#StandUpToSexism - (Not) All in Your Head: How Women Internalize Sexism

Soraya Chemaly is a writer and activist whose work focuses on the role of gender in culture, politics, religion, and media. She is the director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project and organizer of the Safety and Free Speech Coalition, both of which are involved in curbing online abuse, increasing media and tech diversity, and expanding women’s freedom of expression. In 2013 Chemaly won the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Donna Allen Award for Feminist Advocacy and the Secular Woman Feminist Activism Award. ​In 2014 she was named one of Elle magazine’s 25 Inspiring Women to Follow on Twitter. She writes and speaks regularly about gender, media, tech, education, women’s rights, sexual violence, and free speech.

Abigail Sara Lewis, Ph.D., is the vice president of campus leadership programs for AAUW. Previously she worked at Barnard College as the associate dean of preprofessional advising and the associate director of the Athena Center for Leadership Studies, where she oversaw a curricular and experiential women’s leadership program, cofounded the first international undergraduate research journal focused on women’s leadership, and supervised student delegations that organized leadership training workshops for high school students in Brazil, China, France, and India. Lewis holds a doctorate in history and a certificate in women’s and gender studies from Rutgers University and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in African American studies from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Columbia University, respectively.

C. Nicole Mason is the author of Born Bright: A Young Girl’s Journey from Nothing to Something in America. For more than two decades Mason has worked on a range of pressing social issues from violence against women to reproductive justice to economic security. She is an Ascend fellow at the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C., and is also the former executive director of the Women of Color Policy Network at New York University’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. There she held the distinction of being one of the youngest scholar-practitioners to lead a major U.S. research center or think tank. Under her direction the Network became a leading authority and voice on public policies impacting women of color, low-income families, and communities of color. She also delivered a TEDTalk at TEDWomen 2016 on the courage to disrupt and the gift of being difficult.

Gina C. Torino, Ph.D., received her doctorate in counseling psychology from Columbia University in 2009 and is currently a licensed psychologist and associate professor of human development at State University of New York Empire State College. She has published widely in topics such as cultural competency development, microaggressions, white racial identity development, and how to teach strategies that promote cultural self-awareness. Recently Torino coauthored a research article on the Gender Microaggressions Scale, which measures gender-based microaggressions (subtle acts of sexism) directed toward women. Torino is also a coeditor of a forthcoming book entitled Microaggression Theory: Influence and Implication, which will examine the current and future state of research pertaining to microaggressions.