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An Empowering Tradition
Girls Head to the Workplace By Johnathon Allen
Millions of young women ages 9 to 15 across the United States are learning to argue legal cases, design office towers, edit magazines and travel into space during the annual Take Our Daughters To Work Day. The program, created by the Ms. Foundation for Women, seeks to increase girls' self-esteem during their adolescent years, and expand their ideas of what is possible by encouraging parents to bring their daughters into the workplace.
"The program began when an influx of research indicated that adolescent and preadolescent girls were having a progressively difficult time establishing their identities and developing self-esteem," says Ms. Foundation Spokesperson Kelly Parisi. "Members of the Ms. Foundation and the Harvard Project traveled the country talking to women about girls' development. They found that public consensus was overwhelming: today's grown women want to improve the adolescent experience for their daughters."
After two years of experimenting and developing ideas, the Ms. Foundation hired a communications consultant to help them create the Take Our Daughters To Work program. The goal was to give young women a positive idea of their role in the workplace, and to raise adult awareness of the issues girls face in the pre- and mid-adolescent stages of their lives.
"We decided to focus on work in order to emphasize the importance of girls' abilities rather than their appearance," Parisi says. "We thought a day at work would heighten girls' aspirations and help them make the connection between academic success and success in the real world."
Shortly after the first event in April 1993, the Ms. Foundation was flooded with thousands of phone calls from interested parents, and its popularity has sky-rocketed ever since. "In the past, programs for girls have not been effective when they were originally designed for boys," Parisi says. "But the issues facing adolescent girls are particular to them. They need a distinctive approach."
