By Lillien Waller

We often conflate equity with equality. But equity seeks fairness: it recognizes differences between people in status, context, or history. It is a more nuanced and—depending on who you ask—a more contentious concept than equality: the distribution of the same resources, rights, and opportunities to everyone regardless of circumstance. Below you'll meet two Commonwealth School alumnae whose work and passions, empowering girls and advancing health equity in communities, are dedicated to helping us better understand what equity really means, why it is an urgent social justice issue, and what a more equitable society might look like.

Raising Girls' Voices

The groundbreaking 2020 Ready to Lead report, published by Girls Leadership, found that Black and Latinx girls (age 12–18) are more likely to self-identify as leaders than girls of other races, but they are also more likely to encounter external gender and racial bias in school and society that undermines their leadership aspirations.
 
"Leadership is often explored through a scarcity model, of who doesn't have enough of it or who doesn't have the capacity for it," writes Monique W. Morris, Ed.D., in the report's foreword. "For girls of color, this routinely manifests in the failure to recognize their potential to lead." Ready to Lead surveyed 2,012 girls and interviewed their parents and 601 teachers to answer the question: What are the support systems that help girls develop as leaders and, conversely, what barriers do they encounter?
 
Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Girls Leadership Simone Marean ’95 describes her own journey toward self-identifying as a leader. In 2002, when she began the work that would eventually become Girls Leadership with Co-Founder Rachel Simmons, she "didn't really identify as the leader," she says. "I wasn't drawn to the leadership aspect of it. We started to work together because Rachel had this leadership curriculum, and I had this approach to teaching and learning using theater. And I think what made me want to take the leap and leave my job was that what we were teaching the girls was really the missing curriculum in my own life."
 
Simone's revelation may be ironic, but it isn't unusual. Current data reveals that, by the age of six, girls start to believe that boys are smarter. And their leadership ambitions peak at 8–10 years old. For girls of color, however, the obstacles to their ambition come not only in the form of gender bias but also racial bias and lowered expectations in school. That's why the work of Girls Leadership is so crucial and why it centers the needs "of the most marginalized girls in order to best serve all girls," Simone says.
 
The organization develops programs for girls in grades K–12 using a social and emotional learning (SEL) paradigm and works with the network of influential adults around girls, including parents, caregivers, teachers, and guidance counselors, and partners with schools and community organizations. The goal is to keep girls connected to their self-knowledge, to cultivate the power of their voices—which entails understanding the issues at stake from an equity perspective. Different girls experience different structural, personal, and social barriers.
 
"About five years ago, Girls Leadership was going through a moment in which we examined who the girls were that we were impacting," Simone explains. "Do they reflect the makeup of girls in our community? We realized that they didn't, really, and we wanted to change that. So many of our participants were predominantly white, middle class, and affluent, which connected to much of the research at the time of the girls who had been studied. There's one school, a private school in Ohio, that was at the center of a lot of the research thirty years ago, and it's still at the center of many of the New York Times–bestselling books on girls. But those girls don't look like the girls of the Bay Area and the girls of New York, who are predominantly girls of color, who are predominantly low-income. And so we started a journey to do our first quantitative study on girls of color."
 
That study became Ready to Lead, which found that, for Black and Latinx girls, the barriers were more external and were most often occurring in schools where the teaching force is predominantly—80 percent—white women. "We were listening to the girls, building relationships and co-designing the solutions that they deserve and need," Simone says. "But we were waiting for the data. And the data solidified it. That was when we could quantify the bias of teachers who presumed that these students are coming from a home culture that has a leadership deficit and made assumptions about income level, education level, and family structure. Now we had numbers that we could take to our board and to our funders to say 'This is how the challenge is different for different girls.'"
 
Contrary to the assumptions made about them in school, Black and Latinx girls have the highest rates of leadership ambition, come from families with the highest rates of leadership identity, and possess the highest rates of leader-ready skills—more than their white, affluent peers.
 
Armed with a keener understanding of its focus, methodology and mandate, Girls Leadership has scaled its impact from 10,000 girls per year to 100,000 girls per year. Because the organization works with teachers, Simone emphasizes, the impact reaches hundreds of girls within each teacher's sphere of influence and a broader diversity of girls. More than 65 percent of the girls in Girls Leadership programs qualify for free or reduced school lunch, and more than 65 percent are girls of color.
 
In fall 2021, in partnership with Mattel Brands Barbie®, Girls Leadership produced another report, She Knows Her Power, an innovative youth-led research study of girls in grades K–5. The organization is also partnering with the WNBA. A study of how programs designed for marginalized girls affects boys is ongoing, and Girls Leadership is also working to create a stronger culture within its own program staff.
 
"We're designing our own culture and our own work practices to center wellness," Simone says, "so we can take care of the teachers in the schools and the community-based organizations, so they have a fighting chance of showing up for the girls that they interact with every day."

In The Interests of Public Health

 If there's one thing that Pietra Check ’95 wants you to understand about health inequity, it's that it isn't just about differences between groups but rather a system designed to create disadvantage, and everything is connected.
 
"There will always be differences between groups. And health risks and health exposures and health outcomes and health inequities occur when those differences are unfair, unjust—when those differences arise from social and economic conditions and structural disadvantages," she explains. Pietra is Senior Program Analyst in the Occupational Health Equity program at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). She is also completing her doctorate in public health at Tufts University School of Medicine. 

