation, and it will be under the intellectual guidance of Carol Gilligan, who also joins us this evening.

We are very excited about this program, which will be getting underway next fall. Tonight, we also gather to thank Tim Worth for his leadership and service to the School, and to celebrate the establishment of the Timothy E. Worth Professorship in Learning Technologies.

Timothy E. Worth: Well, you're in for a treat. Jane Fonda is a woman of enormous talent, capability, and commitment. Genius does not come narrowly defined, as Howard Gardner would tell us, but comes with multiple facets and great intelligence, and that is Jane. I think everybody in the country knows Jane from her acting career and her very great distinction on the screen, having won two Oscars. She has been a remarkable advocate and citizen leader in so many ways in this country, on issues such as the environment, human rights, and the empowerment of women. We had the privilege of becoming deeply engaged in the Cairo Conference on population in 1994, at which Jane was a special international representative of the UN Secretary General. You may remember this was an incredibly controversial and difficult issue globally, in which there were many forces trying to make sure that family planning, reproductive freedoms, and access to reproductive health care were not available to women, or were very concerned or threatened by the outcome of that conference, which was fundamentally a major document for the empowerment of women. Jane was one of the world's most important advocates in that area.

A year later, we found ourselves together in Beijing, at the International Women's Conference. You may remember that women were put front and center on the issue of human rights, and Jane was again deeply involved there. Watching her in that activity as in Cairo, as in so many others, one wondered, "Could we possibly clone this individual and send her out to all of the troubled and hot spots of the world?"

She is a trustee of the Carter Center. She was the founder of the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention--G-CAPP, and has been deeply engaged in questions concerning adolescence and adolescent girls, the empowerment of young women, and the care and concern that society ought to have [for them].

And I had hoped that we could get Jane to come and address the Askwith Forum, and the timing could not be more perfect for you to share with us your great sense of commitment, Jane Fonda.

Jane Fonda: Thank you very much. I really appreciate being invited to speak here. I want to talk about girls. I'm interested in girls for a lot of reasons. For one, I was one once. And because I work with girls now in the area of adolescent pregnancy prevention, I try to learn all I can about them.

Studying their lives and developmental issues, as all of us who work with girls must do, I've done a lot of thinking about my own girlhood. I also have one biological daughter and two adopted daughters. I want to start by telling a story about girls in a developing country because it's such a dramatic illustration of what happens when girls are empowered through education and work, and because I think that its lessons are true anywhere in the world.

Deep in the heart of Cairo, Egypt, at the bottom of a deep rock quarry, is an impoverished community of 17,000 Coptic Christians. These are the adults and children who collect the city's garbage. They haul garbage day and night in mule-drawn wagons or dilapidated trucks, from around the city to their community, and dump it into the center of their homes. Wet, soggy, putrefying, terrifying garbage, day after day, year after year.

They live in dark, primitive, doorless structures with dirt floors. Garbage piles sometimes reaching six feet high. They cohabit with the garbage _ it is their furniture, their couches and chairs. In the back of each home are pigs that eat the garbage and the pig excrement is then taken and dumped into a huge pit in the center of the community where it composts and is sold as fertilizer.

Children crawl through the garbage. Older ones, mostly girls, sit on the dirt floors sorting through the garbage, removing anything that won't compost. During the day a few of the boys attend school--no girls. There is no reason for parents to educate girls or invest in the education of their daughters. Girls are used as their mothers were before them--as servants, sorting garbage, taking care of the siblings, cooking the meals.

Though they are responsible in large part for the health of the family, they can't read prescriptions the doctors might give them, and they are not accustomed to discussing things with doctors. Once girls in the Macadam community enter puberty they are married, frequently earlier than Egyptian law permits with its legal age of 16. A girl may be married off to someone she doesn't choose, doesn't know, and someone who may be many, many years older than she is.

Once married, a girl moves into her husband's house and goes to work for her mother-in-law. In other words, girls marry and leave home. Boys marry and bring a wife (read servant) into his family's home. Better to invest in boys.

And so the crippling cycle of deeply ingrained gender bias is repeated generation after generation, driving high fertility rates and poor health until now. Six years ago, when I was in Cairo for the United Nations Conference on Population and Development, I asked to visit this community - to see a remarkable nongovernmental project that I had heard about. I was driven into the community past the garbage-filled wagons, past the compost pit. When the car door opened, I was assailed by a stench thicker and more unbearable than anything I could have imagined.

