Yale center’s event ‘For a Girl’ empowers young women

It was fun, and there were games, but the two-week “For a Girl” program was mostly about empowering young women to do and be whatever they dream.
Sponsored by Dr. Lynn Fiellin’s play2PREVENT Lab at the Yale Center for Health and Learning Games, nine girls heard life stories from successful female faculty members at the Yale School of Medicine and elsewhere at the university and designed video games that were meant to educate, not entertain. The three teams presented their games on Friday.
“Listening to other people’s experiences in life and college, I matured a bit from this program and realized, like a girl, I can be somebody someday,” said Kelsey Snedeker, 18, of New Haven, whose team designed a game about adoption.
An adoptee herself, Snedeker said her team was struck by how little information is available to assist adoptees and their parents. Doing a computer search for “another social justice problem, it would pop right up, but ‘adoption’ you can’t find anything,” she said. Snedeker will be a senior at Hill Regional Career High School.
The two other teams focused on women’s rights in a variety of cultures and on immigrants’ rights.
“For a Girl” is a reference to the phrase that is really a put-down of a girl’s abilities, said Fiellin, an associate professor of medicine: “‘You’re really smart — for a girl,’ or ‘You’re really good at that — for a girl.’”