Celebrating International Women's Day at Sheffield Girls'

International Women’s Day is always an important celebration at Sheffield Girls’, and this year we were thrilled to be taking part in a number of activities to mark the occasion. 

Here are just a few of our highlights.

To kick off the International Women’s Day week, Year 8 visited the Showroom Cinema to watch the fantastic documentary Maiden. The film tells the remarkable story of Tracy Edwards who skippered the first all-female crew in the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race. It was an incredible way to start the week and pupils left the cinema feeling inspired.

“I really enjoyed Maiden. Tracy Edwards is a great role model proving that girls can achieve whatever they want to, even if they’ve been told they can’t.” Eleanor, Year 8. 

Inspired by The Female Lead and the Disrupt Your Feed concept, we launched an initiative to encourage our students to reassess the people they follow on social media news feeds like Instagram. The original ‘Disrupt Your Feed study revealed multiple positive outcomes by introducing new inspirational accounts, so we talked to them about interacting with new, diverse, and positive female role models. 

Pupils in Years 10-13 were given the list of Instagram profiles suggested by The Female Lead and were asked to discuss these profiles during Form Time. Pupils then went away and found other new inspirational profiles, to share with the other year groups.

We were thrilled with some of the suggestions our pupils came up with. Nine of the nominations are now available on our school Instagram feed. Head over to @sheffieldgirlsschool to find out who some of their favourites were. 

In addition, we also supported the Sheffield Star Inspirational Women of Sheffield Awards 2020 for the second year running. The awards are a fantastic celebration of some of the amazing women who are from or based in our city. We were also absolutely delighted to see that our Assistant Head, Mrs Boulton-Pratt picked up the award for contribution to science and former student Kathryn Caterer was selected as a finalist in the Entrepreneurship category. We believe it is important to highlight amazing female role models to our pupils and we’re incredibly lucky to be surrounded by so many outstanding women locally.

Our students also put pen to paper for an outstanding piece in the Sheffield Telegraph this week. Read about their views on creating equality in the paper. They really do offer a fantastic and thoughtful insight into what young women think nowadays.