Just like any other person who owns an iPhone,
I’m on my phone, like, all day. It
has become my number one best friend. How else am I supposed to order those
shoes for my mum’s last minute birthday present on the bus? So as I was nonchalantly
scrolling through Instagram last month, I came across @grlpwrgang – a funky Instagram page
full of inspirational girls who have an enthusiastic love for colour and
emojis. I had a look through their posts and saw reels of young women who had
come together to a) make an amazing Instagram
page and b) provide a space for young women who want to break into the creative
industries.
Also, Nora Henick just launched La Femme Collective – a careers advice
page which has given young women a place to turn to when making those all important
career decisions. Their mission is to “humanise the girl boss” and hear all about how she got to where she is, her
successes and her failures – something that will no doubt prove to be invaluable
to young women in the near future.
GRLPWRGANG’s official manifesto is all about
girls helping girls, empowering, inspiring, supporting each other, and working
together on creative projects – and I'm all about that. It goes without saying,
I hit follow and stalked all their members on their Instagram profiles. They
have a mix of make up artists, writers, DJs, stylists, agony aunts, entrepreneurs,
managers, designers, photographers, models, hairdressers, set designers,
singers, artists, and TV presenters – the list is endless! The fact that there
are all these women out there providing advice (everyone answered the
formidable “what would you tell yourself ten years ago” question) to other
young women and supporting each other, even if its not directly, is so empowering
for women in all stages of their career and education. It’s a really positive
thing for everyone to have a role model and, the variety of creative fields
that all their members are in, means that there's someone for everyone to look
up to. It’s also amazing to see that there is real life evidence that girls can
do whatever the hell we want to – who would've thought that you could turn being
an agony aunt into a real career?
image by: @illussarah
Earlier this week, I saw someone on my feed
had joined #GIRLGANGNEXTGEN
and I was instantly reminded of the fluro pink of the original GRLPWRGANG page.
I clicked a few links and landed on the @girlgangnextgen page. I was
instantly home. Filled with tumblr-esqe slogans, cool edits, reposts of people’s
achievements, and a whole load of feminism; this page was quite clearly all
about young women doing good things. I was so excited to have found this page
early on and was even more thrilled to find that they
were accepting members. I hastily chose an old and forgotten selfie, slapped it
onto my profile with a short description of myself, and was elated to hear back
from them almost instantly. I was in.
Feminism is so important today and, if you think otherwise, you're probably
either a Donald Trump supporter or not a feminist – not someone who I would
aspire to be. There are so many issues still facing women today in and outside
the workplace. We still don’t receive equal pay, the latest stats say that
women only earn 80p per £1 that men earn, and we don’t slide as easily into STEM
(science, technology, engineering, and maths) positions as men do. But this is
only one side of the coin – we want men to be able to go into creative
industries just as much as we want to go into STEM industries. But its got to
be said that this is easier for men than it is for women – even in fields which
are typically for women. What I think need to be encouraged is ambition, and that’s
certainly happening in our generation. I know many girls from school who are in
university now studying their arse off for biomedicine, chemistry, and maths
degrees; one of my best friends is out bettering herself in her gap year before
she’s off to her dream university and then a career in
whatever the hell she wants and, honestly, she’s one of the most inspirational
people I know.
edit by: @kateannax
Although I, like thousands of others, went
straight to uni after college/sixth form, I’m still on the heavily trodden path of
finding something that I want to do for life. Although careers can change and
you could move to the other side of the globe, your gender follows you and by
being part of #GIRLGANGNEXTGEN
I hope to support other young women my age and also find something to sink my
creative teeth into (history isn’t exciting 24/7) – and how else better to do
this by getting in with a gang of other girls?
As a group, we’re all about empowering
playlists (featuring lots of Shania Twain, Chaka Khan, and Aretha Franklin, with
a bit of One Direction, and ‘Love Myself’ by Hailee Steinfeld on loop), we’re
about the pinkest most loving emojis, and we’re about writing on your mirror in
lipstick. But we’re also about having fun. Although I can do a boss pink smoky
eye, I am yet to master the contour or the greasy smoky eye (you can’t just
whack on Vaseline it turns out) and I'm hoping I can find some girls to help me
in my quest – YouTube just isn’t cutting it for me anymore. We’re a group of creatives with something to say and we’re ready for this to take off.
The daughter of the original page I fell in
love with last month, has a movement starting and we want you in. If you’re a
DJ or a budding make up artist, or even a small-time writer like yours truly –
get on Instagram. Instagram is hands down my favourite social media platform
and, even amidst my social media purge (in a short lived attempt to see the
world around me and do better in university), Instagram survived the deletion.
Dip your toes in these pages to get on
board:
The Mothership:
@kirstihadley
– Co-founder
@kyliegriffiths – Co-founder
La Femme Collective:
The Next Generation of Girl Power:
@iamnotserenity – Co-founder
@thirt3enclouds – Co-founder
@savingsay
– Co-founder
@gnarlytea
– Co-founder
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