In honor of Women’s History Month, NAU’s Multicultural Center will host Liz Funk, journalist and author of Supergirls Speak Out: Inside the Secret Crisis of Overachieving Girls, at 5:30 p.m. Friday, March 26, in the Gardner Auditorium of The W.A. Franke College of Business.
Funk will speak about a “condition that is spreading quickly from Generation X to Y—and even to little girls.” Funk coined the term “supergirls” to describe girls who “believe that in order to be happy they must excel at their job or career, have the best grades, wear the coolest clothes, date the best-looking boy and have the perfect body size.”
Supergirls Speak Out closely follows the lives of five young women and surveys many more in research that reveals how girls “often feel the need to compete against not only everyone else, but themselves—a destructive habit that leads to depression and other emotional disorders.”
Funk said the pressure among young women to be perfect is what inspired her to write the book. “I thought it would be really important to have a young person talk about the pressure…from inside the phenomenon.”
Funk began her career in journalism at an early age—she was a columnist at the Altamont Enterprise in Albany, N.Y. when she was in high school. For two years she wrote a blog about young women’s issues for the Times-Union in Albany and later went on to be published in USA Today, the Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, the Washington Post, New Yorkmagazine, CosmoGIRL!, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun and other publications.