Active Voice - SPLC

Some teenage male’s dating advice to female students.

The advice showed up in a course assignment “$5 Date” in a Utah high school required course on adult roles and financial literacy, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

The materials were not created by the teacher or her students, but were downloaded from an approved state database of lesson plans and handouts. The section has since been removed from the database.

Here’s a link to the gallery with the advice printed in full.

Lucy Mulligan, whose mother took to social media to bring attention to the assignment, told the Tribune: “Teachers should be a reliable source of information, and this doesn't seem like an educated assignment, or an assignment that would teach you anything at all."

There’s still a long way to go, but what a night. In addition to the four year streak for women in the comedy director category, Rami Malek was the first minority actor in 18 years to win best actor in a drama and Jeffrey Tambor implored for "more opportunities for transgender talent.”

Jobless, a new college graduate emails an author she admires to ask for advice. It’s admittedly a “half-court basketball shot.”

And it lands with a swish.

Are dress codes sexist? Well, a Portland seventh-grader told her school board, 100 percent of the students sent home for violating them are female, so IDK you do the math. Girls are fighting back against dress codes that interrupt their education so their bodies won’t be “distracting” to boys, Upworthy reports. And these girls actually convinced their school to pass a more neutral dress code, which specifically forbids making a violator wear a school “shaming” outfit as punishment (as other districts have been known to do). 

Kate Karstens is on a mission. She’s determined to end a prehistoric “prior review” policy that lets her high-school principal review everything students prepare for the student newspaper in advance, which has led students to censor themselves in anticipation that anything critical of the school or controversial will be removed. And she’s not holding back: “Censorship is the currency of dictators,” she writes in this op-ed column. Bam!

“Find your voice. Own your voice. Don’t be afraid.”

Five college journalists drawn from campuses from coast-to-coast got a two-day crash course in movement-building from experts in the legal, nonprofit and public-relations fields. The Aug. 18-19 workshop marked the kickoff of the inaugural round of Active Voice fellowships, awarded to college students with inventive ideas about improving the press-freedom climate in high schools.

Read more here.

It started with a tweet.

Four teenage girls in Chicago made history happen, using social media to ignite a mass sit-in against police brutality that drew more than 1,000 people to Millennium Park.

Said one organizer, Eva Lewis: “Because we’re like, small—we’re 16 and 17—it just hadn’t resonated that we could do something like that.” 

“And then we did.”

While the study focused on women in tech, it’s not hard to see its applicability to others like media and law. Margarita Mayo writes (emphasis added):

Our study, which has been accepted for presentation at the Academy of Management’s conference in August, shows that men are seen as confident if they are seen as competent, but women are seen as confident only if they come across as both competent and warm.

Most kids aim to lose all of their baby teeth by age 9 or maybe even ride their first two-wheeler, but young reporter Hilde Lysiak has other aspirations.

This nine-year-old reporter who travels on her pink bike for the latest scoop for The Orange Street News, will add another accomplishment to her resume (as if her profiles in the New York Times, The Washington Post and NBC were not enough). By the fall of 2017 a four-part, book series for newly independent readers called, “Hilde Cracks the Case” will hit the shelves.

Lysiak will co-write the book with her reporter father and continues to live by her mantra that: “You’re never too young to follow your dreams. If you take yourself seriously, other people will take you seriously!”

After years of venting in a private Facebook group, female product managers will have a day to make themselves heard face-to-face.

Deborah Liu, Facebook’s vice president of platform and marketplaces, announced that Facebook would sponsor the discussion group’s first offline conference – Women in Product.

Finally, female product managers fighting for a voice in their male-dominated field will be granted sabbatical from their virtual community.  On September 13, an in-person, female-focused gathering will take place at Facebook’s Menlo Park, California headquarters and will host product managers across the industry including those from Twitter, Apple, Google and Uber.

Right now, women account for about 30 percent of all employment at tech companies. In addition, after a slew of high-profile sexual harassment lawsuits, these companies say they are trying to increase female representation and protection in the workforce.

Silicon Valley -- prepare to talk about new ways to shatter the digital ceiling.