by Kevin Burton
It’s girl power times three on Page 7 today.
The third story is about car repair, the first two about clothing, beginning with my favorite, a rare tale of a big company responding to consumers. All three are from the Good news Network:
“A young English schoolgirl named Georgia has claimed victory over the large grocery/home chain Sainsbury’s after she noticed all the girls’ school outfits included pants with no pockets.”
“Arguing ‘girls need to carry things too!’ a letter and petition signed and delivered by Georgia and her classmates last year resulted in a new line of pants with deeper pockets.”
“It started in 2024 when she went shopping at the retail giant with her mom and discovered there were no trouser options for girls that had pockets deep enough to put anything in. Some had pocket linings sewn on and no actual pockets at all.”
“This irked the Ipswich local, and after grabbing a pair of boys’ pants for the school year, she wrote a letter expressing her frustration.”
- “Dear Sainsbury’s,”
- “Me and my mummy went shopping for trousers for school and we noticed there weren’t any pockets in the girls’ trousers. Girls need to carry things too! When will this change?”
“She received a reply from corporate management, apologizing for the lack of pockets and agreeing with her that the pants options should include them. The reply added that the feedback would be considered, and that was the end of things.”
“Georgia followed up her letter with a petition signed by 56 students at her school, including boys, but this was not replied to.”
“The next year, returning to Sainsbury’s, she discovered grey trousers with pockets deep to the wrist, and little grey bows sewn onto the front two belt loops. Georgia was delighted.”
“When asked by the BBC, Sainsbury’s didn’t confirm whether the letter or the petition was the key factor in the change, but Georgia decided to take it as a victory.”
From England to Africa now for a story about improvements to school uniforms:
“In one of the poorest countries in the world, an American entrepreneur is empowering women and girls to stay in school and become household earners.”
“By employing women as seamstresses with a generous benefits package to sew school uniforms—one of the highest financial barriers to entry into the school system—two generations of females benefit.
“The not-for-profit socially-minded enterprise is called Style Her Empowered, or SHE, and was founded by Payton McGriff who began her journey as a senior at the University of Idaho seeking a place in the market to start a business for a class project.”
“Remembering a book she had read two years earlier, called Half the Sky, which looked at rates of female enrollment in primary school around the world, she was inspired to find market solutions to the problem of more than 100 million girls worldwide stuck in their society’s educational dereliction.”
“As it happened, a professor she knew at University was from the West African country of Togo, and he encouraged McGriff to travel to his hometown of Nôtse on a scouting mission over spring break.”
“She learned that not only do 69 percent of households live under the poverty line, but most of the household chores fall upon women and girls. On top of this, the cost of buying new school uniforms made it almost impossible for a child in this part of the world to make it all the way from first to twelfth grade.”
“Every girl stood up and raised her hand so high and, not only that, told a very expressive story about how she had been shamed out of school because she didn’t have her uniform,” McGriff, told CNN, explaining how she surveyed schoolgirls for the largest challenges to staying in school.”
“I realized, ‘Okay, this is a place to start.’”
“The dresses made at SHE are simple, culturally appropriate, and come with extra fabric tucked into the hem that can be quickly released to elongate the dress up to 6 sizes. cords running down the sides of the dress allow it to be adjusted to fit any body shape.”
“SHE operates two factories in Togo where seamstresses make 75 percent more than the minimum wage, and enjoy a comprehensive Western-style benefits package. McGriff manages the business from Idaho, but her early collaborators make up all the middle managers, ensuring that the people reacting to the environment and needs at ground zero are those who were born into the social and cultural environment.”
“The vision for starting SHE was always for it to become locally led because local women understand the challenges and the solutions far better than I ever could,” McGriff told CNN. “I may have struck the original match that started SHE. But what I’m so beyond inspired by is watching our team carry the torch.”
“Today, SHE serves Nôtse and 20 other rural villages, and because there’s no trash service to any of these places, all leftover textile scraps are recycled into menstrual pads to address another major barrier to entry for students.”
SHE has and ongoing GoFundMe that’s seeking to raise $25,000 to enroll another 500 girls in its program, for which a $50 donation provides a full year of education for a girl in one of the villages, including school uniform, supplies, and tuition.”
Finally, an all-female auto shop in suburban Philadelphia, that goes beyond car repairs to empower women.
“A Pennsylvania entrepreneur left her six-figure engineering job to volunteer at mechanic shops around her area to learn how to fix cars, and then founded the Girls Auto Clinic.”
“The GAC is the first of its kind in the nation, and offers car-care memberships, car care education classes, and hands-on mechanic workshops for women looking to learn the skills for themselves.”
“Patrice Banks was working at DuPont, and decided to double her workload and enroll in a mechanic’s night school, where the 30-year-old was the only woman in a class of 18 and 19-year-old males.
“I was tired of feeling helpless and having to go talk to a guy,” she told the International business Times. “I was afraid I was going to be taken advantage of.”
“After accumulating enough experience she opened GAC in Upper Darby, PA, in 2013 with some pretty excellent business ideas based on a decade of dreading oil changes.”
“‘Me and my girlfriend that I worked with at DuPont would go to this specific Jiffy Lube on our lunch break because there was a nail salon next to it. We’d drop our cars off and walk next door and get our nails done while we waited,’” Banks explained, saying she and almost every other woman she knows, hates getting oil changes.
She explains that, despite the complex mechanical engineering going on under the hood of cars, working as a mechanic is a lot of intuition based on touch, smell, hearing, and seeing.”
“Her clients, who get access to free WiFi, snacks and beverages, hundreds of books, and the ‘Clutch Beauty Clinic’ nail salon while they wait, are not only told about the state of their vehicle when the work is finished, but told about how Patrice came to that conclusion—what she was looking for, hearing for, and how she found or heard it.”
“This is breeding a community of ‘Shecanics’ that are not only learning for themselves about the cars they rely on, but quite possibly changing the face of the industry.”
“Maybe it’s this transparent communication, but the automotive repair sector was flooded with female workers during the pandemic, with nationwide numbers rising from 4,000 to 19,000 by the end of 2022.”
“Maybe it was because the government-enforced business closures and curfews kindled a desire for greater self-reliance, or maybe it was because of women like Patrice.
Page 7 