This month, we launch a series which recaps our favorite moments in gender equity from news, media, and longreads all over the internet. You’ll see installments for This Month in Gender Equity the fourth week of each month. If you have ideas or contributions, leave a comment or tweet at us! We’d love to know what you’re reading and learning.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s First House Speech Broke a C-SPAN Record

There’s been a bumper crop of AOC think pieces since freshman legislators were sworn in earlier this month. But this month we’re most interested in what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says about herself and her new role. Her first speech on the house floor made history - it is now C-SPAN’s most viewed Twitter video of any house member’s speech. The new congresswoman must have made quite an impact in her speech, which told the story of one of her constituents and the ways in which he was affected by the government shutdown. We also loved her Women’s March speech, in which she specifically talked about women’s work and wages. “Justice is not a concept we read about in a book,” she said. “Justice is about the water we drink. Justice is about the air we breathe. Justice is about how easy it is to vote. Justice is about how much ladies get paid. Justice is about making sure that being polite is not the same thing as being quiet. In fact, oftentimes the most righteous thing you can do is shake the table.” We appreciate that, for AOC, justice includes an array of issues. We’ll continue to watch her closely in the coming months.

How a Thirteen-Year-Old Girl Smashed the Gender Divide in American High Schools

This is an interesting article about a student, Alice De Rivera, whose challenge of Stuyvesant High School’s “boys only” policy in court  “convinced” Stuyvesant High School to allow girls to attend. Prior to her case, it, and many other elite high schools, were boys only. Sounds like it should have happened so long ago, but in fact it was only 1969. A great reminder of the work that can be done by the young to advance the cause of gender equity in education.

Don’t Give Up on the Women’s March

One of our nonfiction-writing heroes, Rebecca Traister, offers a comprehensive assessment of the seemingly always-embattled Women’s March. Her article starts with a history of the first March’s inception and development and follows it through the second and third iterations. Since this year’s March was particularly contentious and the press homed in on the relationship of founding co-chair Tamika Mallory to Louis Farrakhan, Traister’s perspective is helpful and a timely reminder that the experiences of women, women of color, or women activists are not monolithic. She offers a few key points: contentious dialogue among women’s movements and in the Women’s March in particular is part of the point and built into the design so that groups espousing different priorities come together. She also suggests that some good may have come out of now three years of Marches: “What has begun is an erratic, sometimes painful, and often furious holding to account: of conservative white women, yes, but also of liberal ones — often progressive liberal ones — who have failed to credit or consider or look to leadership from the women of color and black women whose activism has often paved the way for their own achievements.” Finally, she suggests that the Women’s March may continue to play an important role in the resistance, writ large. “I heard from many women and men who were eagerly looking toward January as a release valve for the fury they felt after the confirmation of Kavanaugh, as a reconvening of the determined, as a reminder that they are not alone in their fear or passion, and then, in the weeks after the midterms, as a bit of a celebration.”

-Lauren and Amy