The Girl Effect – an online movement devoted to empowering 600 million adolescent girls in the developing world to be agents of change and make the world a better place – has a powerful new video out called The Clock is Ticking.

This video explores how girls in many impoverished countries are considered women by the time they hit 12 years old. By the time they’re 14, many are married. By 15, pregnant or with a child. But as The Clock is Ticking shows, this cycle can be stopped when girls are given a chance – when they have the ability to stay in school, have regular medical check-ups, and stay safe.

What I love about this video, besides the gorgeous animation, cool design, and moving music, is that it so simply lays out the case for not only what’s wrong with the picture for girls living in poverty around the world, but how changing the life of one girl can make a difference to many.

Check it out for yourself:

To get involved with The Girl Effect, visit their website here and get mobilized. Like them on , host a Girl Effect fundraiser party, and join in the conversation!

If you or someone you know struggles with an eating disorder, please check out my friend and fellow member of the Confidence Community (TM) Johanna Kandel’s new book, which just came out today.

Johanna struggled with her eating disorder for ten years before finally getting help. She founded the Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness in 2000 to do community outreach, education, awareness, and prevention of various eating disorders, to share the message that recovery from these disorders is possible, and make sure that those suffering from eating disorders don’t have to recover alone.

In her powerful new book, Johanna offers tools and insight for those with eating disorders so they can:

• Stop self-sabotage and sidestep triggers
• Quiet the eating-disordered voice
• Strengthen the healthy, positive voice
• Let go of all-or-nothing thinking
• Overcome fear and embrace change
• Stay motivated and keep moving forward

Complete with inspiring true stories from others who have won their personal battles with eating disorders, this book provides the help you need to break free from your eating disorder and discover how wonderful life really can be.

Congratulations to Johanna on bringing this very important book into the world!

I’m wearing jeans today. How about you? If you’re wearing a skirt or perhaps a sun dress, you might want to think about changing. Why? Because New Moon Girls has declared today “Wear the Pants Day” to draw attention to the fact that millions of girls and women around the world are still forbidden or discouraged from wearing pants.

According to New Moon, girls and women are beaten, arrested, and worse for wearing pants. In fact, last fall schoolgirls in the Sudan were flogged for wearing pants and 20 women in Uganda were stripped of their pants and forced to walk home in underwear.

But the issue of women / girls and pants hits closer to home. Only 2 years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on a “persistent bias against pants-wearing women in careers such as law and finance.” Female college grads are warned to wear skirts if they have hopes of hitting the top posts in their professions. And women in the senate and congress only started wearing pants in the 1990s!

Why today, you ask? Here’s what New Moon has to say:

“New Moon Girls picked this day because on June 11, 1964, the Equal Pay Act was enacted in the U.S., mandating that women receive equal pay for equal work. Now, some 46 years later, pants barriers have largely toppled in the US; however, American women still earn just 77 cents to a man’s dollar. Wearing pants today helps keep us focused on the work that remains ahead to ensure that our daughters enter a workplace that’s finally fair.”

So, wear your pants (or shorts if it’s really hot where you live) today and stand up for women everywhere!

Smart Girls Know would like to join Girls Inc. in celebrating Girls’ Rights Week! From May 3 – May 7, Girls Inc. is focused on girls promoting positive spaces for physical activity as part of their and their communities’ greater health and wellbeing.

As part of the week, the Girls Inc. National Scholars traveled to Washington, D.C. where they met with Susan Sher, First Lady Michelle Obama’s Chief of Staff, and Jocelyn Frye, Director of Policy and Projects in the Office of the First Lady, to present finding of Girls Inc. Healthy Girls, Healthy Communities, a project in which girls across the country examined the resources available in their communities to encourage physical activity and barriers that prevent girls from using these resources.

