presidency, to sub for Barack during his weekly address to the nation, speaking
emotionally about how we needed to work harder at protecting and encouraging
girls worldwide.
I felt it all personally. Education had been the primary instrument of change
in my own life, my lever upward in the world. I was appalled that many girls—
more than 98 million worldwide, in fact, according to UNESCO statistics—
didn’t have access to it. Some girls weren’t able to attend school because their
families needed them to work. Sometimes the nearest school was far away or too
expensive, or the risk of being assaulted while getting there was too great. In
many cases, suffocating gender norms and economic forces combined to keep
girls uneducated—effectively locking them out of future opportunities. There
seemed to be an idea—astonishingly prevalent in certain parts of the world—that
it was simply not worth it to put a girl in school, even as studies consistently
showed that educating girls and women and allowing them to enter the
workforce did nothing but boost a country’s GDP.
Barack and I were committed to changing the perceptions about what made
a young woman valuable to a society. He managed to leverage hundreds of
millions of dollars in resources from across his administration, through USAID
and the Peace Corps, and also through the Departments of State, Labor, and
Agriculture. The two of us together lobbied other countries’ governments to help
fund programming for girls’ education while encouraging private companies and
think tanks to commit to the cause.
At this point, too, I knew how to make a little noise for a cause. It was
natural, I understood, for Americans to feel disconnected from the struggles of
people in faraway countries, so I tried to bring it home, calling up celebrities like
Stephen Colbert to lend their star power at events and on social media. I’d enlist
the help of Janelle Monáe, Zendaya, Kelly Clarkson, and other talents to release a
catchy pop song written by Diane Warren called “This Is for My Girls,” the
proceeds of which would go toward funding girls’ education globally.
And lastly, I’d do something that was a little terrifying for me, which was to
sing, making an appearance on the late-night host James Corden’s hilarious
“Carpool Karaoke” series, the two of us circling the South Lawn in a black SUV.
We belted out “Signed, Sealed, Delivered I’m Yours,” “Single Ladies,” and
finally—the reason I’d signed on to do it in the first place—“This Is for My
Girls,” with a guest appearance from Missy Elliott, who slipped into the backseat
and rapped along with us. I’d practiced diligently for my karaoke session for