I forced myself out of the car, embarrassed to show the difficulty I was having, and I had to breath through my mouth so that I wouldn't get sick. I couldn't believe that people lived their whole lives breathing this air. A widely respected Catholic nun who developed and runs the project was there to meet me. First she took me to a small school poised on the edge of the huge compost pit. There I saw girls as well as boys, sitting at desks, studying. The nun told me that initially there was great resistance to sending the girls to school. To counter the resistance, the organizers had recently adopted a more holistic approach. I was led to a concrete building on the side of the hill to illustrate the point.

The rooms were filled with huge looms and paper pressing machines. It was very clean. Girls were working everywhere, and they were clean, too. I was told the girls were taught to respect themselves by coming to work or going to school in a clean dress, usually their only one, with their hair short and their nails tidy. The girls were recycling paper fiber taken from the garbage, and making it into stationery and cards which they embroidered and sold.

Other girls were at looms, weaving recycled bits of fabric into rugs. In another room, girls sat around a table, sorting pieces of colored fabric, leftovers donated by Cairo's textile shops. They were cutting them into squares, triangles, rectangles, applying what they had learned in school-- math concepts that they had learned, to design symmetrical shapes, which they sewed into beautiful quilts.

And while they worked, they were being taught health concepts, including reproductive health, the dangers of early marriage and closely spaced births, and they learned about contraception. Some of them were also being trained to work as health outreach workers. Up to a sixth of the girls in the community are engaged in these income-generating programs, which pays them $17.00 a month. It's difficult for us in this country to imagine how $17.00 a month could be so transformative.

But understand the effect that it had. These girls had achieved a goal on their own, and they had been rewarded for it. Their sense of self was changed. A new world of possibilities had opened up. They could read, they could learn, they could earn, they could feel proud, they could just maybe break out of the cycle of servitude and despair.

Fathers and mothers began to view their girls in a new way. Now that the girls had developed income-generating skills, there was less resistance to educating them. Smart enough to read and to earn, they were becoming valuable assets to be encouraged rather than held back. Family health in the community began to improve, as girls learned to read and grew less timid about talking with doctors.

Another innovative part of the program was the creation of rewards for girls for delaying marriage, which gives them leverage and bargaining power with their families. Girls were offered 100 Egyptian Pounds, or $150 US Dollars, if they married after the age of 18 and if the marriage was freely chosen. Examples like this and numerous others are proof that in the developing world, if you change the lives of girls by educating them and give them the opportunity to become wage earners, to participate in public life, it is a two-fold gain.

You expand human capital, while simultaneously improving reproductive health and slowing population growth. Giving girls the chance to delay marriage until a later age means they postpone the birth of the first child, and desired family size shrinks. Adolescent girls gain new status and identities beyond their traditional ones, which define them narrowly as daughters, mothers, wives, sexual objects, and producers of male children. And for every additional year of schooling, a woman's income increases by up to 10% to 20%.

Typically, in some African countries, women with no education want seven children. Women with primary school education want a little more than three. And women with secondary education want only two. In Zimbabwe, Brazil, Mexico, and Peru, there is a four-child difference in desired family size between educated and non-educated women. Here is what Lawrence Summers [U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary] said in a talk he gave in 1992 at the Economic Development Institute of the World Bank: "Investment in girls' education may well be the highest return investment available in the developing world."

This is a view that is shared by a growing number of economists, and including the World Bank itself. In his talk, Mr. Summers concluded that girls are not being educated because their families don't expect them to make an economic contribution, an expectation that represents a self-fulfilling prophesy. For five years now I've been working in Georgia with an organization that I founded called the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention.

The organization was conceived in Cairo at the same conference that brought me to the garbage collectors' community. Prior to the Cairo conference, I had assumed that the solution to high-fertility rates was to provide more contraception. Now, obviously, more family planning is important, providing it is of good quality, treats clients respectfully, offers contraceptive choices, and is friendly to adolescents. This is important, far too scarce, and should be supported by the public and private sectors, but as I began to learn more, I realized that family planning is for people who want to limit their family size, who feel they have a right to protect themselves and the means to do so.

