There is a particular kind of aspiration that grows in you before you have the words for it. You just know that you want more, that you are capable of more, but the path between here and there is not always visible, and nobody hands you directions.

I grew up with that feeling. I carried it through school, across continents, through a PhD, and into a career studying the very thing I had navigated without a guide: what it means for women to claim space in a world that has complicated feelings about them leading it. That is not a complaint. It is a research question, and it has been the engine of everything I have built.

I am a psychologist. I study leadership: who gets seen as a leader, who has to work harder to be believed as one, and what happens when the rules are different depending on who you are. My research tells me that these gaps are real, they are measurable, and they do not begin in adulthood. They begin in girlhood: in the small, accumulated moments when a girl learns which rooms are for her and which ones she will have to stay away from or fight to enter. Long before a young woman makes her first big career decision, she is already imagining what is possible for her future. That is where the real opportunity lies: in reaching girls at that exact moment, and showing them that every room they walk into is a room where they belong.

Imagine what is possible when we show up for them right then. Not to hand them easy answers, but to lift them up and say, “Here is what is out there, here is how you navigate it, and here is a community of women have been there, and are ready to walk right alongside you.”

The Girls That Can is my research and my values made real. It is a space designed to equip young women not just with knowledge, but with the confidence, tools, and community to ask big questions about who they are and who they want to become. We believe that preparation, vision, and mentorship should never be luxuries.

The Girls That Can exists because we believe that every girl should know that the world has room for her, on her own terms, in her own way.

Dr. Fiona Adjei Boateng is a professor of Psychology, and co-founder of The Girls That Can. She directs the workPLACE Research Lab, and has published research on leadership perception, gender stereotypes, and intersectionality.