How can parents raise strong, confident daughters in a world still shaped by sexism?

In this episode of the Where Parents Talk podcast, host Lianne Castelino speaks with Dr. Jo-Ann Finkelstein, clinical psychologist, award-winning author, and mother of two, about how to support girls' self-esteem, mental health, and identity development in today’s social climate.

The conversation explores how sexism subtly influences girls’ daily lives—from screen time to social media. Learn practical parenting strategies to help girls build confidence, emotional strength, and a healthy sense of self-worth.

Takeaways:

• Understanding the impact of societal sexism on girls' self-esteem is crucial for parents today.
• Parents need to be mindful of implicit biases that influence how they communicate with daughters.
• Teaching girls about gender bias prepares them to navigate societal challenges effectively.
• Recognizing and addressing the emotional health of girls can help combat the pressures of perfectionism.
• Open communication about the realities of consent and relationships is vital for young girls.
• Empowering girls to assert themselves helps foster independence and resilience against bullying.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Psychology Today
• New York Times
• Atlantic
• Oprah Daily
• Harvard Business Review

This podcast is for parents, guardians, teachers and caregivers to learn proven strategies and trusted tips on raising kids, teens and young adults based on science, evidenced and lived experience.

You’ll learn the latest on topics like managing bullying, consent, fostering healthy relationships, and the interconnectedness of mental, emotional and physical health.

Links referenced in this episode:

• whereparentstalk.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Psychology Today
• New York Times
• Atlantic
• Oprah Daily
• Harvard Business Review
• EV magazine

Foreign.

Welcome to the Where Parents Talk podcast. We help grow better parents through science, evidence and the lived experience of other parents.

Learn how to better navigate the mental and physical health of your tween teen or young adult through proven expert advice. Here's your host, Lianne Castelino.

How do you raise strong, self assured girls in a world still shaped by sexism? Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Leanne Castellino. Our guest today is a clinical psychologist and an award winning author. Dr.

Joanne Finkelstein runs a clinical practice for adolescents and families with a particular focus on raising girls against the backdrop of gender bias, mental health and social justice. Her blog appears in Psychology Today and her work has been featured in the New York Times, the Atlantic, Oprah Daily and the Harvard Business Review.

Dr. Finkelstein is also a mother of two teens. Her latest book is called Sexism and Raising Empowered, Resilient Girls in the Modern World.

She joins us today from Chicago. Thank you so much for being here.

I'm so glad to be here.

Obviously a timely and relevant topic for the times we live in. I wanted to start by asking you, Dr. Finkelstein, what did you feel was missing from the conversation that inspired you to want to write this book?

Yeah, that's a great question. I feel like we understand most parents, most people understand that there is sexism in the world, there is misogyny.

What I think that they're missing sometimes is just how ubiquitous it is and how our daughters are forming their self esteem against, you know, or against within this whole system. Right.

It's not many of us think like, you know, we love our daughters, we're raising our daughters up and yes, they are going to hit these, you know, unpleasant, discreet incidents now and again.

But really their entire sense of self and their sense of who they can be and who they are in the world is being fed by, you know, a gender biased society.

And so I really wanted to lay out exactly what and exactly what girls are experiencing and how it and how we can fight back against it because we really can as parents.

So let's unpack that a little bit. You've got your clinical practice, you've been at that for over 20 years and then you've got the various books that you've written.

So, you know, let's talk about what strikes you most about the current trends. And certainly the topic of girls and women has gained particular attention in the last handful of years.

So what are you noticing with those, that lens that you have on it?

What was the question?

What are you noticing in terms of the lens that you have on this topic about what's going on in society today.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's getting worse, right. Like we sort of be. When my book first came out, you know, as I was writing this book, there was a sense of things, the tide changing, Right.

And rather than the progress we were seeing, we were seeing a lot of backlash, right. As I was writing it, Roe v. Wade got dismantled.