This week is also meant to bring awareness to Girls Bill of Rights – six statements that help girls envision a healthy, successful future and an equitable society. So without further ado, here they are:

• Girls have the right to be themselves and to resist gender stereotypes
• Girls have the right to express themselves with originality and enthusiasm
• Girls have the right to take risks, to strive freely, and to take pride in success
• Girls have the right to accept and appreciate their bodies
• Girls have the right to have confidence in themselves and be safe in the world
• Girls have the right to prepare for interesting work and economic independence

For more info on Girls’ Rights Week, visit the Girls Inc. website here!

On this 40th anniversary of Earth Day, I wanted to share with you the new website, Inconvenient Youth, which stems from The Climate Project, Al Gore’s climate change leadership program.

This new venture is aimed at teens with a goal of creating a “a community of teenagers taking action to address the climate crisis.” On the website, you can create your own profile, and then join in the discussion sharing your ideas for addressing global warming, as well as post specific actions you’ve already taken to do your part.

Also – be sure to visit the official Earth Day website, where you can share what you plan to do in the coming year to lighten your carbon footprint on the earth. Thousands of people have already posted their pledges to do things like:

• shop at a local farmer’s market and buy local / organic food
• use reusable bags and bins when grocery shopping
• start composting
• unplug chargers when not using them
• take the stairs instead of the elevator
• shut down computer when not using them
• use environmentally-friendly cleaning products

For me, I’m going to try to walk even more than I already do, shut down my computer every night, and plan more opportunities for our family, including my 5-year-old son, to take part in environmental clean-up volunteerism.

What are YOU going to do differently?

Girls Inc, the nonprofit organization that inspires girls to be strong, smart, and bold, just released findings from its Girls Shape the Future study that gives new info on the factors that affect teen girls’ sexual behaviors and attitudes.

The study examined the belief that girls whose futures are considered at risk because of things like race, family configuration, or economic status, are at high risk for engaging in early sexual activity. But the Girls Inc study shows that there is no difference between the rate of early sexual activity among girls considered “at risk” and the general population of girls.

Interestingly, the study did show that there are 2 very important factors which play critical roles in protecting girls – regardless of their socioeconomic status and household structure – against early sexual activity. Any guesses?

Mom and school. That’s right. The better the quality of girls’ relationship with their mothers and their achievement in school, especially reading proficiency, the less likely girls were to engage in early sexual behavior.

Click here to read all the findings of the Girls Shape the Future study.

Do Something and HP just joined forces to create Increase Your Green, a contest and campaign encouraging teens nationwide to “green” their schools by developing creative plans to engage their classmates and address environmental issues at school.

A panel of judges, including Nick Cannon (check out his PSA below), will evaluate the entries based on creativity, innovation, reduction in waste, energy saved and number of students involved. The best use of technology will be an important criterion for selecting campaign winners. The winners will receive up to $5,000 in funding and an HP Artist Edition notebook to carry out their plan.

The entry period runs from February 15 – April 22, so now is the time to formulate your plan! You can find out all the deets at the Do Something website.

The New York Times ran an interesting article this week about a group of women making history in Iraq. On Monday, 50 women became the first-ever female graduates of Iraq’s police-officer training academy. In a country where women continue to face a steep uphill battle when it comes to achieving equal rights, this accomplishment has the potential to have a big impact.

Women have previously been able to serve doing things like directing traffic, but this is the first time women have been allowed to participate in training academy. These fifty impressive women are now full-fledged police officers who’ll be working investigations and in forensics.

Congratulations to these women for pursuing their dreams and setting an example for more women to follow. And it looks like they’ve already begun…the next group of trainees includes 100 women!

When I got up this morning, I was thrilled to find an article about Seattle teen Jessica Markowitz on the front page of the Seattle Times. Next month, at 14 years old, Jessica is receiving the 2009 World of Children Founders Award at UNICEF in New York for creating IMPUWE, a charity that sends 22 poor girls in Rwanda to school. Over the past three years, she has raised nearly $40,000, taken several trips to rural villages there, formed a partnership with the Seattle Girls’ School, and worked this past summer teaching Rwandan kids to read in English.

