February 2015
With Patricia Arquette’s Oscar speech rousing opinion all over the world, many argue that feminism has failed the underprivileged. Charlotte Young is one woman trying to turn the tide. She has for the last two years been trying to enthuse young working-class girls with the mentality and skills needed to build a successful career through her charity The Girls Network.
Charlotte describes the combination of being a girl from a disadvantaged background, without the necessary support from parents or female role models, as a “real double disadvantage”. Starting out, the charity was a mentoring scheme but has developed into offering work experience for their mentees and highlighting gender equality in schools, as girls tend to be marginalized in a classroom environment. “There seems to be a trend, particularly in classrooms, that boys are more vocal and boys are more confident in putting themselves forward for things”, she says.
According to Charlotte, the fear of being wrong is more prevalent among girls. “There seems to be an emphasis for girls to get the right answer, whereas boys tend to be praised and encouraged for having a go,” she says. This results in girls lacking confidence and suffering from low self-esteem: “From an early age, boys learn the characteristic of interrupting girls, in a classroom boys will often talk over girls and quieten them.”
To counteract this, The Girls Network sets up girls, aged from fourteen to nineteen, with female professionals to create a mentor relationship, which hopefully will engage parents as well. “Often it’s the vulnerable children whose parents don’t engage with school because they had a bad experience and they just don’t want to go into the school building,” she says.
One of Charlotte’s success stories is that of a girl in Brighton with anger issues, who was about to be kicked out of school when she formed a mentoring relationship with a woman who initially didn’t intend to be a mentor. “The school has seen a complete transformation, the mom was in tears seeing the transformation in her daughter, the mentor was in tears, the deputy headteacher was in tears. The turnaround in her attitude and her behavior was just remarkable,” she says.
One of the goals for the network is to increase the pool of female mentors. These include women from City Bank, the FCA, various law firms, the NHS, women who work in PR, the arts and with charities. The number of women to look up to in your personal life are for some very sparse, however in the public sphere, there are plenty. “I think Emma Watson has done a great thing in terms of bringing publicity to the issue [through her UN-sponsored #HeForShe campaign] and also talking about the importance of involving men and boys in the conversation,” she says.
Some argue that one of the problems with contemporary feminism is its focus on women in boardrooms. Charlotte believes that what she can do to help make the situation better is on a lower, more personal level. She explains, “I know so many people who perpetuate gender norms, they’re not even conscious of it, it’s easy to do and it’s just about informing people. I think the whole lot is important and we’re just one piece of the jigsaw.”
Gustaf Kilander 