Digital Leadership Institute – Page 11 – Inclusive Digital Transformation

16 February 2016

Girl Tech Fest Brussels 2016

In celebration of International Girls in ICT Day 2016, on 30 April in Brussels the Digital Leadership Institute will launch the first-ever Digital Muse “Girl Tech Fest” — an all-day event promoting digital and creative skills to 11-15 year old girls from the greater Brussels region. Supported by top technology companies, youth networks, and public and private partners in Belgium and Europe, GTF aims to increase participation of girls in ESTEAM* studies and careers through hands-on workshops at the intersection of creative and digital endeavor.

Digital Muse Girl Tech Fest: The first-ever Girl Tech Fest will showcase inspiring women role models in tech, a Digital Muse Lab where girls can experiment with the latest high-tech gadgets, and dozens of hands-on workshops promoting digital skills and creativity with subjects like “The Future of Fashion,” “Digital Music Composition,” and “Building Smarter SmartPhone Apps.”

Digital Muse One – Music Compilation Release: On the occasion of the Girl Tech Fest, the Digital Leadership Institute will also release its first compilation album, “Digital Muse One – DM1,” featuring top women electronic musicians from the past and present. Album artists will join the Girl Tech Fest as speakers and workshop leaders, and will perform at the DM1 Release party and GTF after-party to be held the evening of 30 April at a central Brussels location. Proceeds from the DM1 release event and sale of the album will benefit this and future Digital Muse activities.

If you or or your organisation would like to support the Digital Muse Girl Tech Fest — with expert-led workshops, sponsorship, promotional consideration, media coverage, technical infrastructure or onsite volunteers, please contact us. We are looking forward to launching this world-first for International Girls in ICT Day in Brussels on 30 April 2016 with you!

*Entrepreneurship, Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Mathematics

1 February 201611 April 2022

Brussels Women Move It Forward

Winning Project and Judges - MIF Brussels 2016 — ENAC: Best Overall Project & Jury – MIF Brussels 2016

On 23-24 January, forty young and adult women gathered at DLI’s inQube space in Brussels to develop websites and smartphone applications, and to launch their own enterprises to tackle cyberviolence and promote online safety for girls and women. Participants of the first-ever Move It Forward Brussels female digital starter weekend — organised by DLI and subsidised by the Brussels Capital Region — came from across Brussels and around the world, to improve their tech skills and try their hand at entrepreneurship.

Move It Forward Participants Create First Smartphone App

Says Bianca Debaets, Brussels Minister for Equal Opportunity and Digitalisation, and supporter of the Move It Forward initiative: “When women take up an active role in the ICT and business worlds, they are stronger. And that should reduce cyberviolence against women too. In that way, Move It Forward serves a dual purpose: It makes more women entrepreneurs and it empowers them digitally.” (Read a full press release about the Move It Forward event in Dutch here: Move It Forward Persbericht 2016.)

Worldclass Tech Partners - Tableau Software — Worldclass Tech Partners – Tableau Software

Attendees of Move It Forward Brussels, from 14 to 54 in age and representing upwards of twenty-two nationalities, dedicated an entire weekend to learning digital and entrepreneurial skills taught by DLI and its worldclass technology partners, including Tableau Software, Amazon Web Services, WordPress and AppInventor. With the help of a dedicated and talented team of coaches, participants developed innovative projects that they presented to a jury on Sunday evening for top honors. Jury-members included Ms. Maité Morren, Councilmember for Ixelles responsible for ICT, and representatives from European Schoolnet, Child Focus Belgium, DLI and AWS.

Ms. Ellen Van Den Berghe - Inspiring Young ICT Lady of the Year — Ms. Ellen Van Den Berghe – Belgian Young ICT Lady of the Year

The two-day Move It Forward Brussels initiative kicked off on Saturday morning with a keynote presentation by Ms. Ellen Van den Berghe, 2015 Young ICT Lady of the Year in Belgium, and closed with an inspiring talk by Ms. Terry Reintke, Member of European Parliament who recently authored a report on Women and the Digital Society.