And, unfortunately, far too few women do. [Existing] services are not enough for poor women in both developed and developing countries, and certainly not sufficient for adolescents, who have so little control over their lives. I was beginning to learn that to understand and modify adolescent sexual and reproductive behavior, one must look beyond the traditional, circumscribed health-centered agenda. Sexual behavior, like all behavior, is determined by a complex web of social ties, based on factors such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity. It is these factors that determine the onset of sexual activity, family size, and the spacing of children.

Several years ago, I asked Dr. Michael Carrera founder of one of this country's most successful adolescent pregnancy prevention programs, what is the single most important thing I could tell a mother who doesn't want her young daughter getting pregnant. And he answered, "Keep her in school and doing well." Making sure girls are educated is as important in this country as it is in the developing world.

Although here education is required and accessible to both genders, at-risk youth who are doing poorly too often dropout at early ages. School failure and dropping out are signs that a girl or boy has given up on himself or herself. And [a girl] will often then turn to parenthood as a way to obtain status and an adult identity within the family and the community. Rather than pregnancy being the cause of school dropout as is too often believed, it is usually the other way around. In one recent study, a majority of drop-outs had a baby more than nine months after they left school, a fact that clearly illustrates that the pregnancy could not have caused the dropout.

Teenage parents in this country tend not to be middle-class people who dropped out and became poor just because they had a baby. Well over half of all American women who give birth as teenagers come from profoundly poor families, and more than a fourth come from families who are slightly better off, but still struggling financially.

Altogether, more than 80% of teenage mothers are born poor and grow up in poor neighborhoods. Their girlhoods are often scarred by violence and disorder, including sexual abuse at the hands of a family member or friend. Chances are their mothers were themselves teenagers when they had them, and lacked the skills to prepare them for school or for life.

The schools they attend are too often run down and ill-equipped, with teachers having to struggle to discipline and motivate the students. And their life experiences rarely move them any closer to the American dream. To quote Marion Wright Edelman, the founder and director of the Children's Defense Fund, "Hope is the best contraceptive." Middle-class girls are more motivated to postpone sex, use contraception if they are sexually active, or get an abortion if they become pregnant, because they see a future for themselves that would be compromised by having a child too early.

Disadvantaged girls, on the other hand, see nothing to lose by early parenthood. In fact, for some adolescent girls who begin life at a disadvantage, motherhood can be a catalyst for turning their lives around. But for the majority of them, having a child makes it harder for them to take advantage of whatever opportunities and lucky breaks may come along. Public policy, to the extent that it exists at all in relation to adolescence, tends to assume that girls have considerable autonomy over their lives in general, and their sex lives in particular. Another misconception is that male and female adolescents form a homogenous group with common needs and interests.

These misconceptions arise from a failure to recognize or fully appreciate adolescent girls' disadvantages and the contrast in the experiences of boys and girls. In general, adolescence is a time of heightened vulnerability for girls, a time of silence, passivity, and devaluation, while for boys it is a time of increased power and social validity. Instead of demonizing young mothers, policymakers, in fact all of us, must recognize that their behavior is not always an expression of their own free will. In the area of sexuality, for instance, some studies show that 60% or more of mothers 15 years and younger have been abused. The victim averages 10 years old, the abuser averages 27 years old, and most were adult male family members.

Childhood sexual abuse was the single biggest predictor of teenage pregnancy over the last 40 years, according to a 1995 survey of 3,400 American adults, conducted by sociologists at the University of Chicago. When a girl has been sexually abused, she has also been brainwashed. Her sense of self, her sense of ownership of and control over her body, her capacity for self-efficacy is taken away. The question "Who am I?" is answered by "I am someone that exists to please others"--What Oprah Winfrey, herself a victim of rape and violence, calls the "disease to please." I dare not ask the women in this room to raise their hand if they know what I'm talking about--the disease to please.

For all these girls, the demand to just say no is anathema. A pregnant teenager may have had to have sex to please a man upon whom she depends financially; she may fail to use contraception because the man either objects or makes it difficult by complaining that a condom reduces his pleasure, or he may threaten violence. She may have gotten pregnant in order to solidify a relationship, or to make a pledge of hope--the hope that there can be a better future, if not for herself, at least for her children. And society runs a moral risk by scapegoating teenage mothers. Even for middle-class girls who have not been abused, it's not so easy to look out for themselves. Our culture portrays sexually active girls as loose or cheap, thereby inhibiting girls from seeking information or services, such as contraception, for fear that this would be an acknowledgement that they want and plan on having sex.

