Empowered women empower women.

The conversation of women empowerment has started and it has greatly progressed, but there is still work to be done. Every single day, women are bombarded with messages that attack who they are or who they are not. We need to help each other, and we must empower women to love who they are.

According to a study conducted by CNN, women are less confident than men. In order to succeed, confidence matters just as much as competence. However, this won’t be the case for long, as the fight to close the confidence gap is on.

We need to encourage women to turn their self-doubt into self-love because seven in ten girls believe they are not good enough. The bigger issue is that low self-esteem can lead to problems in school, negative body image thoughts, and eating disorders, to name a few. The worst problem is inaction – a natural result of low confidence. Women are taking the backseat in meetings and conversations because of their doubts. This is why I Step Up for women everywhere. I Step Up for those who don’t believe they have the voice to be heard and I encourage them to speak up on their own.

More than ever before, today’s young women have more choices and control over how they lead their lives. Some organizations are already taking the steps to create a society of gender equality, eliminating the feelings of inadequacy.

Photo: Jackie Garcia

I Am That Girl is a national non-profit organization that has local chapters around the United States. Each chapter consists of a group of students who meet once a week to talk about various topics such as self-esteem, body image, relationships, sexual assault on college campuses, and more. #BuiltByGirls encourages girls to use technology to identify and develop solutions to this issue, in order to empower the 62 million girls who don’t have access to a traditional education across the world. Girl Up is a movement that is committed to empowering generations of female leaders; their goal is to impact 100,000 girls by 2020.

With the increase of these types of organizations, women are finally sharing their stories of personal struggle and adversity, which have all turned into stories of triumph and compassion. It looks like the future really is female!