A Mighty Girl's 2019 Halloween Gallery is now live! A small sample of the many hundreds of photos submitted can be viewed in our Halloween Highlights blog post.

Thank you to everyone who submitted photos of their Mighty Girls in costume to our 2019 Halloween Gallery! We were awed by the creativity and variety of the Mighty Girl costumes submitted to the gallery. As we've always said, Mighty Girls know that their costume possibilities are limited only by their imaginations and with costumes ranging from ones based on favorite superheroes to ones inspired by historic role models, these Mighty Girls clearly know no bounds! Continue reading → Continue reading

The best board books about Mighty Girl role models and the potential of every Mighty Girl!

What better way to welcome a little Mighty Girl to the world than with a few empowering books? Board books are a wonderful way to build a love of reading from a baby's first months, whether parents are reading to them at bedtime or they're ready to sit on the floor and explore them on their own. And, today's board books provide plenty to explore, from the lives of baby girls around the world to inspiring women of the past and present to the exciting possibilities for her future. In this blog post, we're sharing our favorite board books that are perfect as a gift for a new baby or a mom-to-be at a baby shower. Durable and appealing for both parent and child, they're sure to be favorites for years to come! Continue reading → Continue reading

Five books to help mothers & daughters share, learn, and grow together through the tween and teen years.

A strong mother-daughter bond can be a very powerful thing! But as girls grow older, especially as they reach their tweens and teens, that bond is often tested as girls increasingly exercise their growing independence. Investing some extra time and attention to this relationship pays big dividends for both of you — after all, you’re on this journey together! Continue reading → Continue reading

The new Sesame Street programming aims to resources "deliver the words children need to hear most: You are not alone. You will be taken care of. Addiction is a sickness and, as with any sickness, people need help to get better. And most importantly: It’s not your fault."

The beloved children's TV show Sesame Street is helping children understand the difficult topic of addiction with its new Muppet character, Karli! The 6-and-a-half-year-old Muppet appears in several new online videos which explore how her mom has struggled with addiction and is now in recovery in child-friendly ways. According to Sesame Workshop, the free resources "deliver the words children need to hear most: You are not alone. You will be taken care of. Addiction is a sickness and, as with any sickness, people need help to get better. And most importantly: It’s not your fault." Continue reading → Continue reading

"If we cannot treat our sexual assault victims right, especially if justice has been denied to them for so many years, we certainly want to be able to treat our current survivors properly."

In 2009, over 11,000 untested sexual assault evidence kits were found in a Detroit police storage warehouse during a routine tour, some dating back to 1984. After the discovery of the abandoned rape kits, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy was determined to seek justice for the victims. She and her team started the long process of testing the kits, investigating the crimes, and prosecuting the perpetrators. Last month, after a decade of unrelenting effort, she announced that they had successfully tested the entire backlog! In the process, they identified 824 serial rapists and have won 197 convictions so far, with hundreds of investigations still underway. While Worthy is proud of the work she's done, she says it has revealed upsetting truths about how the justice system has long failed rape survivors, observing: "If we cannot treat our sexual assault victims right, especially if justice has been denied to them for so many years, we certainly want to be able to treat our current survivors properly." Continue reading → Continue reading

In order for our Mighty Girls to learn how to stand up against bullying, they need the help of the adults in their lives. Parents, teachers, school administrators, coaches and others in the community can have a powerful impact on children's attitudes toward bullying and how they will respond if they experience or are witness to it. But it can be challenging for adults to know when typical childhood conflict turns into a pattern of bullying, and to decipher when they should step in and when they should let children resolve their own conflicts.

In this third part of our blog series for Bullying Prevention Month, we focus on resources for parents and educators that explore the problem of childhood bullying and provide strategies for raising caring, kind children and handling those times when children aren’t so kind.

For Mighty Girl books on bullying prevention for young children, check out our post, The End of Bullying Begins With Me: Bullying Prevention Books for Young Children.. For bullying prevention resources for older kids, visit our post, Taking A Stand Against Bullying: Bullying Prevention Books for Tweens and Teens. Continue reading → Continue reading

Judy Garland's Dorothy was one of the early 20th century's defining Mighty Girl characters.

There are few stories from American literature and film as well known as The Wizard of Oz! Whether you read the book first or marveled at the classic MGM movie, Dorothy Gale and her friends Toto the dog, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman, and the Cowardly Lion have been beloved by generations. Dorothy, famously played by actress Judy Garland, was one of the early 20th century's defining Mighty Girl characters, although her determination occasionally got her book into hot water — in 1928, the book was banned from public libraries in Chicago "for depicting women in strong leadership roles"! Continue reading → Continue reading

"This weird idea that women maybe can’t open movies or are not important to storytelling or the female story is not high art, it’s bogus."

Captain Marvel soared past $1 billion global box office sales this month! As of April 12 — a little over one month after its release — the film had earned $380 million domestically and $664 million internationally. Only 37 other films in history have earned at least $1 billion and Captain Marvel marks the first time that a female superhero has driven this level of ticket sales. The movie's success is one more reminder that, contrary to commonly-held attitudes, female-led films do draw in viewers. "A lot of times in our business there is a lot of bias disguising itself as knowledge," observes Christy Haubegger, an agent with the Creative Artists Agency and part of a research team that conducted a recent study that found female-led films have higher box office returns at every production budget level. "The perception that it’s not good business to have female leads is not true.... They’re a marketing asset." Continue reading → Continue reading

Dr. Katie Bouman led the creation of a new algorithm to produce the first-ever image of a black hole.

Scientist Katie Bouman has said that photographing a black hole is "equivalent to taking an image of a grapefruit on the moon, but with a radio telescope." Today, the MIT postdoctoral fellow shared a photo of herself "watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed." Bouman and her team released this first-ever image of a black hole to the public, which is the first direct visual evidence that black holes exist. Continue reading → Continue reading

Commercial mother-daughter pilot teams are extremely rare in an industry where less than 5% of all commercial pilots are female.

A mother-daughter pilot team inspired people around the world when they shared the cockpit of a Boeing 757! Captain Wendy Rexon and her daughter, First Officer Kelly Rexon, flew together from Los Angeles to Atlanta in March. When only 6% of commercial pilots in the U.S. and less than 5% globally are female, female pilots are already a rare sight but mother-daughter flight teams are virtually unheard of. Dr. John R. Watret, who took the pilots' photo, observed that such role models are important to encourage young women's interest in aviation: "The first officer had a great role model for becoming a pilot – her mother... It’s good for aviation and inspiring for all of us." Continue reading → Continue reading