The effect of society on women’s views of themselves and others brought together students at the first Women’s Leadership Quarterly Summit of the year.

The most recent summit was centered around the theme of self perception. Students of all grades were gathered in the LRC on Oct. 27.

Discussion focused on how young women view themselves and was an idea brought up immediately at the summit as girls entered the LRC.

Walking into the LRC, girls could choose to walk under the “average” or “beautiful” entrance. This was an activity taken from Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty commercial. Later, the girls sat in groups and discussed why they chose the path they did.

“It was powerful. I left with a different mindset on self-image and everything. Going into it, I personally don’t have a good self-image, as I’m sure a lot of people do, and just watching the videos and talking in groups really helped,” sophomore Catie Barrett said.

Girls then had the opportunity to write their personal insecurities on papers with cartoon demons on them and then shred the papers.

The summit is an opportunity for girls to get together, but socializing is not the main objective.

“When you come to a summit, we’re doing something with our minds, we’re not just interacting. Like with Snowball or ROAR which is about building community, here we’re about building community, but more than that. We’re about building our knowledge base of what issues affect women across the planet,” English teacher Amanda Cordes said. “In our first one, we watched ‘Girl Rising’ and we learned about how women are being treated and raised in countries across the planet. We looked at child brides, we looked at the women in Middle East who are not allowed to go to school, we’re looking more at global women’s issues versus getting to know each other like a sorority.”

Unlike other school activities, the summit is open invitation and any girl can participate.

“I think with a bigger group it just gets better and better, there’s just more amounts of people. I think they should do it more often too,” Barrett said.

Although the summit is open invitation, the invitation does not extend to male students.

“We are very committed to maintaining it females only for the summit, (but) there’s definitely room for another place to have a combined gender discussion for women’s issues, but what we need as school is to be really well educated first as women,” Cordes said. “The conversation changes as soon as men are introduced. It’s not a bad thing, it’s just a different thing. We would love to embrace this down the line when it can be done in a very professional way where everyone can come to the table with something informed and educated to say. There is totally a place for that, but I think it’s down the road a little bit.”