How can we create safe, engaging spaces for teenage girls in a digital world?

My experiences, insights, and lessons from MIT’s Hack for Inclusion 2021

Cards explaining Liberatory Design mindsets shared with Hack for Inclusion participants!

This weekend, I participated in MIT’s Hack for Inclusion! The challenge statement I worked on was “Creating safe, engaging online spaces for teen girls”. This challenge was posted by Generation Wow —an organization that delivers Social and Emotional Learning to teenage girls while also providing a platform for them to connect with each other, as well as with mentors. As a proud older brother of my delightful sister who recently turned 20 and is in her undergrad, this challenge was very close to my heart.

Through this post, I’ll share the insights and lessons I learned through the 2-day process of being exposed to the problem statement, interviewing 3 teenage girls, and working with my 6-member team comprising of 4 amazing women and a very talented girl who herself is in the 11th grade! 😃

The Problem of Social Pressure, Self-Worth, and Resources for Teen Girls

To begin with, the following 4 statistics offered in our challenge statement were eye-opening to me:

• 74% of girls say they are under pressure to please everyone
• Only 3 in 10 girls believe they are good enough. The rest believe they aren’t good enough or don’t measure up in some way, typically with regard to their looks, performance in school, and relationships with friends and family members
• Only 1 in 5 girls believe she has the key qualities required to be a good leader
• Only 10–20% of youth program participants are girls

So I could see that there are opportunity themes to

1. reduce social pressure (from family, friends, peers, teachers/school, society)

2. improve self-worth (around appearance, academic capabilities, social skills, relationships)

And these 2 opportunity themes can be acted upon through digital offerings that target teen girls, or even parents and/or teachers and schools (the third problem area of resources and support)

Insights from Conversations with 4 Teen girls

We had the opportunity to chat with 4 teenage girls.

Girl 1: A 10th-grade Black girl from Jacksonville, Florida

Girl 2: An 8th-grade White girl from Virginia

Girl 3: An 11th-grade Indian-origin American girl from Florida

Girl 4: An 11th grade Asian-American girl (who was also our teammate!)

Here are the key themes that stood out to me from our conversations (I’ve also included the detailed notes from each conversation in an appendix at the end of this post).

1. Academic & career-related pressures: All the 4 teen girls we chatted with from 8th grade to 11th grade faced academic pressures. They also knew or felt the need to know what careers they wanted to pursue. Their mothers seemed to be the key drivers of their academic and extra-curricular activities. These girls enjoyed mentorship from women in careers of their interest but also wanted mentorship from girls closer to their age.
2. Safe and diverse community that shares and understands common problems: All 4 teen girls enjoyed connecting with other girls who were nice, who could relate to their problems, but who were also different so they could exchange experiences. Age and economic background came across as desired dimensions of similarity.
3. Emotional learning: Emotional learning seemed to be an important catalyst in forming friendships. The girls who went through the Generation Wow program seemed to grow close through their conversations and lessons on dealing with life as well as through shared activities. Generation Wow seemed to create a positive space for girls to be authentic instead of having to present a facade.
4. Role of mothers: It was curious that fathers were never mentioned in the interviews and mothers seemed to be the key drivers of academic as well as extra-curricular activities. This made us wonder if the girls without mothers, or without a close relationship with their mothers were missing out.
5. Joy of creation: All the girls seemed to enjoy creating things with their friends. Perhaps the process of creation re-inforces a sense of self-worth and ability when these girls worked on it together.
6. Tech-savvy: Each of the girls seemed much more tech-savvy than I had anticipated. Discord, Youtube, Instagram, and Snapchat seemed like platforms of choice. (Tiktok didn’t come up but perhaps it would if we had asked about it!) Online platforms are very much a part of their teenage years, the way television was for me when I was growing up. Anonymity to get support is desired, but at the same time, the separation that a digital layer creates ends up letting some of the girls say mean things online that they probably wouldn’t say in the presence of other adults in a physical space.

Lessons I Learned from this Hackathon

As we were building user personas and looking at pain points, we wondered if we could center our solution on the theme of the role of moms as a way to drive the adoption of Generation Wow’s offerings. But then, a teammate rightly stopped us to point out that not all girls have mothers or such healthy relationships with mothers. Thus, we should be very careful to create a solution that doesn’t end up excluding girls without mothers or girls who don’t have close relationships with their mothers.

This was a big lesson for me as a product person:

When you design for a niche user persona or use case, make sure that the solution doesn’t inadvertently exclude potential beneficiaries.

Furthermore, having a teammate who was actually a teen girl highlighted the difference between designing ‘for’ a community vs designing ‘with’ a community. I noticed that I was more aware of my biases about teen girls when a representative of this group was in the room with me. This was a key principle of liberatory design. We constantly relied on our 11th-grade teammate to check if our assumptions about their lives and their pressures were right. Our protective tendencies would have led us to overlook the need for anonymous problem sharing that she pointed out.

Designing WITH a community can prevent biases that can creep in when you design FOR a community without teaming with that community.

Finally, I learned that there’s a burning need for a platform that enables teen girls to be authentic, to discover the broader world and everything the future can hold for them, and to get social and emotional learning in addition to skills-based learning so that they can enjoy much higher levels of self-worth and satisfaction from their lives!

I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, and experiences on this topic! :)

Appendix 1: How ‘Hack for Inclusion’ works

• MIT Sloan students organize Hack for Inclusion each February and invite companies to share a problem statement related to inclusion that they have been tackling.
• Participants sign up and select 3 problem statements of their preference. Organizers then team up 6–7 participants from diverse backgrounds and assign a problem statement to each team.
• Finally, the teams go through a 2-day hackathon guided by design-thinking that ends with each team pitching their solution to a panel of judges!