Awesome Team, Coaches & Partners — Awesome Move It Forward Team, Coaches & Partners

Top awards for the weekend were presented to ENAC, Detrolled and iCompassion-Ubuntu, each promoting a unique approach for addressing cyberviolence against girls and women. All winning teams receive several months’ inQubation and startup coaching at DLI and free membership for one year on the Amazon Web Service platform. Each member of the Overall Best project team also received Amazon Fire tablets. In addition, several follow-up workshops are already planned to allow inQube community members to further develop the digital and entrepreneurship skills they started learning at Move It Forward Brussels.

Organisations across Europe have expressed interest in organising Move It Forward events in their own cities, and future plans for the Brussels inQube community include taking on additional challenges faced by Europe’s girls and women, including immigration and asylum-seeking, health and nutrition, media portrayal, etc. Please contact us if you would like to learn more about the Move It Forward initiative, to partner with DLI/inQube, and/or to organise a Move It Forward event in your city!

The Jury: Child Focus, European Schoolnet & Amazon Web Services

Pitching Projects to Tackle Cyberviolence

Dedicated DLI Staff — Dedicated DLI Team

"Check out this exciting line-up!" — “Check out this exciting line-up!”

28 January 2016

Support the First Startup Europe Week

During the week of 1-5 February 2016, hundreds of regions and cities across Europe will be celebrating the power of startups to revitalise the economy, stimulate job creation and address our most pressing social needs in innovative ways. Actors — from governmental authorities to university incubators and grassroots organisations — are all on board to support the first-ever Startup Europe Week by showcasing the opportunities, resources and support available to individuals in their communities who are eager to launch a new enterprise.

Ms. Cheryl Miller, DLI Founder, is coordinating 2016 Startup Europe Week activities for the Brussels Capital Region, numbering four events organised by local startup ecosystem leaders and collectively presented as “Brussels: The Heart of Startup.” In addition, the launch event for Startup Europe Week will also take place in Brussels at the European Committee of the Regions premises.

For more information and to register for the Startup Europe Week 2016 activities taking place in Brussels from 1 to 5 February, please follow the below links:

1 February: Startup Europe Week Launch Event – European Union Committee of the Regions
1 February: “Promoting Tech Startup in Brussels” – European Commission Representation in Brussels
2 February: “Embrace Your Inner Entrepreneur” – Co.Station
3 February: “From Success to First Steps” – Betacowork
4 February: “Bluemix Girls’ Night at inQube: Women & the Cloud” – inQube/DLI

Event organisers across Europe look forward to welcoming you in their cities and regions for this inaugural Startup Europe Week, and we especially welcome your involvement in “Brussels: The Heart of Startup!”

6 January 201617 April 2018

DLI Update – December 2015

The Digital Leadership Institute closed out 2015 in style. After organising twenty events reaching over 500 girls and women in only ten months as Europe’s first female digital innovation center, the DLI team, along with you, is ready to tackle another fabulous year with even greater ambitions! But first, let’s take a quick a look back on the final weeks of 2015 — highlighted by DLI founder, Cheryl Miller, becoming a small-time Spanish celebrity after a video interview with Vodafone was carried in El Mundo, one of Spain’s largest newspapers! 😉 Check out the video, and the rest of our December 2015 news, here!

The DLI Board and Executive Team are actively involved in initiatives with partners and stakeholders around the world that promote ESTEAM* leadership by girls and women. Find out below about our work in December 2015, learn here about future activities we are involved in, and visit our calendar for upcoming events that DLI is organising. *entrepreneurship, science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics

7-8 December – GAMAG Europe Launch (Geneva): As part of the International Dialogue on Gender Equality in the Media, DLI Founder, Ms. Cheryl Miller, contributed to the incorporation meeting for the Europe region of the UNESCO-supported Global Alliance on Gender and Media, which took place at the UN Palace of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. Read our article and press release about this ground-breaking event here.