I already knew of Jessica because of my work on the Board of Directors for Seattle Girls’ School, but didn’t know about the award until this morning. Excited, I went to the article online, only to have my heart sink as I started reading some of the comments people had posted on the Seattle Times website about Jessica and her work, including things like:

While I appreciate that this girl is trying to do “good,” it does seem a bit disingenuous. Just take a walk downtown Seattle sometime, one will see many, many, in need…why “travel” to “help?”

While thousand starve and go without right here in her own country, her and her family rather find a remote place in the world? I don’t get it.

This is a rich kid whose parents can afford to jet her around the world at 11 or 12 to save some poor black kids. I’d like to have parents like that:) Mommy, let’s bake cookies for poor black kids. Then I get to jet set around the world as a benefactor before actually working myself.

What I find so confusing about comments like these is why some people are criticizing Jessica Markowitz for something she has done so well—listened to her personal values, her passion, and her heart in order to have a positive impact on an issue that connected with her?

What Jessica’s critics aren’t getting is that her story isn’t about how much money she has or where she comes from or the scale of her impact based on her parents’ financial status. Jessica’s story is that she is a social change agent, and she is doing that in the way that she can at this point in her life.

Social change agents come in all different shapes, sizes, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Likewise, social change agents all have their own personal story…their own personal issues they want to affect. Some might be passionate about the environment. For others, it might be poverty in the U.S or animal rights issues. For Jessica, it is children who lost their parents in the Rwandan genocide. What every social change agent has in common though, is a desire to make a difference. Of course the scale of the impact made by social change agents will vary. One might change life for thousands, while another might change life for one. But is any positive impact too small to make a difference? Absolutely not. Imagine the impact a generation of empowered teens can have on their world as they all move forward with the passion, drive, commitment, and determination to address the issues they connect with?

What are your thoughts?

Click here to read more about Jessica and IMPUWE (formerly called Richard’s Rwanda).

Each year, the Nobel Prize is awarded to people who’ve made outstanding contributions in areas like chemistry, physics, medicine, literature, economics, and peace.You’ve probably heard a lot about the Nobel Prize in the past week, especially after President Barack Obama surprised many people around the world by being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

But President Obama isn’t the only Nobel Laureate making news. In fact, five other winners are getting a lot of attention, in part because they’re women. And that’s the largest number of women to win the prize in a single year. Here’s a look at the women who won:

• Ada E. Yonath – Chemistry – “For studies of the structure and function of the ribosomes”
• Elizabeth Blackburn & Carol Greider – Medicine – “For the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase”
• Herta Muller – Literature – “Who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”
• Elinor Ostrom – Economics – “For her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”

The other night I heard a story on NPR about Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics, and some of the story focused on the fact that she is the first woman to ever win the prize for economics. The next night, the same news show on NPR mentioned that they received a lot of emails from listeners complaining that the original news story should have spent less time focusing on the fact that she was a woman, and more time focusing on her actual accomplishments in the field.

I can understand where these listeners are coming from. In an ideal world, a woman winning a major international award for economics wouldn’t be seen as unusual at all. But this isn’t an ideal world. This is a world where men dominate in careers in math, science, technology and engineering, in part because there aren’t many role models for young women to look up to.

Says prize winner Carol Greider in an interview for the New York Times about women in the field of science: “There’s still a slight cultural bias for men to help men…It’s not that they are biased against women or want to hurt them. They just don’t think of them. And they often feel more comfortable promoting their male colleagues.”

I say, let’s celebrate Elinor Ostrow’s accomplishment and that of all the women who won prizes this year as loud as we can! For they all made a major contribution in paving the way for girls and young women to pursue their future dreams and know that they really can come true.

What do you think? Should the gender of the winners be considered part of the news story? For more on this topic, go over to Jezebel.