Best of International Women’s Day 2017
March is Women’s History Month. March 8th was International Women’s Day. If you spent any time on social media yesterday, you saw plenty of creative expressions in the ongoing struggle for gender equity. Here are a few of our favorites:
‘Fearless Girl’ fittingly fearless of crowds
The statue appeared overnight in advance of international Women’s Day challenging the famous Bull on Wall Street. It was commissioned by State Street Global Advisors, the investment arm of Boston-based State Street Corp. with $2.5 trillion in funds, to help bring attention to the lack of women on corporate boards.
Its temporary installation coincides with SSGA’s new campaign to push the 3,500 public companies in which it invests to add more female directors. If you can believe it, quite a few have all-male boards. The new twist for the already pic-popular Bull has taken over social media in just two days.
Gender gap in fiction is stunning non-fiction
Starting on March 1st, Loganberry Books in Cleveland, OverDrive’s hometown, turned around all books authored by men to illustrate how much more prominent men are in the written world than women, just in time for Women’s History Month.
Reshelving the books took place during a live performance-art project, in which approximately 10,000 volumes written by men were flipped around, page-side out. In person, the aggregate effect is illustrative. One tween girl was overheard saying, “there’s, like, nothing left.” The performance art piece runs through March 14th.
Discover new heroes and narratives
STEM Books for Girls
Not only is it Women’s History Month, it’s Teen Tech Week. Girls will find inspiration in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math in this STEM Books for Girls collection. Biographies on Sally Ride, Amelia Earhart and Rachel Carson are highlighted as well as non-fiction titles featuring Women in Medicine, Engineering, Chemistry, Space and more.
Women’s History Books
Surf every wave of feminism with this teaser look at our J/YA fiction and non-fiction titles for Women’s History Month.
Of note
For those who doubt the power of an all-women perspective, consider this. The CEO of the company that commissioned Fearless Girl is a woman. The artist who created it is a woman, and the human featured in the sculpture is a girl. The owner of Loganberry Books is a woman, as is the tween who muttered about the lack of representation on the shelves. The two collection lists above feature 100% female authors, and feature female narratives. The OverDrive team member who compiled those many titles is a woman, as is the author of this post. #whoruntheworld
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