Women’s Educational Equity Takes On Technology

Student Leadership Network hosted its Whole Girl Education National Conference for educators and program partners working to close the gap in gender equity.

By Liann Herder
Originally published in Diverse Issues on Higher Education on March 18, 2024

“While American women have advanced in the last 175 years, we haven’t come close to achieving equity,” said Laura Rebell-Gross, senior managing director of Girls’ Education with the Student Leadership Network, a nonprofit organization working for educational equity. “Disparities exist across every discipline and women’s achievements still go unrecognized.”

The conference, Closing the Gap: The Role of Girls’ Education in Creating a More Equitable World, focused on the unique burdens confronting young women of today, and the biases in technology and AI that are impacting the present and future.

“Women make up just 15% of textbooks, 8% of public statues, less than one- third of Congress, and the wage gap has barely budged. The disparities are much starker for women of color,” said Rebell-Gross.

The conference, and the conversations it begins, are “how we close the gap—one school, one program, one teacher, and one student at a time,” said Rebell-Gross.

Dr. Ruha Benjamin, author, sociologist, and professor in the department of African American Studies at Princeton University, took educators through the imagining and development of modern technologies, exposing how biases recreate themselves in these products.

“If inequity is woven into the very fabric of our society, then each twist, coil, and code is a chance for us to weave new patterns, practices, and politics,” said Benjamin. “Its vastness will be its undoing, once we accept that we are the pattern makers.”

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