And so what we're seeing now is the rise of what people are calling the woman's sphere. Right. It's sort of a play on the term of the manosphere, Right. Which is, you know, for listeners that don't totally know what the manosphere is.

Right. It's.

It's men and young men who have been on the Internet sort of recruiting boys and teenagers and young adults to believe that the loneliness that they're feeling, and they are feeling loneliness and sadness and depression, but that it's the fault of a woman. Right. That it's women and feminism.

That women and feminism have sort of taken away their rights and their rights to be in a relationship in the way they want to be in a relationship. And so it's blaming that. So now the counterpart to that is the woman's fear.

And I think it is a new thing that parents are going to have to sort of keep their eye on if they want to raise progressive girls who have all the same rights as boys and men. And that is, you know, a lot of people know about trad wife content. It can be very beautiful content and it can be very alluring.

And then there are, you know, people like Brett Coop Cooper and Candace Owens who are really talking about this sort of gender essentialist view that we are made to be in the home, that we are the better caregivers, that something is wrong with us if we want to choose a career or to sit in some horrifying cubicle over taking care of our children. It is this way of convincing girls that life is hard because it is right.

They don't have to be convinced of that or young women, but that the answer lies in this sort of beautiful glossed overview that these people in EV magazine and all of these sort of conservative magazines that are popping up to convince our daughters that they don't want more and they shouldn't want more.

So interesting.

You talk about the shifting societal tides as you were writing this book, and I wonder, you know, what kind of approach did you use on this massive topic as it's shifting, as it's evolving into this timely and relevant space that we're in? When you decided to write it, what was your approach?

You know, I wrote it as a timeless book. Right. I did not predict we'd be where we are now.

I mean, I, of course, worried about it, and I understand that where there's progress, there's backlash. But I do think it's a really timeless book. I mean, I hope it will. It will run its course and we won't need it in the future.

But I think that the approach I took was really looking at the subtle sexism. Right. Like sexual harassment. Sexual assault was in the news, and there's certainly a big chapter on that.

But I was more interested in helping parents understand the subtle messages that girls are getting and also the subtle messages that parents are giving. Right.

Without realizing it, even the most progressive parents have, including myself, including people who write books about this, have implicit biases that we're passing on to our daughters.

And so I took the approach of let's really scrutinize who we are, who our culture is, so that we can raise our daughters in ways that make them feel good about themselves and good about who they want to be. And that could be anybody. Right.

I'm not anti staying at home with your children, but just really focusing in on who you want to be as opposed to who the culture tells you you should be.

Anything in your research that particularly struck you as you set out to write this book?

Oh, so many things. You know, one thing that I like to highlight, because it's sort of.

It's sort of shocking to parents, but, you know, we are, as parents, two and a half times more likely to Google, is my son gifted? Than is my daughter gifted? And for her, we're twice as likely to Google, is my daughter overweight? Right. So it's not. It's not conscious. Right?

We don't. If you asked, we'd say, no, my daughter's just as smart as my son.

But on some level, we don't believe girls are as smart as boys, and we don't believe. And there's research to back that up, and we don't believe that it matters as much.

Interesting. So then, Dr. Finkelstein, what would you say are some of the common misconceptions that parents have about raising confident, resilient girls today?

Yeah, that's a really good question. Okay. So I think that they believe they're raising their girls to be as entitled as boys. Right?

And when we talk about entitlement, we usually think of it as a bad thing. Right? We usually think of it as somebody who wants too much. But over and over, I see girls in my practice who aren't entitled enough. Right.

Who lack a healthy sense of entitlement. And here's what I found when I dug into the research, right? Girls believe that they deserve less than boys. Right.

And so you were asking about research. One study looking at this phenomenon discovered that it starts as early as third grade, right?

So they found that when four to nine year olds were given the opportunity to negotiate with an adult for their favorite stickers, the older girls, like the third graders, asked for fewer stickers than the boys when they negotiated with a male. This reflects the same gender gap in negotiation we see in adults.

