Rewriting an important message to girls

If you live in New York City, perhaps you've seen this new public service ad campaign over the last few weeks. It's meant to help with young girls' self-esteem:

I'm a girl 

I'm creative, a leader, sporty, friendly, bold, honest, playful and unique. 

I'm beautiful the way I am

I know I'm not the target audience, but I am now the father of a young girl, and I was immediately turned off by these ads. At the same time, I was disappointed in my harsh reaction, since it was obvious that the many people behind these ads clearly had their heart in the right place. So I'm going to try to not be too mean here. But there are some problems.

1) Let's start with a nitpick. There's a pretty well-rounded list of adjectives in the ad, but it includes "sporty". Well, turns out there's already a word for "sporty", and it's called "athletic." Sporty is just a girlier word for athletic. We don't need dumbed-down female versions of words - I would think that's just the sort of thing this ad campaign should be fighting against. It might as well say, "I'm sporty, posh, ginger, baby, and scary." Granted, that would convey girl power, but I'd rather just change it to athletic:

I'm a girl

I'm creative, a leader, athletic, friendly, bold, honest, playful and unique.

I'm beautiful the way I am

2) Here's another small issue. That same sentence says "I'm creative, a leader, athletic, friendly, bold, honest, playful and unique." That's a tall order, a lot of pressure. It almost sounds like a girl HAS to be ALL those things. Instead, the message should be that she can be anything she likes. She doesn't HAVE to be athletic, and not everyone is a leader. She can be some of those things, or even none. She has the capability to be anything she wants. How about:

I'm a girl 

I can be creative, a leader, athletic, friendly, bold, honest, playful and unique. 

I'm beautiful the way I am

3) Here's a much more important issue, indeed the first one that jumped out at me: the use of the word "beautiful". As the final adjective, it's implying that it's the most important one. And if there's one thing we really want to convey to girls, it's that BEAUTY IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING. Why in the world did they go in this direction? You could argue that they are using the word "beautiful" not in the exterior "looks" sense but in the "inner beauty" sense. But there are better words for that: "I'm proud of the way I am", "I'm awesome the way I am", "I'm great the way I am", etc. "Inner beauty" is a subtle connotation that is not the first thing you think of when you see the word "beautiful". (If it was, we wouldn't ever need the prefix-word "inner".) They should have avoided it altogether:

I'm a girl 

I can be creative, a leader, athletic, friendly, bold, honest, playful and unique. 

I'm awesome the way I am

4) Lastly, let's look at the rest of that closing sentence. "I'm beautiful the way I am." What a let-down. Maybe it's just me, but here's what that sounds like: "I'm ok even though I'm not a boy." or "Hey, I was born a girl, but I'm dealing with it." or "I may not have a penis, but I'm almost as good." WTF? It seems so meek and defeatist. Why not go with a more uplifting ending? How about just:

I'm a girl 

I can be creative, a leader, athletic, friendly, bold, honest, playful and unique. 

I'm awesome!

Straightforward and to the point. It should be inspiring. I would be proud for my daughter to see this ad now.

You may argue that I'm nitpicking and wordsmithing this too much. But that's the whole point of feminist critique: that there are subtle biases even in our language that convey that women are not equal to men. I'm really surprised that nobody who helped with this ad thought this way; it's the whole reason for the ad, after all. I've worked at several ad agencies, and trust me, all ads are edited this much. You only have a few words to work with (they used 20), and a few seconds of the audience's time, so you have to make each word count.

Which brings me to my final edit ... something to really make the ad "pop" and grab people's attention. I realized, hey, this ad is for NEW YORK CITY. What says not just "I'm an awesome girl" but "I'm an awesome New Yorker"? How about:

PS. For a better example of empowerment, check out this awesome GoldieBlox ad.

Update on interracial marriage

The interracial marriage of Bill de Blasio, newly elected mayor of New York, is generating a lot of headlines. De Blasio may be the first white politician in U.S. history elected to a major office with a black spouse. Not only did this not ruffle the feathers of very many New Yorkers - probably the most diverse city on the planet, after all - but it looks like it probably helped get him elected.

I've got a chart in the Secret Peace book reflecting the trend of acceptance of interracial relationships:

A clear trend, but I only had data at the time up to the year 2000. However, the trend is so obvious that we can pretty safely extrapolate what it would look like if it continued to today (in blue):

Pretty impressive, as the two groups' opinions are converging around the 80-85% mark. But what's really interesting is that one of the articles about de Blasio, in the Huffington Post, mentions current trends - allowing us to update the chart for real:

The result (in red) is even higher than projected. The percentage of whites approving went from 4% in 1958 to 86% now. Today, across America, only 14% of whites disapprove of mixed marriage, and an amazingly low 2% of blacks disapprove.

Can you imagine this trend ever reversing? I can't. Nearly everyone approves of interracial marriage, something that would have been inconceivable to folks a few generations ago. Though they're going at different speeds, all other trends of tolerance are moving in the same inevitable direction as well.

Even skydiving is safer

I found this great page all about skydiving safety statistics. (I am on the Internet a LOT.) Did you know how many fatal skydiving accidents there were in the U.S. in 2012? Only 19. If that still seems like a lot, consider the total number of jumps: 3.1 million. That's a .0006% fatality rate. (And there were only 915 non-fatal injuries, as well: roughly 3 injuries per 10,000 jumps.) That's a lot safer than I think I expected.

