AMAZING OPPORTUNITY FOR GIRLS TO TALK BACK !!!

*Repost from Young Feminist Wire, my new favourite website!! Original available at:http://yfa.awid.org/2011/11/call-for-participation-in-young-feminist-blogathons-share-your-activist-story/

Submitted by Nelly on 28/11/2011

Call for Submissions: Young Feminist Blogathons – Deadline extended to December 5th!

There is still time to send in your last minute submissions to the Young Feminist Blogathons. Deadline has been extended until December 5th! Hurry up and Submit – we are looking forward to it.

The Young Feminist Wire is calling young women writers, bloggers and activists to submit blogs and/or videos on TWO themes this month. The first theme is Use of Social Media for Social Change and the other theme is Young Women on the Girl Effect. You can choose to submit your blogs/videos to ONE or BOTH themes by answering the questions provided. Please see below for descriptions on both themes including guiding questions and guidelines for submissions. DEADLINE for receiving submissions is November 27th, 2011!

Looking forward to receiving many submissions from young women!

1) USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA FOR SOCIAL CHANGE

Social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs have exploded amongst young activists especially with the increase of internet accessibility in the last few years. Many young activists and organizers have used these mediums to rally support and spread awareness on social justice. On the one hand, the Arab uprisings have even been dubbed by some media as the Facebook and Twitter revolutions. On the other hand, the safety and security of online social media tools have been put to question with recent State crackdown on youth bloggers and internet censorship in Iran, Cuba and China. The debate on social media reached new heights when a Syrian Lesbian blogger was found to be an English man.

If you have used social media as a young feminist activist in your organizing, we want to hear your story.

How has social media helped you in organizing? How have identity politics and social ethics translated into the online world? How can social media benefit or harm women’s rights organizing?

Tell us about an organizing experience you have had that used social media to create social change. Did it work? What were the challenges? What advice do you have for other young feminist activists using social media in their organizing?

AND/OR

2) YOUNG WOMEN ON ‘INVESTING IN GIRLS’

Around the world, governments, donors, the UN, non-governmental organizations, financial institutions, corporations and the media alike are claiming that the solution to a wide range of the world’s problems is to invest in young women and girls. The Nike Foundation campaign on the Girl Effect, and Plan International’s Because I am a Girl campaign are just two examples of this growing trend. On the one hand, the growing focus on young women and girls presents important opportunities for the advancement of young women’s rights with increased attention and resources available for work with young women and girls. On the other hand, the investing in girls approach is often weak in its rights-based analysis and mostly tends to look at women and girls as an untapped resource for the advancement of their communities and societies.

If you are a young women activist who feels strongly about this trend, we want to hear your thoughts!

Tell us about your initial reactions to the Girl Effect and the Clock is Ticking videos. How are young women and girls portrayed in the videos? How is the “investing in girls” trend impacting the way people perceive young women and girl’s rights in your context? How is this trend affecting the work carried out to advance the rights of young women and girls? Does this influence what kinds of initiatives get funded or types of work that gets implemented? What are the opportunities and threats presented by this trend in your context? How are young women activists in your context responding to the trend?

How to participate

Simply, tell us your activist story through either a written blog post or short video. Refer to the submission guidelines below.

Click “Young Feminist Blogathon” to find out how to enter & see other great content from Young Feminist Wire!

We posted this to share the opportunity to contribute to the production of knowledge by girls! Enjoy.

Words of Wisdom from Li'l Azúcar, 13

"It's important for girls to learn how to DJ because it's a fun hobby and it's fun to learn. It also proves girls can do the same things guys do. I learned how to skip beats, set up the turntables, and mix music together. I learned that old music can sound better than new music. My friends are proud and they all want to try. Plus they want me to do parties. DJing is harder than I thought it would be because I have to set it up just right or it won't sound good. I would tell girls do not give up on it (DJing) even if it's not something you want to do, because in the end, you're going to have fun."--Li'l Azúcar, Gemini, 13 years old

http://www.girlsdj.com/participants.html

Research Study on Girls and Technology

Kekelis et al. conducted a research study to engage a group of 126 girls aged 11 to 19 from a range of ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds to investigate why girls interested in technology do not choose to go on in a career in advanced technology. They designed an after-school program, called “Techbridge”, which taught and engaged girls in software engineering, robot making and other avenues of technology, and they formed focus groups to give the girls a space to discuss their relationships with technology. The researchers found three main hurdles girls face when considered pursuing a career in technology:

1) Negative Stereotypes about Computing Jobs

2) A Disconnect between Dreams and Plans

3) Lack of Career Guidance and Support from Family

Application to Girl Power:

Many girls are told by their parents and schools to graduate, go to college or university and to keep their options open and try many things in post-secondary education. Girls are told they can be anything, do anything, and as a result change the world, hence giving them a false sense of power. However, this open-minded guidance has made it hard for girls to focus in on a career, especially technology careers, and it leaves them unaware of the future challenges, barriers, and work required by the careers. Many girls set their minds on a dream career, singing, acting, web designer, or world class D.J., but have no idea of the high school courses, resources and skills needed to get into these vocations. How then, do we get girls to harness the true power of engaging technology and participate in positive prosumption?

