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Celebrate International Women’s Day with Story Maps

International Women’s Day is around the corner! Explore story maps that highlight important women’s issues that can be used as teaching tools in your classroom.

March 8th is International Women’s Day – a time to reflect on the contributions of women around the world and the struggles they continue to face. This year’s theme is “An equal world is an enabled world.” This is an opportunity to discuss with your students why gender equality is essential for economies and communities to thrive. Use the following story maps in your discussion.

Story maps to explore:

Celebrating Women’s Rights
In this story map, students can go through the UN's Global Goals for Sustainable Development to see some of the issues women face and what the future could look like if the goals are achieved.

Global Women's Health Indicators
In honor of International Women’s Day, this story map looks at health indicators of women globally.

Learn about female life expectancy from the Global Women’s Health Indicators story map.

The Commission on the Status of Women
This story map will take you on a journey to past meetings of The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and the four important World Conferences, and will be updated in late March 2020 to reflect the working documents and declarations that emerge out of CSW 64.

Taking Action: The 2030 Agenda is outlined in The Commission on the Status of Women story map.

Inspiring girls and women with following resources:

Women and GIS, Volume 2: Stars of Spatial Science
Print book publishing in April 2020; e-book available in March

Similar to the first volume, Women and GIS: Stars of Spatial Science tells how 30 women in many different STEM fields applied themselves, overcame obstacles, and used maps, analysis, imagery, and geographic information systems (GIS) to contribute to their professions and the world. Sharing the experiences of their childhoods, the misstarts and challenges they faced, and the lessons they learned, each story is a celebration of a woman’s unique life path and of the perseverance, dedication, and hard work it takes to achieve success.

Lindsey the GIS Specialist
The short book written by Tyler Danielson, follows Lindsey a GIS specialist. She explains what the acronym GIS means, the different types of GIS data, how she collects data, and what some of the maps she makes are used for.

We thank the women that have given us inspiring stories of GIS support over the past few years. Explore the GIS Ambassador work they have done with educators and students across Canada.

From top left to right: Debbie Verduga, Hayleigh Conway, Jennifer Link and Madoka Otani are some of the wonderful women who have supported teacher and students in their local area.

Happy Women's Day! 

About the Author

Angela Alexander is a K-12 Education Specialist in the Esri Canada Education and Research group. She has over 15 years of experience working with educators across Canada. Angela focuses on producing geographic information system (GIS) and curriculum-specific resources, and conducting and creating custom workshops for educators. She manages the GIS Ambassador Program and is the Technical Chair for the annual Skills Ontario GIS competition. Angela also writes monthly posts for the Esri Canada Education and Research blog, highlighting K-12 educators and partners, new ArcGIS resources and GIS-related events.

Profile Photo of Angela Alexander