ANN ARBOR—A popular teen girls’ Web site has been given a new lease on life by the University of Michigan. After blossoming into a project well beyond its creator’s resources to maintain, SmartGirl.com has been given to the Institute for Research on Women and Gender (IRWG) at U-M.

The site’s new owners rolled out an updated version of the original site on
SmartGirl is a place where girls can make their voices heard online by sharing their opinions and stories anonymously with other girls. On the site, they can review the latest products and media or share their love letters and love poems. One of its most popular features is the Speak Out section, which polls girls about their opinions on everything from the latest movies to everyday issues girls are interested in, such as school, relationships and navigating adolescence. The SmartGirl Web site has been cherished by a loyal and growing constituency of thousands of online girls.

The Web site was founded about five years ago and as membership grew, the site expanded in response to user demand. Eventually, though, the small New York based company that established it could no longer keep up with the maintenance needs. In an effort to rescue the site, founder Isabel Walcott searched for the right recipient of it. “I couldn’t stand the thought of closing a site that so many girls have come to love,” she said.

Walcott wanted to find a recipient that could not only handle the demands of the Web site, but would identify with its mission (providing girls with a non-judgmental, empowering environment for self-expression), and might even develop new features that would offer girls new opportunities. She contacted Abigail Stewart, director of IRWG, who saw a potential to develop the opinion survey feature of the site in conjunction with another successful Institute program—Using Math: Girls Investigate Real Life (UM-GIRL)—that enables girls to ask and answer social research questions of their own. In short, both Walcott and Stewart viewed the gift of SmartGirl to IRWG as an opportunity to increase the Web site’s range of activities without jeopardizing its mission and appeal. Walcott says, “Now girls will be able to enjoy SmartGirl in much the same way as they have in the past, but they will be able to do even more things and make it even more their own place.”

Stewart says, “Rather than support itself by conducting market research, the site instead can focus on providing learning opportunities for adolescent girls. Of course, it will still provide a safe, online community where girls can voice their opinions, but the anonymous information visitors submit will not be disseminated to companies.” She foresees that “in addition to being a place to connect with other girls from around the country, SmartGirl will become a place where girls can actually use reasoning, problem solving, and communication skills to address issues that mean something to them. Tiffany Marra, who is overseeing site development, has exactly the right skills and background—in computer technology, education and hands-on teaching—to bring our vision into virtual existence.”

In the few short months SmartGirl has been housed at IRWG, it has already attracted national support. The National Science Foundation has approved a grant to help IRWG incorporate the curriculum for UM-GIRL into the SmartGirl Web site. As Marra points out, “there’s more to data analysis than just computational proficiency. Students need to be able to make sense of mathematical ideas and acquire the skills and insights to solve real problems.” By transforming the survey portion of the Web site, Marra hopes to create a space where girls can ask their own research questions, design surveys, and find out where their ideas fit within the larger SmartGirl community. The SmartGirl Web site will provide the tools in an interactive format; the girls will supply the creativity and ideas for using the tools to answer the questions they are interested in.

As a community, the U-M will provide a technical and intellectual utopia for the Web site. With resources ranging from the technical expertise of the University’s Information Technology Central Services to the understanding of adolescent girls of the Women’s Studies Program, SmartGirl will be able to expand in ways never possible before. Over the next eight months, while many of the familiar and popular features of smartgirl.org continue unchanged, classes from the School of Information, School of Education, Department of Psychology and Women’s Studies Program will be redesigning several portions of the site, and planning ways for girls to interact with undergraduate Web mentors. A relaunch of the Web site is expected in early 2002.

For more information, visit SmartGirl at http://www.smartgirl.org/ or
E-mail: jsteeh@umich.edu

Institute for Research on Women and GenderSpeak OutIsabel WalcottAbigail StewartNational Science FoundationInformation Technology Central Serviceshttp://www.smartgirl.org/