9 December – Women Entrepreneurship Platform Lunch Debate & General Assembly (Brussels): DLI Cofounder, Ms. Rosanna Kurrer, contributed to a WEP Lunch debate on the topic of Digital Networking hosted at the European Parliament Members’ Salon by Ms. Sirpa Pietikainen, Member of European Parliament. The lunch debate was followed by the first annual general assembly of the WEP membership.

9-10 December – GAMAG First Assembly (Geneva): Ms. Cheryl Miller, DLI Founder, joined the first General Assembly of the UNESCO-supported Global Alliance on Gender and Media, which took place at the UN Palace of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland on December 9-10. Read our article and press release about this ground-breaking event here.

15-16 December – Emerging Technologies France (Toulouse): On 15 December, Ms. Cheryl Miller, DLI Founder, led debate on the future of education with a world class panel at the premier Emerging Technology event in Europe, Emerging Technologies France. See a video of the event here:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtSHTGusnVU

Be sure to visit our Calendar, Upcoming Activities page, and sign up for the DLI Newsletter in order to keep up with DLI events and activities!

24 December 201511 April 2022

Looking forward to a new year of learning!

A New Year’s message from Rosanna Kurrer, DLI Cofounder, Digital Literacy Lead & g-Hive Community Manager:

Hi girl-techies!

This year was a year of firsts for our organisation, and for our community. We got our own space in March, and started doing workshops on coding and electronics, using Scratch and Processing, as well as using interactive electronics and electric paint with the Bare Conductive Touch Board.

In the coming year, we plan on rolling up our sleeves and getting more active in organising a workshop series, for those of you who would like to take their learning experience to the next level. We will be introducing project-based learning workshops in coding and app development. They will be taking place bi-weekly (every two weeks) on Wednesday afternoons. More information on these workshop series will be shared in January. If you have a preference for time and day, please don’t hesitate to send me an email with your requests.

I am also preparing a series of morning workshops for those of you who would like to learn basic coding skills, while enjoying a morning coffee with like-minded ladies. This will be a series of informal workshops called the “Techie Brekky Tuesdays”. You got it, we will be meeting on Tuesday mornings (every two weeks) for a couple of hours of group coding, coffee-sipping and croissant-munching techie-gigs. Again, more info on this on my next blogpost in January.

In the meantime, our female digital starter weekend “Move It Forward – tackling Cyberviolence and Online Hate Speech” has been moved to January 23-24, 2016. We have a line-up of great workshops scheduled for these two days, including a host of inspiring coaches who will help you with your projects and start-up ideas!

One more event that you might want to know about, we are teaming up with the IBM Bluemix team to organise a Bluemix Girls Night at inQube and offer a hands-on tutorial on their Bluemix Cloud Platform. Their team of engineers will be coming to our space and will lead hands-on exercises on real-world Internet of Things applications that could be deployed on the cloud. These tutorials will help us understand how cloud computing works, what the Internet of Things is, and how we can use “the cloud” to bring our start-up ideas to the next level. Visit here for more information, and to register for this event.

Here’s wishing all of you relaxing days during the holidays with your loved ones!

And let’s all stay techie-curious, and greet the new year with renewed energy to learn!

All the best,

Rosanna

*Originally posted to g-hive.org on 21 December 2015

20 December 201511 April 2022

Support Women Tech Entrepreneurs

*The Move It Forward event originally scheduled for 28-29 November 2015 has been rescheduled for 23-24 January 2016! More time for you to join us and help support this great initiative!

There’s a serious shortage of women tech entrepreneurs in Europe. How serious? We don’t really know. There isn’t a lot of data available but unofficial numbers in Belgium, for example, put the percentage of female tech founders at three percent. Three percent. And although we know the following to be true, there exists no concerted effort on a Belgian or European level to engage girls and women in tech startup:

Girls and women are underrepresented in the tech industry, academia and in startup;
Growth in the number of women-led startups in Europe is outstripping that of startups led by men;
Girls and women thrive in tech and startup initiatives that specifically target them; and
The untapped economic potential of getting more women engaged in the tech sector is huge.

