Collaborating with Our Bros, BAEs & BFFs
Opportunities for Every Student
At GirlsGo, we support and work with all students who identify anywhere on the gender spectrum, not specifically “girls.” We chose the name “GirlsGo” to heighten focus on helping to equalize the scales of success for girls and women, the keyword here is “equalize.” Our mission is to help all students achieve, and that means increasing opportunities and success for everyone. We welcome any student to join our community and encourage each of you to become a contributor and share your talents, vision, insights, struggles, and successes with us.
Because we so strongly believe that equality and parity are essential for healthy, successful societies, the team at GirlsGo is launching a GoBro, an initiative that unites communities to address sexism and suppress its embedded existence. We want to end inequality.
Inequality is described in Tara Hackley’s article, “Why women write about being women in tech,” as she identifies the reason that this discrimination still exists: sexism is systemic. She exposes the pervasive challenges we still face:
Sexism is alive and well in all parts of our lives. It starts at a young age, in the way parents and guardians discourage daughters from taking risks and the way girls are told how (not) to dress through dress codes and policies that body-shame them; policies that are created to minimize distractions for boys, simultaneously shaming girls for having visible bodies and prioritizing the education of boys over girls, rather than teaching boys to pay attention and not objectify girls.
As we get older, we continue to be blamed for our woman-ness and undermined for it, too.
It is our greatest hope that every person, no matter where they identify on the spectrum of gender, will join our GoBro Initiative to mobilize boys and men to support girls’ and women’s equality and help amplify opportunities, safety, self-confidence, voices, and triumphs of girls and women. We chose “GoBros” as our campaign moniker because it holds a dual meaning. We want our “bros” to “go achieve” just as much as we want girls to accomplish their goals. We also chose it because we want the passé notion of “bro” to go! “Bro” in urban lingo has represented the conventional “man’s man,” a perceived closed fraternity where women have typically not been included:
Bro is a male youth subculture of “conventional guys’ guys” who spend time partying in ways similar to each other. Although the popular image of bro lifestyle is associated with sports apparel and fraternities, it lacks a consistent definition. Most aspects vary regionally such as in California where it overlaps with surf culture.[1] Oxford Dictionaries have noted that bros frequently self-identify with neologisms containing the word “bro” as a prefix or suffix. …The word became associated with young men, “conventional guys’ guys” who spend time partying in ways similar to each other. Oxford Dictionaries identified the use of the term “bro” as the one “defining feature” of the changing cultural attributes of young manhood.[2] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bro_(subculture))
As Tara Hackley wrote, “…the fact is, creating an inclusive environment is part of the end game. We don’t want to always have to be talking about this. We don’t want to always be fighting for this. We want supportive, inclusive, nondiscriminatory environments to be a given. We want them to be the default.”
That is why we are challenging our brothers (fathers, uncles, grandpas, partners, husbands, and friends) and our sisters to join our GoBro movement to change the lives of girls and women by raising your voices and fighting for feminism so that all of today’s students have the same opportunities to achieve.