Often girls are unable or unwilling to negotiate condom use or articulate their needs and desires because they've been taught by our culture to be docile and to please the man at all costs, or they fear accusations of unfaithfulness or intimidation, especially when partners are several years older.

Harvard professor Carol Gilligan, in her groundbreaking book from the 1970s, In a Different Voice, wrote about the problems that ensue from rendering oneself selfless in order to have relationships. Professor Gilligan said, "Women's choices not to speak, or rather to disassociate themselves from what they themselves are saying, can be deliberate or unwitting, consciously chosen or enacted through the body by narrowing the passages that connect the voice with the breath and sound, by keeping the voice high in the head, so that it does not carry the depths of human feeling." Later she says, "The justification of these psychological processes in the name of love or relationships is equivalent to the justification of violence and violation in the name of morality." Gilligan wrote that the problem of voicelessness becomes "central in women's development during the adolescent years when thought becomes reflective and the problem of interpretation thus enters the stream of development itself."

And she goes on, "As girls become the carrier of unvoiced desires and unrealized possibilities, they are inevitably placed at considerable risk, even in danger." When I first read In a Different Voice, the part about keeping the voice high in the head so that it doesn't carry the depth of human feelings took my breath away. I've been there. I remembered my early years as a movie star and I looked at those early films. My voice was all high and thin, and not expressing any of what I was.

I have since gone back and tracked my growth as a woman by looking at my films chronologically and noting when my voice began to drop. It began with Klute--which was the first time I identified myself as a feminist. It was also when I won my first Oscar. My acting got better as I came to connect with myself, with my own Klute. I know what Professor Gilligan writes about, I know it in my skin, in my gut, as well as in my voice. But it has taken me into my sixties to own that voice and take what Gilligan calls "the road back from selflessness, the road back from selflessness." I'm not supposed to do that. And I went to the best schools, I went to high school at Emma Willard School, the all-girl school where Gilligan did her research on the value of single-sex education for girls. God knows what would have happened if I had gone to a co-ed school. I would never have found my voice.

Anyway, in spite of that and my many advantages, I was conditioned to think that if I made my voice heard, I'd be selfish, no man would love me. That if I expressed desire or need, I would be a bad girl. So after a certain point, age 11 to be exact, I didn't know what I wanted anymore. I thought whatever the boy or man wanted was what I wanted. I remember when I auditioned in my early twenties for the movie Splendor in the Grass, the part that Natalie Wood eventually got, the renowned director Elia Kazan called me down to the footlights. He looked up at me and asked me, "Are you ambitious?" And I said, "No!" And in that half second, I saw the look of disappointment on his face and I knew I had lost the part. But good girls weren't ambitious. And I was still a good girl.

Women have made many strides in this country since Professor Gilligan wrote In a Different Voice, but we still have so far to go. I work with girls who have no advantages. I work with 14-year-olds who have already had their second child, girls who don't know their own bodies or what romance is. Or that they have a right to their own pleasure, a right to say no, or a right to have rights. And I see lives destroyed because of these things.

So many of the fine programs out there are less effective than they could be, or not effective at all because of gender issues and teachers' lack of knowledge and skills to address the problem. Many, if not most, teachers and coaches, like most of us, suffer from unconscious, internalized gender prejudice that renders our work, if not our relationships, problematic.

We have the legal structures in place in this country that outlaw gender prejudice. We have, for example, Title 9, yet in violation of that, when a girl becomes pregnant, she is all too often forced to leave school or to go to an alternative school for troubled youth while the boy or man who impregnated her not only escapes censure but is almost never identified. We still have a culture of prejudice that allows girls to remain vulnerable and disadvantaged, and we still have a culture that teaches boys a distorted, often downright violent view of what it takes to be a man. This has to change, and we have to start young.

Too many lives are being lost, too much human capital is being wasted. Maybe Harvard can do something about it. I'm here to issue a challenge. For several years I have read so much material about how the gender-related lessons of the Cairo Conference are being infused into the work of USAID and the World Bank, and the programs they do in developing countries, and this is very important news. It is really cause for optimism, but what I would like to know is, when are we going to bring the lessons home to our adolescents? When are these lessons going to become part of the quality core curricula of this nation's public schools? I don't want today's girls to have to wait as long as I have to get it right.