Despite the foregoing, there are no public- or private-supported initiatives that promote startup and innovation in Europe which explicitly address under-representation of girls and women in this area. Talk about “innovation”: This is a situation ripe for something new.

On 23-24 January 2015,* the Digital Leadership Institute will launch “Move It Forward,” a female digital starter weekend that aims to tackle the under-representation of women in tech startup in Europe. The initiative — NOT a hackathon, NOT a startup weekend, but actually both of these with a twist — is an event for female, tech and startup beginners that gives girls and women digital and entrepreneurial skills, along with a social challenge they need to address using these skills.

With the pilot version of Move It Forward, DLI and the Brussels Capital Region have given girls and women from the greater Brussels area the mission to develop projects that promote online safety for girls and women, and tackle cyberviolence. Participants will receive training and coaching in website and smart app development, data visualisation and in launching digital enterprises. With these skills they will develop projects and initiatives that they will present for prizes, resources and further development on DLI’s inQube – female digital accelerator – platform.

We are still looking for coaches, jury-members, sponsors and partners for the Move It Forward Brussels event — which aims to reach teen and adult women in the greater Brussels region, and create a footprint for future MIF events on topics like media, health, migration, etc., in other cities in Belgium and across Europe.

Does the idea of getting more women in tech entrepreneurship interest you? Would you like to support the Move It Forward project of DLI and its partners — Dell, Amazon Web Services, Tableau, et al.? Please contact us and let us know how you would like to help! 🙂

Brussels Region Logo

Move It Forward is supported by the

Ministry of Equal Opportunity of the Brussels Capital Region.

14 December 2015

2015 European Ada Award-winners

On 14 December in Luxembourg, the Digital Leadership Institute and its partners – the Council for European Professional Informatics Societies, DIGITALEUROPE, the European Centre for Women and Technology, and European SchoolNet – announced winners of the 2015 European Ada Awards, recognising outstanding girls and women in digital studies and careers in Europe, and the organisations who support them. The 2015 Ada Awards ceremony took place at the opening for a high-level eskills and entrepreneurship event as part of the Luxembourg presidency of the Council of the European Union.

2015 European Ada Award winners and finalists were recognised in the following categories:

Digital Girl of the Year – outstanding young women in digital areas:

Winner – 13 years old: Niamh from Ireland

Niamh, 13, learned to code at CoderDojo when she was nine and she loves to build websites and apps that help people. When she was 11 she developed an award-winning app to help the drivers of electric cars. For three years Niamh has mentored at CoderDojo in Dublin City University, where she helps other young people – and particularly girls – to learn how to create with technology. She is a member of the Digital Youth Council in Ireland and she would like to see more coding and technology taught in schools.

Winner – 14 years old: Yasmin from England

Yasmin is a fourteen year old who has been programming for six years. She regularly builds projects with the Raspberry Pi computer, and volunteers to run workshops for young people to learn how to code using the Pi. As well as this, she runs a programming club during her school lunch breaks for younger pupils, to hopefully increase the uptake of Computer Science at her school.

Digital Woman of the Year – outstanding women in digital studies and careers:

Winner: Janneke Niessen, Improve Digital, from the Netherlands

Janneke is a female serial technology entrepreneur who, next to her role of Chief Innovation Officer at Improve Digital, also makes big efforts to help other entrepreneurs and is a strong advocate for women in tech. She is mentor for startups, angel investor and regularly speaks at events to share her experience in building a high-growth international technology company. She is co-initiator of Inspiring Fifty, that makes female role models in technology more visible. She recently published a novel for young girls (10-14) to create a role model for them and show them how great and fun technology is and how many possibilities it offers.