When women don't negotiate their first salary, and research shows that they often don't, if their boss is male, they will lose approximately half a million dollars during their careers.

We have to be asking ourselves, what lessons are we teaching girls unconsciously or directly, that lead them to believe they deserve laughs, especially with regard to speaking up, respect and money, right? So when it comes to speaking up, we interrupt them. Right?

Research shows girls and women are interrupted far more than boys and men when it comes to respect. We teach them that being liked is more important than being respected. So what do girls do?

They try to be agreeable even when they don't feel that way. They prioritize other people's needs and comfort over their own. And then what do we teach them about money? Well, not much, Right.

We don't talk to girls nearly as much about money as we do with boys. And if that isn't enough to convince you that the scales are tipped in favor of boys, listen to this.

Research shows we pay boys shockingly more allowance for chores and we save more for our son's college. Right. So we are implicitly telling girls money is a man's domain.

And I've got a million more examples for you about, you know, about these double standards that we hold without realizing it.

On that note, and you alluded to it earlier, are there any other examples that come to mind when you talk about subtle things that parents may be doing unintentionally, intentionally or intentionally that, you know, continues to sort of exacerbate the very issue that many of them are trying to address?

Yeah, like I said, right. Even the most progressive Adults aren't immune to bias thinking. So, you know, I had a woman recently write, write to me and email me after she.

Or maybe she was in the middle of reading the book, and she said, oh, my God, I can't believe this. I'm this progressive feminist parent who is trying really hard to raise my daughter and sons the same way.

And reading your book, I'm realizing, I think I shut my daughter down when she has strong opinions, even though my son is the more outspoken and opinionated one. Right? And so she went to her daughter and said, I think I might be doing this.

And her daughter start to cry from the recognition because she couldn't articulate what her mother was doing, but she knew something felt bad. Right? And so I think there are these ways that we expect girls to sort of be capital G, good, right? Listen, be patient, be easy.

And then when they don't fit this notion of femininity that was put on us, that we are caring implicitly, we shut them down. Right. We don't listen to them as well. We think they're being kind of aggressive. So I think that's a big one that we carry in.

We just really expect them to be nice.

So how does a parent go about unpacking that? Right.

Because there's so much that goes into what you've just described, from generational differences to how the parents were raised to, you know, social media influences, societal discourse. I mean, it's a long list. You're the expert, you're the researcher who has, you know, taken all of these things into consideration.

Presumably, you know, what is the. What is a starting point for a parent to be more intentional about how they're trying to raise strong, resilient girls?

Yeah.

Well, first I'll say, you know, that when girls don't feel entitled to things like we were talking about speaking up, being treated with respect, it makes it hard for them to protect themselves. Right. It's a very slippery slope from gender bias and sexism to sexual harassment and assault. So that is why I.

I want to drive this point home that parents have to be involved in dismantling these things. And the ways we do it are. Are sort of twofold. One is we do it directly, and one way is we do it less directly. So the, in.

The less direct approach is the one most of us are more comfortable with because, well, we'll get to the direct opposed, but the indirect approach, it would be like, for instance, creating teachable moments.

So you're watching TV with your young kid, let's say, and you know, there's the girls, there's witches, and they're doing magic, and it's a fun show, and it's a cool show. And don't get me wrong, I love magic.

But what the research shows is that characters on television who are female tend to solve problems using magic, but male characters use stem. Right. And their physicality. Science and their physicality. So that would be something you could use as a teachable moment to say, huh?

So many of these shows we watch have girls use using magic to solve problems, which makes it seem like real girls can't solve magic because. Can't solve problems because real girls don't have magic.

But that's silly, because we know that girls are clever, fast on their feet, whatever, right? So there are these ways that you can bring it in or, you know, you could. You could.

You could use a teachable moment at the doctor's office, you know, did you notice that the doctor interrupted me much more than he interrupted Daddy? That that could be because there's sexism that lots of women are fighting back against, and that means lots of women are interrupted.