Appendix 2: Detailed Interview Notes

Girl 1 — a black girl from Jacksonville, Florida who is in the 10th grade

• Enrolled in Generation Wow’s online program in which she met with 4–6 other girls for 1 hour each Wednesday.
• She got enrolled by her mother because since the pandemic there wasn’t much to do after school
• She was very happy with the program because she said that “school was stressful already” and she was having a tough time at school making friends and only had 1–2 close friends. However, through the program, she has made some very good friends and feels very happy now. There are lots of similarities between her and most of her friends in the program — they all like anime and hip hop and talk about colleges and career paths
• Their sessions usually involve having conversations about different things but the session she remembers the most fondly is one in which they all cooked a fruit crumble pie together
• She wanted to be a neuroscientist or a neurosurgeon and is fascinated by the brain and behavior. She has been connected to a mentor around this.
• The one thing she wanted from the program and was not getting yet was to connect with more peers and mentors who are closer to her age because they’d understand her better

Girl 2 — a white girl from Virginia, who is in the 8th grade

• She was not enrolled in Generation Wow’s online program and hadn’t heard of it yet
• She was looking forward to entering high school and meeting new people and hopefully making more friends because middle school had been great for her but elementary school ‘sucked’ (as she said it!)
• When we asked why she felt that elementary school sucked for her, she said she was bullied by other girls and had ‘fake friends’ and there were girls who were ‘snobby’ who she didn’t like. When we asked further on what she meant by snobby girls she said that they were from ‘big houses’ and didn’t interact with her but in middle school, some of these girls went away to different schools and new girls joined the school who she ended up becoming friends with
• Outside of school, she participated in girl scouts, ballet, and a few other activities as well as computer science classes. We asked her more about the computer science classes and she said that she had learned Scratch (MIT media lab’s offering to help kids learn coding) in elementary school. She has been learning python now and was very proud of a simple game that she and her friends built together in python. We asked her how she got interested in scratch and she mentioned that her mom found out about it and enrolled her into a class and the same happened with python. She wants to grow up and become a computer scientist and asked us what a typical day in her life looks like.
• In her free time, she likes to watch youtube videos of people playing games and also enjoys being on discord with some other friends. Her parents don’t set a limit on hours she can spend on the internet but come into the room once in a while to see what she is doing
• We asked her if she would be interested in joining a once-a-week, hourly program in which she would get to make friends with other girls her age and participate in fun activities. She said she was already very busy and doesn’t think she could take on that activity.

Girl 3 — a South Asian origin, American girl from Florida, in 11th grade

• She had only gone to a large in-person event along with other girls from her class in 2020, before the pandemic. The in-person event had about 400 girls and she had gone to it with other girls from her class. She enjoyed the in-person event a lot. She eventually got an email from Generation Wow about their weekly virtual programming. She discussed it with her mom and decided it was worth trying out. She has loved the virtual programming ever since and has also benefited a lot from the virtual mentorship.
• She wants to go into NYU or Columbia for a program on screenwriting and also said that she is a screenwriter. She was initially choosing between media communications and screenwriting with an inclination for media communications. Her interactions with her mentor led her to consider screenwriting as her first priority. She is also taking a high school class around film and screenwriting.
• She likes the weekly sessions in which there are speakers and conversations about life and career paths. She believes that her group members from the Generation Wow weekly meetings are ‘her sisters’.
• Her favorite weekly session was about forgiveness, and more so about forgiving themselves. They all made a ‘Jar of Happiness’ in which they wrote down good things they remembered from their childhood and things they liked about themselves. She liked the concept so much that she held on to her jar of happiness and writes nice things and adds to it every now and then. And when she is feeling low, she opens up this jar to see the things she had written about herself to lift her spirits again.

Girl 4 — Asian American girl in 11th grade

• This was our teammate in the hackathon. She was pretty intrigued by Girl 3 who seemed to know exactly what she wanted to do in her career. She had been in the Girl Scouts and offered to answer any questions that Girl 2 might have had about the girl scouts.
• She has virtual classes from 9 am to 1 pm and then does homework after 1 pm. On the weekends she serves at a community cat shelter that her mom signed her up for because it counts towards a congressional award. She mentioned that she doesn’t know any other girl in her school who is working towards getting the congressional award and her mom had found out about it. The congressional award is awarded based on hours spent on physical fitness, community service, and exploration.
• She was feeling a bit stressed out by SAT prep, college search, and school work along with other activities. She was intrigued by the offerings of the Generation Wow program but said she was ‘too busy’ to be able to join this too.
• She enjoys manga, BTS, and playing with her 2 dogs
• She would love to meet new girls with different backgrounds so she could learn about their experiences
• She also brought up the issue of awkward silence in zoom breakout rooms and that online spaces should engage people enough. She mentioned she wouldn’t be comfortable letting her parents keep track of her search history and also brought up the idea of anonymously asking questions about problems girls might be having
• When we got to the prototyping phase, I was blown away by the wireframes she ended up creating for the app. I remember the first time, I tried wireframing an app or website back in 2012/13 I was a bit lost. I hadn’t even used an android smartphone even when I was in the second year of my undergrad in 2012.

Interesting comments from Generation Wow program facilitators:

• They had conducted a live stream event in which a video was shown and girls could chat while viewing the video through a chat stream. While there was a lot of participation from the girls a few girls eventually started posting mean comments and the stream had to be shut.
• Girls keep telling them that they don’t want to hear from adults and would instead prefer hearing from other girls closer to their age group.
• Teen girls are very active on Instagram and Snapchat but their moms are more active on Facebook.