First Runner-Up: Monique Morrow, Cisco, from Switzerland

Monique Morrow is the Chief Technology Officer for New Frontiers at Cisco that uniquely focuses on empowering women through the intersection of research, economics and technology execution. Her current focus is spearheading an Internet of Women movement as an opportunity for women worldwide to collectively shape the future of the Internet powered by a SHE (Supercritical Human Elevated) technology platform.

Second Runner-Up: Nicole Wajer, Cisco, from the Netherlands

In her work, Nicole supports account teams and partners that need her technical expertise. She is passionate about the Internet of Things (IoT), IPv6 and Security, and is currently playing with new technology e.g Sensors in her own home. Nicole is a Champion of Change for her passionate work in the Industrial Automation space, and is a frequent blogger and attendee at the four annual Dutch Hacker Conferences.

Digital Impact Organisation of the Year – organisations fundamentally impacting the ecosystem to get more girls and women into digital studies and careers:

Winner: VHTO, The Netherlands:
VHTO, the Dutch national expert organisation on girls/women and science/technology, makes an effort in many different ways to increase the involvement of women and girls in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Every year VHTO organises the Dutch Girlsday together with 300 IT and technical companies. In 2015, 9,525 girls participated! To increase the participation of girls in Computer Science specifically, VHTO created the Digivita program for girls (age 8-18) which took place in in six cities in 2014, and carried out the Digivita Summer Camp in 2015. In 2014 VHTO reached 55,210 Dutch children through projects in primary and secondary education.

Runner-Up: Travis Foundation – Railsgirls Summer of Code, Germany:

Travis Foundation runs Rails Girls Summer of Code for the third year in a row now – providing stipends for women all over the world to work on Open Source projects. The grassroots initiative is a hands-on solution for the problem of women being underrepresented in Open Source and Tech in general. With Rails Girls Summer of Code we are not only changing women’s careers, diversifying Tech Communities and building safer environments for women in Tech – we are also creating the much-needed role models in IT, so that future generations can follow suit.

Congratulations to all the 2015 European Ada Awards nominees, finalists and winners in every category, and thank you to our Award Partners and supporters of the 2015 European Ada Awards: Amazon Web Services, Facebook, Google, HP and SAP! Please contact us with questions or inquiries on how to support the Ada Awards and the larger mission of the Digital Leadership Institute.

14 December 201511 April 2022

DLI supports First U.N. Gender and Media Meeting

9-10 December 2015 at United Nations headquarters in Geneva, the Digital Leadership Institute joined the first-ever General Assembly of the Global Alliance on Media and Gender (GAMAG). Read below the outcome of the gatherings, including input by Cheryl Miller, DLI Founder, on the impact of online media on the struggle for gender equality.

Media Equality Critical for Women’s Rights

Geneva, December 11, 2015: The first general assembly of the Global Alliance on Media and Gender (GAMAG) has rounded out a week of meetings at the UN with a call for gender equality in and through the media by 2030 in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

“On International Human Rights Day (10 December), we call for inclusive societies that give equal voice to all,” said Colleen Lowe Morna, CEO of Gender Links and GAMAG Chairperson. “This cannot be achieved as long as half the world’s population is effectively silenced.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0C-M9XLfEw

“We have come together to forge a global movement on gender and media,” said Alton Grizzle of UNESCO, which has facilitated GAMAG and organised the Geneva meeting with the Greek Secretariat General for Media and Communication. “Better access, leadership and portrayal of girls and women in media is a critical stepping stone for equal rights,” he added.

Launched in Bangkok two years ago, GAMAG brings together some 700 media houses, training institutions, journalism unions, gender and media activists to promote gender equality within the media and ICTs, and in the content they produce, as essential for achieving fundamental human rights for women worldwide.

Christiane Amanpour, Chief International Correspondent for CNN and UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Freedom of Expression, joined the International Development Cooperation Meeting on Gender and Media remotely to kick off the week’s events. Said Amanpour: “On the very important platform that is media, women are simply not equally or even adequately represented, either in leadership roles or in media coverage.”