But that doesn't mean you don't have something important to say. Right? And that's sort of the line between direct and indirect. You're, like, bringing it up.

But you couldn't just be really direct at some point when your daughter is picking up on stuff, when you've had enough, and you can say, listen, there's this thing called sexism in the world, and you're going to notice it in little ways, and you're going to notice it in big ways.

In any case, I go into the book, I have scripts, I have things that you can say that will really help you communicate with your daughter in a way that doesn't rob her of the sense that the world is fair. The point is, you want to give your daughters not too much too soon, but also not too little, too late.

And so, you know, you asked me before why I wrote the book and what was missing. I think what we were finding in the culture was girl power, right?

And girl power can be great for motivating a sense of, you know, respect for the female gender. And it, you know, and it can look like buying them, buying, you know, RBG paraphernalia and books with strong female characters.

But it does not do enough to help our girls when they experience real moments of gender bias and sexism. They need the language to understand what's going on, because otherwise they question their capabilities.

So then how should that language ideally change from Parent to child, when that girl is a tween teen or a young adult female, you know, against the backdrop of what we're seeing in terms of the world at large, social media, and all the voices that may be countering what the parent is trying to do at home.

Okay, I think we can start early, early, early with the indirect stuff, right. Did you notice, you know, first with the media staff, right? Like, huh, why do they. On this girl's looks?

They haven't commented on the boys at all, right?

And this is actually true in animated characters as well, right, that the focus on looks and weight is far more in female cartoon characters than in male. So there, you know, you can start really early.

The way I decided with my own daughter to do it was we were watching MasterChef Junior, and there were a lot of comments being made that felt really uncomfortable to me, and it took me many seasons to say something to her. We were kind of binge watching as a family, you know? And, you know, the first season, she said, oh, I think the girl is gonna win.

I know she's gonna win. The second season, she said, I really hope this the girl wins this time. The third season, she said, girls never win. Right.

And at that point, I had hit my limit, and I felt like she. That protecting her from the idea of sexism was no longer helpful to her and that I needed to.

That she was basically begging me to explain what was happening. Right. And because sexism is subtle and you don't know if it's happening, you know, I. I was able to say that to her too.

I was able to say, there's this thing called sexism going on, and you don't always know if it's happening. But here's what I'm seeing, right? I'm seeing three male judges who are really identifying with the boys, because that's normal.

We identify with people that look like us, right? And so they would say to the boys, wow, you know, what a wonderful dish. How much do you think you'll charge for it at your future restaurant? Right?

They're really thinking big for these boys, but for the girls, they would say, huh, what a wonderful dish. Do you think you could do that again, or is this a fluke? Right? And then we wonder why so many women have imposter syndrome and don't.

Somehow, in this culture, we just don't believe women are all that competent. So I think my daughter was around seven when I introduced the concept. And then as tweens and teens, I really do think it's fair Game.

I mean, you want to pick your moments carefully because otherwise they'll shut you out, roll their eyes. But, you know, you can talk to them about puberty as they're going through puberty like you're going to.

Men are going to start to see you as older than you are, and that can feel really uncomfortable. And they might make comments to you, and that's not your fault. And here are some ways that you can respond to that. Right.

And I have a whole thing in the book about how we respond to catcalling, who we can talk to about harassment, how to manage your child has been harassed or assaulted.

So taking all of that into consideration, then how would you say that, you know, in the world that we live in, that often praises, as you mentioned, girls for being nice and quiet and cooperative, how can parents then go about raising daughters who feel safe, being bold, assertive, and in some cases, even angry?

Yeah, I mean, I think it starts at home, Right. You bring up anger.

I think, you know, there's a chapter in the book on healthy entitlement and the sort of five voices that we should cultivate in our kids. And one of those is a voice of resistance. Right. So that would be the anger voice. Right. We tend to shut girls down when they're angry. Right.

