Headmistress, Mrs Lucy Elphinstone and Director of Communications, Vanessa McKinley attended the first day of the Global Forum on Girls' Education hosted by the National Coalition of Girls' Schools in New York City on Sunday 7th February. They joined other GSA schools and member organisations from around the globe in New York City to represent 23 nations. Over 900 delegates attended, making it the first ever truly global celebration of girls' school education.  

Highlights included the keynote speaker Gloria Steinem, who is an author and feminist activist. She spoke about the importance of girls developing 'intellectual self-esteem'; how you can't have democracy without feminism; the importance of voting and how we should teach girls 'to listen as much as we talk' and to behave 'as if everything we do matters'.    

Tara Christie Kinsey and Rachel Simmons talked about 'The Myth of Effortless Perfection' and how it harms girls and what schools can do to fight it.   

Tara told the audience how the definition of 'being perfect' was constantly being added to and that we need to give girls permission to say 'no'. Rachel talked of the 'rhetoric reality gap' between what parents /staff say and what they do.  She said we need to teach girls the practice of self-compassion and to ask for help.  She discussed the terms under which girls are working to achieve success, so that they learn to calibrate their relationship with success with losing their soul!  How they need to stop seeing everyone as a competitor and stop overestimating what their peers are achieving, because in reality it is a lot less than they think!  In essence the message was about girls learning to navigate their own destinies and not allowing themselves to be passengers throughout their lives.

See more photos here