Over the past ten years, little has improved concerning the presence of women in media, according to Sarah Macharia who spoke on behalf of the World Association of Christian Communicators, an organisation that regularly monitors gender equality in global news media.

The 2015 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) found that women constitute 24% of news sources – the same as five years ago. “Women remain invisible or underrepresented on traditional media based on almost every indicator we measure,” Macharia warned. “And this trend has replicated itself in digital media as well.”

“As the struggle for gender equality moves to online media, the challenges multiply,” added Cheryl Miller of the Digital Leadership Institute, reporting for the GAMAG working group on media, ICTs and gender. “Underrepresentation of women in both media and digital sectors converges online, and the scope for urgent action grows,” said Miller. From promoting positive role models online to tackling cyberviolence, “the internet is a double-edged sword for women,” she said. “It needs to be wielded for their benefit.”

At GAMAG’s inaugural General Assembly, stakeholders committed to making 2016 a year of unprecedented action on key priority areas which include digital media, youth, advocacy and gender and media research. In addition, four regional GAMAG chapters were launched in order to operationalise the “Geneva Framework” reached at the International Development Cooperation meeting that preceded the General Assembly.

Actions announced by GAMAG working groups included a set of gender equality principles and standards to be signed up to by media houses; gender sensitivity education for the media; a best practice community on gender and media, and an initiative to identify regional and local champions for gender in media like Amanpour.

Lowe-Morna underscored the urgency of GAMAG’s mission. “Gender equality in and through the media is intrinsic to freedom of expression, democracy, good governance and transparency. We cannot hope to achieve the SDGs if this is sidelined.” GAMAG will be lobbying for gender and media indicators in the SDGs in the run-up to the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) meeting in New York in March 2016.

UNESCO’s Grizzle celebrated the milestones reached by the Geneva gatherings, and the support garnered from UN agencies and key public and private sector partners around the world. “With these watershed meetings behind us,” Grizzle said, “we are now looking forward to the next steps that will mobilise even greater effort and resources toward actively achieving the mission of GAMAG at a local, regional and global level.”

8 December 201517 April 2018

DLI Update – November 2015

November was a busy month, highlighted by Women’s Entrepreneurship Day that took place all over the world on 18 November. This month also featured hands-on involvement by DLI in several world class initiatives promoting young and experienced women in business, as entrepreneurs and, of course, in digital leadership of all kinds!

The DLI Board and Executive Team are actively involved in initiatives with partners and stakeholders around the world that promote ESTEAM* leadership by girls and women. Find out below about our work in September 2015, learn here about future activities we are involved in, and visit our calendar for upcoming events that DLI is organising. *entrepreneurship, science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics

4-8 November – Women2Women Belgium Leadership in Action Event (Antwerp & Brussels) – The weekend of 7-8 November, DLI Founder, Ms. Cheryl Miller, contributed to the Leadership in Action initiative of the US Embassy in Belgium during a partnership event and opportunities fair promoting leadership by girls from across Belgium.

12-13 November – Women³. The Power of Three (Istanbul): As part of the EY Women. Fast forward platform, Ms. Cheryl Miller, DLI Founder, facilitated a high-level roundtable at the global Women³. The Power of Three conference, promoting technology as an enabler to achieve global gender parity.

14 November – JCI THOE Think Bigger Entrepreneurship Event (Brussels): Ms. Cheryl Miller, DLI Founder, contributed to a plenary session at the JCI The Heart of Europe Think Bigger event on the topic of growing your startup, and encouraging more women into entrepreneurship.

19 November – Bluemix Girls Night Meetup (Brussels): As part of the 2015 global celebration of Women’s Entrepreneurship Day — for which DLI Founder, Ms. Cheryl Miller, is Belgian Ambassador — DLI collaborated with IBM Belgium/Luxembourg to deliver Belgium’s first Bluemix Girls Night Meetup, promoting digital entrepreneurship by women around the world.

