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By Laura Drinan
Hometown Weekly Reporter
Every Wednesday, students in Needham High School’s Gender Equality Club (GEC) meet before the start of school for a discussion. Throughout Needham High, the club aims to educate their peers about feminism and advocate for gender equality.
To get more involved in their mission to achieve worldwide gender equality, the club hosted the “GEC Together,” an evening to celebrate feminism and bring greater awareness to the issue of gender inequality to the community.
“It’s a whole night of feminism and empowerment,” explained Stephanie Berger, one of GEC’s officers. “We have all of these different booths, kind of like a ‘feminist fair,’ as some people said. There’s trivia, we’re selling necklaces, there’s cookie decorating, and we have representatives here from different clubs in our school.”
HackHers, the all-girls coding team, and the All Genders and Sexualities Alliance Club joined in support of the GEC. The club members also organized a clothing drive to donate to Rosie’s Place, a women’s shelter in Boston.
The club’s culminating event began three years ago under a different name, and when they came out as the Gender Equality Club this year, the members decided to revive the event and rename it.
“The goals are just sort of to bring people together who care about gender equality and want to learn something about gender equality, just for a fun night of being together and hearing from an amazing speaker, and doing fun activities,” Berger said.
The aforementioned guest speaker was Shirley Leung, a Boston Globe columnist, who spoke to the students about her experiences as a woman of color in a primarily male-dominated position. She also encouraged the women in the room to pursue their dreams and warned them about the issue of becoming too complacent in lower-level positions. Leung applauded the men in the club, and also advised them to continue advocating for feminism and to empower their female peers.
“I think at Needham High, we definitely have work to do on a lot gender issues, but I think we’re willing, as a school, to do that work and I feel like we get to lead a lot of it,” said Berger, noting that she and the GEC would like to see more female students enrolled in higher-level math and science classes, and see female teachers instructing such courses.
“Our administration and our peers are really open to hearing what we have to say and working to making it more of a gender equal place.”
“Everyone feels really open to learning about all the different issues and were really excited,” added GEC co-officer Beth Markman.
Mackenzie Fuller agreed with her co-officers that Needham High backed their goals.
“I feel like a lot of people have been supporting us. We had posters around the school and a lot of people have been wishing us good luck because they couldn’t physically be here. Everybody loved our shirts today when we wore them to school,” Fuller said, motioning to the GEC members’ purple shirts that proudly read, “This is what a feminist looks like.”
“It’s just been a lot of support from our school community.”