"When we look at it from another angle and talk about health equity, what we are talking about is creating structural conditions in which individuals and communities at the population level can really enjoy and achieve the highest level of health and well-being," Pietra says. This understanding forms the foundation of her work around occupational health equity, particularly the social determinants of health, which are a set of conditions—such as the work we perform, where we live, and how much education we have—that affect our health over the life course. Pietra points out that biomedical and technological advances in the last several decades have enabled public health to develop more sophisticated approaches to understanding and mitigating disease and illness. But, unless we look at health equity from a social justice perspective, inequities between workers will likely persist.
 
Different workers are exposed to different work-related health risks; according to the Occupational Health Equity program, this is true even between workers who are performing the same job. Take, for example, farmworkers and whether they have access to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) protections on the job. "If you work on a farm in the United States that has ten employees or fewer, OSHA is prohibited from spending any money to enforce occupational safety and health laws. If the farm is a smaller operation with fewer resources, it may not be in a position to voluntarily choose to protect their workers," Pietra says. "Protections are necessary. We have a good idea of what's needed to protect people. And there are standards and laws and policies around what employers may or may not do. But some employers just cannot do that. So some workers are afforded protection and other workers are excluded."
 
OSHA protections are a structural issue, but social conditions are always at play, as in the debate around whether to raise the minimum wage. "Your wage determines whether you have enough money to eat," Pietra explains, "whether you can eat at all, much less healthy foods. Which foods are less expensive and more accessible to you? Do you have access to health care? Do you have time—leisure time, shopping time, cooking time, time to spend with your family? Do you have time to help your children with their homework? The jobs you are able to get and what your work looks like are all a part of that."
 
What becomes clear is that work is a determinant of health. And occupational health equity is inextricably linked to a number of other issues beyond just job safety that, for some workers, represent "an overlapping and mutually reinforcing system of disadvantage."

When We Know Better, We Can Do Better

 The Occupational Health Equity program "promotes research, outreach, and prevention activities" to address the structural and social conditions that put some workers at greater risk for workplace injury, illness and even death. The program is, however, working to move public health research in a more equitable direction. Explaining the social determinants of health and their effects is an important part of it. So is an equity agenda within occupational health and safety research: the research establishment must consider how the work they are doing impacts different populations differently, and the best way to do that is to employ a collaborative research model.
 
"To paraphrase Maya Angelou, all of us have a responsibility, now that we know better, to do better," Pietra says. "We need to be doing inclusive research, and we know how to do that. So the program is working on guidance for researchers, which shows them how to create research partnerships with workers, communities, and worker organizations. This allows them to do better research that's more representative of the working population and will, therefore, be more successful in finding ways to promote health equity."
 
The third piece of the puzzle, Pietra says, is to diversify the CDC workforce—a fact not lost on the organization, of which occupational safety and health is a part. She notes, however, that diversifying the organization's base of researchers must occur "along all different social axes: gender, race, ethnicity, as well as discipline. We need social science expertise to understand these issues. It will strengthen our ability to do this kind of work and create a pipeline for people who want to enter the field."
 
Prior to her current role at NIOSH, Pietra was Deputy Director of the Office of Agriculture Safety and Health. She moved back to Boston to work on her doctorate in public health, and her research and community engagement are an expansion of equity issues she has worked on, and cared deeply about, for years. Her dissertation explores the lives of immigrant women who have moved to the United States from Central America and Mexico during the most recent wave of immigration that began around 2011, when migrant demographics began to shift from mostly men to women and children. Whereas single male migrants, who would come to send money home, had been more common, families of migrants are on the rise due to changes in social and political conditions in Central American countries, particularly El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
 
Viewing migration to the United States through a lens of health equity, Pietra wants not only to understand these migrants' experiences and the particular social conditions and work that influence health but also examine migration itself as an act that impacts health. "How do people who migrate—and essentially cut off their local social support system—protect and promote their health when they come to a new place? How do they re-establish themselves and what does that system look like? So I've been looking at migrant health after migration, particularly in recent immigrants from these countries where they've experienced trauma plus the trauma of migration itself. How does that translate here?"
 
Using research models of community engagement, Pietra has partnered with the Women of Color Health Equity Collective, the Migrant Education Program, and the Brightwood Clinic in Springfield, Massachusetts. So far, she has found that the migration experience is extremely traumatic for many of these women, who have often been detained at the border, stripped of their belongings, and given barely enough food for themselves and their children. A common experience, Pietra explains, is that the women will be given bus tickets and told to report back on some future date. They often arrive at their final destination sick and with little orientation about how to get help, and end up at places like the Pioneer Valley Workers Center in Northampton, another one of Pietra's community partners.
 
Pietra hopes that her research can show the humanity of these migrants and help lead to more humane policies, but she makes the point that all of these policy issues are connected to actual people and to each other. "What happens regarding immigration is inherently related to health. Immigration policy is health policy. Economic policy is health policy. These are all conditions and structures that shape people's ability to be healthy and well."
 
Lillien Waller is a poet, essayist, and editor. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, and she is editor of the anthology American Ghost: Poets on Life after Industry (Stockport Flats). Lillien is a Cave Canem Fellow and a Kresge Artist Fellow in the Literary Arts. She lives in Detroit. This article was originally published in the Winter 2022 issue of Commonwealth Magazine.