Because of Professor Gilligan and her colleagues, because of Radcliffe, because you have recently endowed Harvard's first professorship in Gender Studies by establishing the Patricia A. Graham Chair, because of the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, and because of a whole lot of other things Harvard's School of Education is a perfectly positioned institution, to begin the groundbreaking work of developing a gender curriculum for K-12, a teacher-training curriculum, and building the needed coalition to get there. You are a magnifying glass, a trailblazer, you've set paths, you are the people to do it. Carol Gilligan knows how and I'll help you raise the money.

Come with us on this guys. It's a two-way street. We can't do it alone. I've just learned that in my private life. There are risks, but the benefits are worth every moment of it, and it's a win-win situation. Besides a school curriculum that will help our youth grow up without the handicaps of gender bias, we need public policies that specifically address the needs of adolescents. Most adolescents are responsible, capable, and deserving of societal supports. But convincing decisionmakers of this is difficult in the absence of natural sympathy for adolescents and understanding of their experience. Furthermore, young people don't constitute an organized and vocal constituency--come on guys!--with the social and economic power to lobby on their own behalf.

And thus, the lack of governmental commitments to adolescents goes largely unchallenged in the political arena. And where adolescents do have advocates, the agenda is usually health centered, which is fine, but it neglects the critical components of the adolescent girl's experience. In fact, at present, adolescent girls are virtually invisible in the policy domain. The Population Council, in its book Unchartered Passages, has cited several main policy challenges, which I'd like to quote for your consideration. Adolescent policy must differentiate the particular conditions of adolescent girls' and boys' lives, attach positive rights of passage, expectations, and opportunities to girls' adolescence; acknowledge that adolescent girls' lives are often governed by harmful, culturally sanctioned gender roles; expand girls' social participation, schooling, and economic opportunities; understand that these are basic entitlements and that they frame girls' reproductive behavior; and recognize the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which among many other things, extends the boundary of childhood through age 18, thereby establishing that girls who marry and/or give birth as adolescents remain girls-- that is, children by definition, and are entitled to the same supports, education, and protection as their nonparenting peers. I believe Iran and the United States are the only two countries that have not signed the Convention of the Rights of the Child.

To close, I want to quote again from the Population Council's Unchartered Passage because this to me says it all: "In a world of increasingly poorest boundaries and political complexity, global thinkers are puzzled, looking for points of reference and leverage to understand and shape the future. They classify countries in regional or cultural blocks, identify power elites and influential individuals, and rank transnational corporations by size. Appearing on none of these power lists is one of potentially the most influential figures in the world--the 12-year-old girl. There are now 50 million of these girls, and there will continue to be at least that many year after year for the next three decades. In the next few years, this 12-year-old girl will either abandon or continue her schooling, be pushed into marriage and child bearing, or develop a sense of proud ownership of her physical self and make independent decisions about her lifetime partner. She will either struggle in poverty or find a socially productive livelihood, submit to a faceless life, or thrive as an individual, making her contribution to the world. As her future is reconfigured, so is ours."

Thank you very much.

Questions from the Audience

Jane: The question is [that] she has a program here called "Girls Rock!" and [about] the difficulty in obtaining funding for girls programs. I understand what you're saying. I think it is slowly changing. I know several other girls' programs here that have managed to get both public and private funds. More and more women are working in banks, in executive positions, and I find that going to banks and meeting the women who run the foundation of banks can be very helpful. There is the Ms. Foundation-- everybody goes to the Ms. Foundation, but there is a wonderfully progressive network of women in this area who do have money and who would probably be very interested in knowing what you're doing. One of the things that has changed from 20 or 30 years ago is that you have to be able to prove that your program actually works in terms of behavioral change. I think the biggest challenge in the area of fundraising is raising the money to do an evaluation.

[inaudible question]

Jane: I think you are absolutely right. Thank you so much. The question is, what happens if we leave boys out of the discussion? I focused today on girls, and in the work I do in Georgia, we have boys' programs as well as girls' programs. I was fortunate enough before coming here to meet with Professor Gilligan in her office, and we talked about the very same thing--that you can't succeed if the gender curricula is only going to girls. You have to find a way to balance that, otherwise the male side feels threatened and either just opts out or becomes violent or whatever. I see it every day in the work that we're doing. It's very, very important, and again, I'm very optimistic. I think compared to 15 years ago there is more focus, and much more understanding of the need to work with boys. Publicity for the Million Man March, Farrakhan's Million Man March, at least in the African American community, put fatherhood and male involvement on the map, which is wonderful.