And I'm not saying we let our kids walk all over us or be rude to us, but there are very specific ways that we. We can hear girls anger and validate it and let them know that we can handle it, and so they are able to take that out into the world more easily.

We can also talk to them about what happens when they do take it out in the world. Right. For instance, there was a time early on when I noticed that my son was interrupting my daughter a lot. Right. He's a very outspoken kid.

She, at the time, was very soft spoken. And so I would intervene and I'd say, gabby, honey, I want to hear what you have to say. It's really important.

And it's okay to say that you're being interrupted and to stick up for yourself or to stand up for yourself. Right.

And to my son, you know, it's very sensitive because you don't want to shame your son in any way, but you can say in front of your daughter, you know, girls in this culture get interrupted a lot more than boys. So we have to be really careful that we're not interrupting people who have less of a voice than us, and we want to make room for it.

So to answer your question, I would also.

I have also Said on occasion to my daughter, there are times where you will stand up for yourself and say, I'm speaking or you're interrupting me, please let me finish. Where people will see that as aggressive because you're a girl. If a boy did the same thing, it would be, it would be considered normal.

And they'd say, oh, sorry, you might not get that, but you need to know that isn't you. That is the culture. Right? You are not broken. The culture is broken. And we are all trying to fix the culture together.

So you're giving them, you're sort of balancing the darkness with hope all the time.

And that's certainly very important to keep in mind for parents, especially Dr. Finkelstein.

I'm curious as to how resilience differs from perfectionism when we talk about girls specifically, because as we all know, there's a certain amount of pressure, let's say, from a variety of sources specifically targeting girls, it would seem to be perfect. So how does that differ and how can girls learn to sort of accept or live with that discomfort and setbacks as they continue to try to move forward?

Yeah, such a great question. I think that I would almost say that perfectionism and resilience are opposites, right?

You have to understand that you're human and you're flawed and you're going to make mistakes and you're going to have one eyebrow that's unruly compared to the other one in order to be self accepting and resilient in the world of, of, you know, that has constant ups, ups and downs.

So that, you know, also makes me think of, you know, the idea that we raise girls to be liked rather than to be respected or to feel like they need to be liked rather than respected. Right? Because if you're trying to be liked, you're trying to be perfect, you're trying to be what everybody El wants you to be, right?

And so you're putting their comfort and their needs above your own comfort and needs.

And so, you know, if you can sort of say, I am going to hold on to who I am, I am going to speak my mind, I am going to accept that, you know, I find my nose a little too big, whatever it is, right? You're, you're much more likely to garner respect.

And you know what I, what I tell girls is you might give up parts of yourself and be liked, but you're not going to gain respect. But most times when you're able to hold on to yourself and gain respect, right? And be proud of who you are and Be proud of your accomplishments.

There's a good chance you're also going to be liked. Right? And I think we want to get that across. I think we want to start raising our girls to, to expect respect.

In that same vein, then how would you suggest that we teach girls as parents to recognize gender bias without making them feel discouraged or disempowered by it?

How we help parents recognize it or help we help the girls recognize it?

How do parents teach their girls to recognize gender bias?

You know, again, I think it's in those direct and indirect ways. It's in those teachable moments. It's admitting when you realize that you've been asking your son to take out the garbage and not your daughter. Right?

Like we need our girls to learn that they are physically capable and as well. Right. So you say, huh? I wonder why I've been. I mean, it's so silly. I've been.

I think I've been asking Harry to take out the garbage and mow the lawn because that's just sort of what boys have done. But that's so silly. I mean, we're perfectly capable of doing that.

And I think it's important that you learn all the skills, just like Harry needs to learn to wash the dishes.

And, you know, they're just all of these ways that, you know, it's one of the reasons why I wrote the book, so that parents could really tune into their biases that are very unconscious. Because once you make them conscious, you're much more able to own them and do things differently.