But that's not the cool part. We have no real way of knowing if that number is good or bad. We need context: is this more or less safe than in the past?

Turns out it's much more safe. That fatality rate has been cut in half just in the past decade. Before that, we don't have all the same data available here, but if we judge by U.S. Parachute Association membership as a proxy for jumps, we see the rate of fatalities per thousand members go from 3.65 in the 1960s steadily and consistently down to 0.64 today.

These trends mirror lots of declining death and injury rates from all sorts of accidents. I had known about other stats, but it was fascinating to see the same trend even in such a seemingly dangerous arena as skydiving.

This guy is way safer than he used to be.

Page is here: USPA: Skydiving Safety

The teen pregnancy epidemic

... is not real. From Slate.com, via The Week: "The U.S. teen birthrate dropped 6 percent between 2011 and 2012, and is now the lowest it's been in the 73 years the government has been tracking it." And this is most likely the lowest in the country's history, since people had children at much younger ages in the past in general (even if they happened to be married).

A small part of me thought that maybe this meant teens were getting more abortions, but I looked that up, and nope, that dropped, too, and precipitously:

(The chart is from familyfacts.org.) So why all the good news? Well, health experts theorize that the most likely culprits are good ol' increased sex education and more readily-available contraception. Keep up the good work, kids! Good job being too busy texting to get pregnant.

An admirable apology

We are all well aware of the Supreme Court's big decisions regarding gay rights last month. But you might not have heard the parallel story of Exodus International. They were the driving force behind “conversion therapy”, the movement that “helps” gays and lesbians change their sexual orientation through prayer and therapy. Well, they just announced that they were closing and that they had been wrong all along. The founder apologized for all the “pain and hurt” the organization had caused, regretting breaking up gay relationships, and saying now that gay couples can be “every bit as capable of being amazing parents.” (from The Week, July 5-12, 2013)

This seems pretty remarkable to me, since it's rare to hear public apologies that aren't required by law or necessary to win votes. It would have been much more likely for this organization to simply dwindle away until they ran out of business and the last guy closed the doors and slinked away, never mentioning his former "career" to any of his new coworkers at whatever more normal job he ended up at. Not that an apology makes up for the incalculable amount of absurd pain the organization caused, but it's still a nice gesture.

This announcement of course dovetails nicely with the Supreme Court’s historic decisions. The Court is in step with public opinion, which has been changing fast, perhaps faster than for any other marginalized group in history. Here are some charts from the New York Times’ Nate Silver:

source 1

source 2

The first chart focuses on the U.S., and the second on the world. It's interesting that both articles focus on same-sex marriage, and in recent years it's intrigued me that this is the locus of our debate about gay rights. It's not that marriage isn't an important issue, but it's worth remembering that in previous civil rights movements in earlier decades and centuries, groups were fighting for equal representation in voting, in hiring and pay, and in ending violent acts (lynching, burning, you name it.) It's a sign of progress that those issues thankfully don't need to be the primary concern of this particular fight for equal rights today.

Yet another good vaccine

This is from last week's The Week, "The lifesaving effect of HPV vaccines". A new study has shown the new HPV vaccine to be very effective. "The rate of infection with the cancer-causing strain of HPV has been cut in half among American teenage girls since 2006, when the [CDC] first recommended [the vaccination]." That's particularly impressive since the vaccine is controversial and so only a third of young girls have received it. HPV is the primary cause of cervical cancer, and if we were able to up vaccination levels to 80% (like many other countries have done), we would prevent an estimated 17,000 more cancer deaths. Let's do that.

Extreme poverty may disappear in our lifetimes, if we just keep up the good work

It never ceases to amaze me how much success the world has seen in reducing poverty, and even more, how few people know about it. This is probably for three reasons: we're more aware of poverty (and bad news in general) than in the past thanks to the explosion of news, our standards have been constantly increasing, and we're aware that global population is increasing (although that rate of growth is actually decreasing, another stat we're unaware of.) I think these combine to make our gut feeling that dire poverty is increasing. Thankfully, that's not true.

It seems more obvious when you realize that we've never been richer than we are today. Throughout most of history, ALL people were in dire poverty, or near to all. For every one king with a bit of gold, there were thousands of peasants. There was no middle class to speak of until recent centuries. And then during the twentieth century, poverty reduction really took of.

I have a chart in my book that shows this reduction in extreme poverty, which I've reproduced often:

But here's a new one, from an Economist article this week:

The Economist is generally more optimistic than many publications, but still, it's not often you see global stats simple labeled, "Hooray!" (Although the subtitle should say "Global extreme poverty rate, %", an important distinction. Extreme poverty is defined as people living on less than $1.25 a day. General poverty will be with us much longer.)

What makes this chart new to me is it's the first one I've seen with projections 20 years into the future. And those projections are amazing! Look, even in the worst case scenario, we're still reducing poverty, just slowly. And in the best case scenario, it's practically gone by 2030. This is stunning, and contrary to all our assumptions. Read the whole Economist article for their suggestions on the best ways to make the most progress in the coming years.