Kekelis, L.S., Ancheta, R.W.. & Heber, E. (2005). Hurdles in the pipeline:

girls and technology careers. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26(1) p.p. 99-109.

Mini Doc on a FGBG (For Girls By Girls) Learn to DJ Program in Philidelphia

Why are there no female DJs on DJ Mag's top 100 list?

This article was posted October 28, 2011 by Hanna Hanra on The Guardian's music blog.

As a female DJ I've had guys telling me how to use the decks and even changing the speed of my records for me – so perhaps it's no surprise we've been left out of a list of the best DJs ...

Head-in-hands moment … not even BBC Radio 1's Annie Mac made DJ Mag's top 100 list. Photograph: BBC

Clicking through DJ Mag's newly published list of top 100 DJs, it's easy to spot the one thing missing: women. Revered in the clubbing industry as the "black book" for DJs, producers and promoters, the list is voted for by the public every year. Between 2007 and 2011 just one girl, Claudia Cazacu, scraped on to the list, charting at number 93 in 2010. Not even Annie Mac – who hosts three shows on Radio 1, DJs regularly at Fabric and whose Annie Mac Presents mixtape is No 1 in the electronic charts – gets a look in. It's clearly a bone of contention with some women in the business – Peaches, the Berlin DJ/producer posted "DJ MAG! Your Top 100 DJ boy club list can eat a dick! Where the ladies at???" on her Facebook page in a fit of frustration after the list was published.

For the last 10 years, my main source of income has been from DJing. It's taken me around the world, from dive bars in Krakow where the kids went wild when I played Nirvana to glitzy fashion parties in New York where Grace Jones serenaded me with Pull Up to the Bumper wearing only a headdress as I stood in the DJ booth (which was, incidentally, disguised as a tiki hut). I thought, based on my experiences so far, that it could be an exciting career. I've DJ'd in the coolest clubs and the shittest pubs, I've played at a record-breaking 13 parties during a four-day period one London fashion week and I've been flown across the world to play 10 songs at a party. I lost count of the number of mornings I've spent trying to get tequila off my CDs. But just at the point where my parents finally began to understand exactly what it was I did for a living, it became harder to break through into top-billing territory. I hit the glass ceiling. I always thought that term applied to women in skirt suits in big, windowed office blocks – not those whose working day starts at 11pm and involves sticky floors and a disco ball.

I realised that it didn't matter how many times a week I DJ'd or how much I charged or how much people loved what I played, I was losing the impetus to fight my way through the boys' club and try and make it to the top. And if I got there, would the fight to stay there be worth it? Annie Mac, who is one of the handful of really successful female DJs, admits that she might not have made it without her radio show. "I had a profile through that and got gigs through that," she said in a recent interview.
Boys aren't better at DJing than girls. We don't DJ with our vaginas. But the fact is, in my experience, they clearly think they are and do make it more difficult for us. I've had male DJs reach over as I mixed two tracks and start twiddling with the knobs. Or come and stand behind me and instruct me on what to do. My personal favourite was when, at a regular Sunday nightclub, the male DJ who played after me reached over the sound desk and start to change the speed of a track for me. Did he think I had sped the track up slightly on accident? Another brilliantly sexist moment was when a DJ span round and said to me bluntly, "Well, boys just know more about music, don't they." And it's not just the other DJs – there are the soundmen too, who persistently ask me if I know what I'm doing. You know, after 10 years, I'm still not sure.

I guess maybe the whole unbalance is something to do with the fact that it's only in the past 5 years that most venues have acquired CD decks, so you no longer have to play from vinyl, which is heavy to carry. Maybe that's why there are so many more men at the top. They're better at carrying heavy things.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/oct/28/female-dj-mag-top-100

Has technology become the new "Boys' Club" ?

This study is a decade old, but still very interesting...

The American Association of American Women's (AAUW) study, Gender Gaps: Where Schools Still Fail Our Children documents a diminishing gender gap in achievement in mathematics and science, with one exception -- technology. The study concludes, "While girls have narrowed the gender gaps in math and science, technology has become the new 'boys' club.'"
Only 17% of the high school students who took the Advanced Placement Computer Science test in 1997 were females - the lowest percentage of all tests given. AB Calculus is up to 47%, Chemistry is 42%, Biology is 56%, and Physics, although still dismal, is over 20%. Complete data was published by the College Board.
The AAUW study also concludes

• Girls are significantly more likely than boys to enroll in clerical and data-entry classes, the 1990s version of typing. Boys are more likely to enroll in advanced computer science and graphics courses.
• School software programs often reinforce gender bias and stereotypical gender roles.
• Girls consistently rate themselves significantly lower than boys on computer ability, and boys exhibit higher self-confidence and a more positive attitude about computers than do girls.
• Girls use computers less often outside of school. Boys enter the classroom with more prior experience with computers and other technology than girls.

Retrieved from http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/pres/cwac99.html