Be sure to visit our Calendar, Upcoming Activities page, and sign up for the DLI Newsletter in order to keep up with DLI events and activities!

8 December 2015

Hillary and Angela, Meet Jessica!

Equality Over Here–Equality Over There
In Europe, we can talk seriously about building a “smart, sustainable and inclusive” society without a smirk or sidelong glance from anyone. The “knowledge society” and the full contribution of a rich, diverse human capital is a widely recognized strength of a modern, united Europe. For this reason, there is a clear basis for formal dialogue on the topic of gender parity and greater empowerment of women — economically, politically and socially. In a formalistic top-down sense, there is reason therefore to even expect ground-breaking leadership by Europe on the topic of gender equality and women’s rights. This is already evidenced by the milestone passage of the so-called “quota directive,” requiring at least forty percent representation of women on non-executive boards of all publicly-traded European companies.

On the other hand, class, gender and ethnic divides run deep in the old world. High-level decisions are still largely made by a handful of “haves” and not necessarily in the interest of members of lower economic, social or political status. Change is slow and incremental, and universal directives, even the most noble, must be ratified by twenty-eight sovereign countries each with its own independent and distinct national priorities, culture, history and language(s). This means that any enlightened policies, including on gender parity, still must stand the test of local politics and traditions that have existed and persisted for literally centuries. Gender stereotypes are so ingrained in Europe that they almost typify some cultures, which also means that achieving gender equality on a grassroots level in practice will require a long, arduous and hard fought struggle that, in some senses, is only just beginning.

The Most Equal States?
On the other hand, quick and even far-reaching popular support for gender equality may emerge sooner in the US, as is already somewhat in evidence in this single domestic market with one dominant language, relatively affluent socioeconomic circumstances, and national media, including digital, that reaches almost all households. After a certain “tipping point,” uptake of popular grassroots movements, like that in support of gender equality and women’s rights, can be quick and widespread in the US. Whether such a tipping point has actually been reached for gender parity is certainly up for discussion. But it is clear that the open – sometimes violent – debate currently taking place on this subject, even globally, is dominated by actors, messaging and media, online and off, largely originating in the US.

The Interwebs
Regardless of how one measures progress on gender equality and women’s rights, this top-down leadership and bottom-up populist support are equally critical success factors. To that end, both the US and Europe have important roles to play, as does the internet, where advances achieved on gender parity can be shared, replicated and scaled worldwide. For that reason, no matter where the struggle is waged, a new and important development is now taking place at the convergence of the battles for gender equality and net neutrality, where it may be argued that a free and open internet has replaced diamonds as a girl’s “best friend.”

Media: The Silver Bullet
Though there is no silver bullet for achieving gender parity worldwide, popular media may present the single greatest opportunity today for positively impacting cultural norms to increase gender equality and promote women’s rights. Geena Davis famously said “if she can see it, she can be it,” and effectively raised the bar on portrayal of women and girls in popular culture, thus commencing a shift in role depictions in storytelling that may impact gender parity the world over.

As the home of Hollywood, of new content powerhouses like Netflix, and of internet big brothers like Facebook and Google, the US enjoys unprecedented influence around the world via its unique brand of popular culture — which is consumed with almost equal voraciousness in Moscow, Russia as in Moscow, Idaho. This brings with it a clear responsibility: The US must also begin to champion gender equality through better and more portrayal of girls and women in its own popular media, and it must equally demand such leadership by other actors — fictional and real — across the globe.

Step Up US!
US leadership on this double mission holds unparalleled promise for impacting the dialogue on gender equality around the world for the better, and it would squarely place the US on footing with Europe in its claims to an inclusive and diverse “knowledge society.” Given the snails pace at which this topic has advanced to date, such a change — smirks and sidelong glances aside — would be welcome as long overdue.

*Featured Image: Jessica Jones, Marvel superhero and subject of eponymous Netflix television series.