Have you seen this 1 minute commercial? I LOVE it!

There she is, Miss America

There she is, your ideal

With so many beauties she took the town by storm

With her all-American face and form

And there she is

Walking on air, she is

Fairest of the fair, she is

Miss America

MacKenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates donate $40 million to gender equality projects

Last June, Melinda French Gates and MacKenzie Scott launched the Equality Can't Wait Challenge, an intense contest to identify the best ideas for helping to expand women's power and influence in the United States by 2030. One year later, the challenge is complete, and on Thursday, Gates' incubation and investment firm Pivotal Ventures announced the four winners, each of which will receive a $10 million award to continue their work.

Rising to the top of the more-than 500 proposals submitted for consideration were: The Building Women's Equality through Strengthening the Care Infrastructure coalition, the Changing the Face of Tech project from the Ada Developers Academy, Project Accelerate, led by Girls Inc., and The Future is Indigenous Womxn initiative from New Mexico Community Capital and Native Women Lead.

An additional $4 million in funding was awarded to two runner-up proposals: one for providing support to survivors of intimate partner violence, and a training program for women who want to get more engaged in politics.

"The overwhelming response to the challenge proves there's no shortage of transformational ideas about how to accelerate progress for women and girls," Melinda French Gates said in a statement Thursday.

Girls Inc.'s Project Accelerate was one of the four "Equality Can't Wait" challenge winners. Through a network of 78 partners, Project Accelerate wants to lift 5,400 diverse women into positions of power and influence across the American economy, shifting the corporate landscape for generations.

"The awardees are strong teams working on the front lines and from within communities to help women build power in their lives and careers," MacKenzie Scott added in a statement of her own. "And best of all, they're not alone. This challenge received so many bold ideas to activate new levers, remove old barriers, and push forward for gender equality."

To Scott's point, two of the winning ideas mark collaborations among established advocacy and action groups. The Strengthening The Care Infrastructure coalition, for example, came from a wide swath of caregiving and women's organizations—including The National Domestic Workers Alliance, the National Women's Law Center and the MomsRising Education Fund—with ideas for changing attitudes around caregiving and mobilizing public demand for paid family leave and flexible care. The Future is Indigenous Womxn initiative, meanwhile, is a partnership between New Mexico Community Capital and Native Women Lead to give Native women more equitable access to capital, business development resources and career opportunities. Their goal is to support and scale businesses owned by Native women.

The diverse focus of the winning groups reflect the parameters of the Equality Can't Wait Challenge, which specifically sought ideas for creating real, measurable change for women in at least one of the following areas: wages and wealth, unpaid care, share of leadership roles, content creation (in other words, increasing the percentage of cultural and intellectual content created by women), and public perception.

- Forbes

I'm recommending a film currently on Netflix, “This Changes Everything".

The documentary “.....paints an impressively full picture of how Hollywood's gender imbalance is sustained and also how it reverberates throughout the culture."

Many top actresses and women directors go on record discussing the few roles and work available to females in Hollywood, both on the big screen and on TV,

Just a few statistics shared during the documentary:

“The ratio of male to female characters in film is exactly the same as it was in 1946, and the percentage of female directors... it isn't even that there's glacial progress, there is zero progress. There's utter stagnation for decades... we're talking about in front of and behind the camera.” (Quote from Geena David, actress and producer of the documentary).

Per the film, 72 percent of speaking roles in the 101 top-grossing G-rated movies released from 1990-2005 were male; meanwhile, comparing male to female narrators in those films shows that less than one in five were women or girls.

*This Changes Everything” was made in 2018. I think you'll find it interesting and insightful.

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In every day life, I see the prioritizing of men over women.

Recently, my husband and I showed up to a family picnic. We walked over to my sisters sitting by the pool and as we approached, one sister got out of her nice, comfortable chair and said to dh, “You can sit here, and Camille (that's me) and I can sit here." She squatted over to the bottom of a lounge chair where my niece was relaxing, expecting me to share the edge of it with her.

I sat right down in the chair she had just vacated, saying, “I'll sit here!" Then dh went and found a spare chair, which he did not mind doing at all, and brought it over to our group to sit.

This is so typical of my sister. She is giving the man the comfortable chair while finding it perfectly acceptable that three women cram themselves on a lounge chair so he is accommodated. She is conditioned to think, “There is not enough. We women will compensate by making ourselves less than the man, we will sacrifice our own comfort and be inconvenienced because because that's what we are supposed to do." And for the sister, it's not enough that she just minimizes herself. She makes sure to try to drag other women down with her, to condition us to have her same beliefs. In the first place, she didn't even have to get up from her seat. Dh and I easily could have both found spare chairs.

It may seem I'm making a big issue out of something simple, but I see small instances of this type of behavior by women all the time. This particular sister is so adept at minimizing herself and expecting me to do the same that it is difficult for me to be around her very long.