Isolation, even in a crowd, is an insidious prison for women, many of whom begin to serve time as adolescents. The experience stifles their self-confidence, shackles their self-esteem and mutes their voices.
Pat Cooper engineered a breakout from her time in isolation, and she is determined to provide an escape route from that invisible prison for other women, especially adolescent girls.
The accidental death of her 2 1/2-year-old daughter and, soon after that tragedy, a move to a new city slammed Cooper into her cell of isolation. Her husband, Peter, a geophysicist, went to the Arctic on a five-month work assignment, leaving her alone with their 3 1/2-year-old son.
“I knew no one,” said Cooper, 49, who was born in Toronto. “Whenever I heard a door open, I rushed to the window just to see someone. I was wallowing in grief and realized I was not functioning very well.
“It was a time of sink or swim. I made the decision to swim. I had to take control of my life, to take some step toward a stable feeling that was, if not happiness, then at least some sort of harmony.”
In her isolation, Cooper, a former history teacher, came to understand with greater clarity that women historically were isolated, in that they had little or no influence on issues that shaped their lives. She decided to devote her life to helping women break out of their isolation.
Her first step in that direction was to the local YWCA so her young son, Wes, could meet other children and she could meet other women. She joined the Y’s social issues committee, where she researched and wrote briefs on women’s issues. During the next 10 years, Cooper became one of Canada’s leading women-rights activists. That work solidified her belief that women, starting as adolescents, must receive an education that can lead to economic independence.
In 1990, after moving to Denver with her husband, Cooper helped to create Girls Count, a non-profit organization whose mission “is to increase women’s economic security by raising the awareness of girls’ career choices and of the skills required to pursue those careers,” said Cooper in her third-floor office at the Children’s Museum of Denver. She serves simultaneously as the president of Girls Count and as the executive director/president of the children’s museum.
“Our focus is on systematic changes in the educational system, particularly in math and science, and on working with corporations to provide meaningful career jobs for women with those skills.”
Girls Count came about as the result of two studies.
One study, by the Women’s Foundation of Colorado, showed that an increasing number of females have limited job opportunities; this limitation traps them in a cycle of poverty. The first spin of that cycle often occurs when adolescent girls are discouraged from pursuing well-paying careers.
Another study, by U S WEST, an international communications corporation, predicted that the United States labor pool of males with engineering, technology and computer skills would level off by the year 2000. The report concluded that the company would need to recruit skilled workers from Asia and Europe.
To Cooper, this sounded like two blind men describing the same elephant. The Women’s Foundation, concerned about the feminization of poverty, had hold of the trunk. U S WEST, concerned about replenishing its skilled workforce, was hanging on to the tail.
Cooper knew that really to see the elephant, a person would need to envision the potential of young girls who were not choosing math, science and computer technology as careers. She was instrumental in bringing the foundation and the corporation together to define the same elephant.
The Women’s Foundation and the U S WEST Foundation initially underwrote the Girls Count program. Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Colorado Foundation soon joined them to create a core advisory body. Many other corporations and small businesses have since joined the program.
A series of questions defines Girls Count. What personal and professional plans are adolescent girls making for their future? Are they realistically planning for rewarding and productive years in the labor force? If their marriages fail, do they have the skills to be economically independent? Can they support one or more children? How are the schools helping them define and answer such questions? What opportunities exist for young women in the workplace?
A lack of satisfactory answers to these questions helps create a sense of isolation for adolescent girls, program supporters believe. Gender stereotypes limit girls’ visions of their futures. Gender bias in the media, schools and workplaces gives girls the message that they have less promise and fewer possibilities open to them than boys.
“Girls are silenced as much as women were silenced, and this makes them feel isolated,” Cooper said. “Often they don’t believe that their opinions are of great value, or that they will be rejected if they express an opinion.
“Women’s role historically has been isolation, and that isolation has caused silence. The silence of women has prevented the history of women from being well documented. Therefore, women don’t even know their own historical background. The silence has caused the inability to impact policy that affects women’s status in society, economically as well as culturally.”
Because of their “lesser” role, women have always had to compromise their aspirations for the good of the family or for the husband’s career, Cooper said. Cooper compromised her career as an adviser to the Canadian government on women and children’s issue when she followed her husband to Denver, where he had a new career opportunity.
“I’ve always compromised,” Cooper said. “That’s the nature of women’s roles around the world. Their needs are not the priority in most cases. I think women will continue to compromise. Women make sure that the home front is stable. I don’t expect that to shift too much.”
