I think it's very important. I speak a lot at high schools and colleges. It's extremely important to set expectations. My job is to encourage girls and women to participate in media, or politics, or whatever forum it may be, where we want a more pluralistic and dynamic engagement. To do that, we have to prepare people for what they might encounter. In so doing, it's important to introduce them to networks of support that already exist. That's just essential, and if they don't exist, then they can be created.
I do know for example that online, there are so many good places where.... I'm particularly interested in teenage girls and young girls, because they're on the cusp of doing these things, and they're watching very carefully what happens to someone like you. They're deciding and they're making decisions. They're also engaging in their schools, and this is why I think this is so important.
There is a great deal of resistance to talking openly about sexism and intersectionality. We need to address that head-on in schools, because girls don't have the language or the framework. They don't go to school where feminism is taught pervasively in their classes. They get to the point where they are hit hard by double standards, and it's cognitively dissonant for them because we've been saying that you can do anything, you can go anywhere you want, you can be anything you want to be in deliberative bodies. We have sold them a bill of goods. Until we can sit down and say, “Hey, this is the situation. It's not a victim mentality. We're teaching you how to deal in the real world”, even with things like speech dominance in deliberative bodies. We know it's real, so let's talk about what that means and what you do about it.