One of the things, one of the unconscious biases is language. We tend to use emotion focused language with our daughters starting from birth. We use proud.

I mean, I'm sorry, we use words like excited and sad and love. Emotion focused words. And they get really good at recognizing emotions.

With our sons, we recognize, we use achievement oriented language like proud win best. And so they come to understand that competition is okay and it's okay to want to win. Right? And of course, kids need to have both of those. Right?

You need to be good with emotions because you want to be able to know who you are and you want to have good relationships and you need to be able to own your ambitions and your industriousness because that's another. That's a part of our humanity that we all have. So we're trying to sort of develop the full, the full kid, not just these parts that have be.

Have been considered traditionally feminine or traditionally masculine.

So then if you could offer parents one mindset, shift those parents raising Girls today, What would that be?

Oh, that's such a good question. You know, I really want them, I really want them to help their children understand that the culture is broken. They are not broken. Right.

So that if the, so that if the girls are treated as whole and serious human beings at home, it will feel wrong when they're not treated that way out in the world and they'll be more likely to protect themselves.

You mentioned the home and you are the mother of a teen boy and a teen girl.

Curious as to how, you know, your clinical work, your professional work, the research you did for your various books, how has that influenced how you parent and how you parent, maybe intentionally as a result?

Yeah, I mean, I think diving into the research and you know, I had a hunch it was, it was very ubiquitous.

But diving into the research, I, I was able to re, really take home just how serious a problem it is and how it really does affect the mental health of, of girls. And you know, I don't, I don't think that sexism is good for boys either. And we can get into that.

But so I think what it made, it just made me, which is, you know, what I was hoping for, for the book, but it really had a huge effect on me was just the awareness it brought to me in every interaction of, of that, you know, this is the air that, that kids are breathing in that girls are lesser.

And you know, it has such serious effects, not just, you know, on the ways you would think it has on body image and eating disorders and you know, sexual dysfunction, but it also has like real ramifications for our cognitive abilities. Right? So take beauty culture, right, and the focus on girls appearance which like, I can't believe we haven't gotten to that yet.

But you know that I haven't brought it up yet. But there is so much focus on girls appearance that globally girls believe their most important asset is their appearance. Right?

Like, how sad is that? So their appearance is focused on at the expense of all of these incredible qualities about themselves.

But what happens is when there's so much focus on a girl's appearance, she starts to focus on her appearance, right? So not only is she objectified, but she starts to self objectify, right?

And what the research teaches us is that the more girls self objectify, the more they have getting into flow states. So it's gets in the way of their, of their ability to accomplish their goals, right? Because you need to be in flow states for that.

And so I always say to parents, it's worth, you know, it's worth like as you, as your child is leaving the house and you want to say darn, you look so cute. Right?

Think twice about that because if they're on their way to school, that is interrupting their mental capacity and it shows to have an effect on how well their, on how well they're going to do in that class or in on that test they have. Right.

And it's worth wondering how often our daughters bodies are commented on right before they're going into a piano recital or you know, or a math test or whatever.

We only have about a minute left. But I did want to ask you, Dr.

Finkelstein, what do you hope that sexism and sensibility will empower parents and daughters to do differently in the world?

I hope that parents will start paying attention to how much emphasis that they're putting on their daughter's appearances, how much emphasis everybody else is putting on their daughter's appearances.

I hope they will become more aware of the very subtle ways that they are bringing gender bias into their homes and be able to change that because it really does make a difference.

And finally, I will say that I want them to feel empowered to help their daughters recognize in advance what they're going to encounter in the world and then know what to do do once they've encountered it.

We've only just scratched the surface on this topic, certainly. But thank you so much, Dr. Joanne Finkelstein for sharing your thoughts, your perspective.

Our award winning author, clinical psychologist, the book is called Sexism and Sensibility. Really appreciate your perspective today. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Leanne. To learn more about today's podcast, guest and topic, as well as other parenting themes, visit whereparentstalk.com.