[inaudible question]

Jane: The question is, how do we empower girls to gain their voice, given the culture that we live in? Well, I wish that Professor Gilligan was up here to answer that question because she--would you like to come up and answer that question Carol? While she is coming, I think if you think back to your own girlhood, at least this is true for me, if around the age of 10 or 11 someone had said to me "what you're experiencing is not unique to you, here is why you are not alone, you have a right," it would have changed my life.

Carol Gilligan: I just have to say that I would have had that question before I did the work with girls, and what the discovery of the work with 12-year-old girls is that they have strong voices, and that really changes the whole question because it's not a question of how can they get strong voices, it's how can they keep their strong voices. And I wish that the 11-year-olds in my project were here right now because they were the first to say, "We have our voices!"

[inaudible question] Jane: Carol knows how to do it. She has actually done it, both privately and in different kinds of public schools. She knows how to unleash the process of girls finding their voice and, more importantly, adult women that they work with saying, "Oh, I have one too, let's get together." The adults in girls' lives are so critically important to allowing them to keep their voice.

I'm a good fundraiser. I'll help you fundraise, and we're going to do this! My philosophy is, take a major leap of faith, go public, and then it happens. We want to create something that can be taken into any public school, anywhere in the country, and there will be trained people who know how to do it. And then we have to figure out the male component, a critical part of it.

[inaudible question]

Jane: You know, I'm a failure in that course. The question is, how do we keep young girls from buying into this body image notion that is being promoted in the marketing world in our culture, and I said it's a course I failed. I grew up in the 1950s. I don't know the answer to that. I think--do you know the answer Carol? I know one thing--it's got to start with parents. Mothers and fathers must never say anything except, "You are beautiful! You are beautiful!" Parents who like to exercise, do it on your own time, it will rub off. Don't say, "You're putting on a little weight, you better start exercising." No. As a long-time eating-disorder person, I'm telling you, it's got to start with the parents. Don't say anything but wonderful things to your children.

And beyond that, I'm not sure, except I like Mary Pipher's Book, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, because she talks about the importance of politicizing the culture. There is a program called Postponing Sexual Involvement that has a component where they bring into the class these cultural images, these advertisements, with the perfect bodies and all that kind of thing, and they start dialogues with the girls and boys about how you're being preyed upon, how your insecurities are being brought out. When you become aware of it outside of yourself, it becomes politicized. You can distance yourself from it. It's still there, I mean, God knows if we'll ever be able to change the mindset of Madison Avenue, but if we can politicize our young people so that they can see them in relation to that, then I think it does empower them to distance themselves.

[inaudible question]

Jane: A wonderful question. The question is, along with focusing on the girls and what needs to happen so that girls find their voice and become the powerful people that they are potentially, what can be done or is being done to change the societal forces around them. Carol? Come here.

Carol Gilligan: It's a great question, and it's exactly the right question, and once the political framework is taking off and it becomes girls' problems, it's a problem of relationship, I think. As Jane said, 12-year-old girls are great natural resources in our midst, and it's not a question of creating strength, it's really a question of trying to remove the obstacles to the growth of those strengths.

Jane: One of the things that I learned in Cairo is if you look at everything in the world that can potentially happen, you realize that girls are the agents of change, so the way that we change the society around them is that we allow girls to find their voices and they grow into women, and they are the agents of change. Whether it has to do with the health of a family or a community, or the education of daughters or population growth, or the use of the environment, or any of those things that determine the well-being of everyone on the planet, women are the agents of change, and that's it.

[inaudible question]

Jane: How do you get-- this young woman was saying that she was in the science and tech field and she felt weird because it wasn't supposed to be what girls do. And the question is, how do we change that so that more girls feel okay about getting into those areas. One of the things I'm so proud [of] about my alma mater, Emma Willard, [is that] it's an all-girls school that has an entire state-of-the-art science building. It's also why I'm on the national board of Girls Incorporated, which has among its many very well-evaluated programs a science-and-tech program that encourages girls to get into that [area]. But we need to talk it up and put the role models up on a pedestal and let girls know it's okay.

[inaudible question]

Jane: Are pop stars like the Spice Girls and Britney Spears helping or hindering the concept of girl power? What do you all think? I've never seen any of them. I don't know. Do you think it helps or hinders? Spice Girls, Britney Spears--do they play into the stereotype? [I say,] Think Roberta Flack.

Thank you all very, very much for coming.

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