Legal Momentum is a National Ally for Vision 2020, a national project that seeks to launch an action agenda to move the United States toward gender equality by 2020, the centennial celebration of the 19th Amendment. On October 21-22, 2010, Vision 2020 sponsored "An American Conversation about Women and Leadership" in Philadelphia, featuring panels about increasing women’s leadership in all fields, from Law to Finance to Arts and Culture.
Lorelie Masters of Jenner & Block LLP served as a Vision 2010 Delegate from Washington, DC. She reflected on the conference in a series of blog posts for Legal Momentum. This is her sixth post, co-authored by Legal Momentum's Director of Development, Amy Levine.
The panel on Communications and Media focused on continued sexism in the media, both in terms of the portrayal of women in the media and women's access to leadership and visibility in the media. Morgan Coffey, an 18-year-old Delegate from Georgia, the youngest Delegate at the Convention, reported a dramatic example of how sexism in the media today. In 2009, Morgan won the Girl Scout Gold Award and was named a Young Woman of Distinction. The Gold Award is comparable to the Boy Scouts' Eagle Scout Award. The newspapers in Morgan's hometown devote a full-page spread to each Boy Scout who receives the Eagle Scout Award. However, Morgan’s accomplishment warranted one sentence. This is just one example of how the media continues to discriminate in the public eye and the message that it sends to girls and boys.
One of the panelists, Kathleen Jamison of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, recommended that Morgan talk to friends back home and take out an ad in the local papers that says, we would like to demonstrate how proud we are of Morgan’s accomplishments and the refusal of the paper to recognize her accomplishments. Women at the conference volunteered to assist in that effort. If you want more information, please contact Vision 2020 here.
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