By Beyoncé Knowles-Carter
We need to stop buying into the myth about gender equality. It isn’t a reality yet. Today, women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but the average working woman earns only 77 percent of what the average working man makes. But unless women and men both say this is unacceptable, things will not change.  → Read More

In thinking about this weekend’s tragedy, the misogyny that fueled Elliot Rodger’s worldview and rage were hard to miss. I again started thinking about words and all the ways we use them to diminish women.  → Read More

One of the most challenging thing about raising teens is trying to understand their world as they see and experience it. Of course, we had it all figured out as teens, knew exactly what we were talking about and how things worked. Totally. Yet here we are as parents, two or three decades later, trying to figure it all out so we can do right by our sons.  → Read More

Last week, the White House Task Force to Protect Students From Sexual Assault released its first report. Focused exclusively on colleges and universities, the Task Force’s primary recommendation was that institutions assess their own campus sexual culture. But it’s a limited start.  → Read More

Like many boys who came of age in the 1980s, I learned that men show their care for others with action. Like generations before me, I was taught to take care of the people in my life, particularly women, by paying for dates, killing bugs that got in the house, being the primary breadwinner, and solving their problems. Caring was defined by doing. But like many men of my generation, I want to be involved in my daughter’s life in a way that’s different from how my dads were involved—or, really, not involved in my emotional life.  → Read More

Cultures change over time, and so do the expectations and the behavior of the people in those cultures. Approximately 100 years ago, most American men worked for themselves or in small businesses, more people lived in rural areas than urban areas (and there were no suburbs), the median age of first marriage for men was 25, and mandatory public education through grade 6 was new. That was controversial; many people asked what would happen when boys spent their days sitting still in a setting dominated by female teachers instead of doing physical work in the company of men (sound familiar?).  → Read More

Despite countless programs designed to educate girls and promote healthy body image, as well as the growth of girls’ sports, the problems remain and appear to be starting younger. I think I know part of the reason why: boys. Don’t get me wrong, I am NOT saying that boys force girls to diet or worry about their appearance. But we haven’t meaningfully taught boys how to challenge and deconstruct the image of female beauty they’re seeing; we’ve certainly taught girls that.  → Read More