She seized the move as an opportunity to help young women prepare for a self-reliant future. Educators, parents and employers also have a responsibility to help them plan realistically for their futures.
“We knew there was not a lot of good career counseling going on within the school system,” Cooper said. “Girls were not getting the true story about the life they may face. We decided to concentrate on the middle schools because the self-esteem of girls in that age range is so fragile. We want to beef them up at time when there were many hundreds of messages a day telling them that they weren’t really of any value.”
Those messages may include a teacher who assigns a boy to conduct a science experiment and a girl to be his scribe. Or textbooks that do not have positive female models. Or teaching methods that do not give girls a positive message that they can succeed in math and sciences.
Girls Count’s trained volunteers go into workplaces and talk to executives and workers about the importance of girls’ making good choices for themselves and their careers. The workplace is a good conduit to parents, who have an important impact on their daughters’ decisions.
Parents are also contacted through the Girls Count newsletter and the program Parenting Our Daughters. The program’s goal is to help adults open a range of choices to young girls moving into their first phase of adulthood. The program emphasizes that achievement and femininity are not mutually exclusive.
The volunteers also worked directly with girls through the Focus On Your Future program, an exercise of games about the economic realities of life, options, setting goals and how to achieve them. Girls are encouraged to think positively about math, science and computer technology as attainable careers.
“We point out that marriage is a wonderful choice, but be prepared that it may not survive,” said Cooper. “We want girls to be prepared to make choices with an educated background.
“We haven’t been impacting girls directly as much as the systems that impact the girls. For example, we looked at how Title IX of the Civil Rights Act was being enforced in Colorado schools. We were looking the girls’ participation level in leadership roles, rather than how athletic departments have accommodated girls’ role.
“We looked at how many girls were actually graduating and getting scholarships. We questioned school administrators about what programs they were putting in place to guarantee no bias or discrimination against girls participating fully in the school system existed. We had seen examples of girls (who had) come through the school system with a terrible perception of what their future would be.”
Girls Count found mixed results. Title IX provisions are not fully enforced in some school districts. On the positive side, some school districts had complied fully with Title IX.
Education is the top women’s issue in the United States in Cooper’s opinion.
“Girls Count is a key way to address this priority. We address the policies that impact the school’s curriculum. We address workplace issues. We address the portrayal of girls in the media and the impact that image has on their decision-making.
“The unfortunate part about the media is the portrayal of women being only valuable for their sex, and possibly for their stupidity. This contributes to girls’ giving up on their dreams and hopes about a future they imagine for themselves.”
Girls Count has had an impact on the educational system, Cooper said. In September, the organization helped to write an amendment to a Colorado legislative bill on standards-based education. The amendment, which was approved, requires that all educational standards meet gender and ethnicity equality.
The importance of preparing girls with meaningful work skills came home to Cooper in the locker room after a workout. She listened to women complain about their enormous frustrations in the work world. She heard the litany of inflexible time schedules that did not accommodate family needs, unequal promotions and pay, a system that values production over employees’ well-being.
“It is difficult for women to feel that they can have a family and a fulfilling career,” said Cooper. “I see this in my own daughters, who are 16 and 17. (She also has a 24-year-old son.) The young women, including adolescents, see the exhaustion in their mothers. They see their mothers striving to achieve a worthy position in the workplace and having very little time left for their family or for themselves. The younger women don’t like what they see.”
Many women opt out of male-dominated workplaces to start their own businesses. There are 7.7 million women-owned businesses in the United States. Nearly half of the small businesses in the country are founded and owned by women. That number is expected to increase by 60 percent by the year 2000, according to projections by the National Association of Women Business Owners.
Cooper finds encouraging changes happening in the work world. Industries are welcoming skilled young women. Math and science scholarships for young women are sponsored by companies such as U S WEST, Procter & Gamble and Hewlett Packard. The “old-boy” corporate network embraces an increasing number of women.
“More and more of those old boys have daughters, and those daughters are struggling in the workplace,” said Cooper. “Those old boys are saying, `My princess is 24, and she can’t find a good job.’ Or `She left the corporation because she knew that there is no place for her.’ “
To take advantage of these changes, Girls Count intends to franchise the program nationwide.
“Girls Count is a strategy that works,” said Cooper. “We know it is a model that effectively counteracts what is happening culturally. We need to bring girls together to share their concerns, to speak out and to receive positive messages about their future. Then they can gather the courage and strength not to be isolated and be a full participant in society.”
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More information is available by writing Girls Count, 1580 Logan St., Suite 540, Denver, Colo. 80203.
