Empowering girls has always been the central mission of Girl Boss Chess, which is why we have always emphasized that we are, first and foremost, an empowerment company. We, of course, use chess as a vehicle to encourage more girls into STEM. And while using chess as a vehicle has been an incredibly rewarding and exciting venture for the Girl Boss Chess Collective, this year it has also been important for us to acknowledge that there are other vehicles out there too that can serve our company mission.

And this is what we have been exploring and steadily venturing into this past year.

STEM Fields still remain very male-dominated, but the truth is that there is an increasingly digital future up ahead, that we are all rapidly accelerating towards…which is why we need more girls in STEM than ever before! This is not just so that they can take up the space that they have been long denied by gender barriers and glass ceilings since the beginning of patriarchal norms, but also because, at the rate that we are developing, it is hard to even imagine how the world will operate in the decades to come- and girls alongside other marginalized groups, deserve to be at the forefront of innovation, building the future alongside their male counterparts! Also, a new digital future means an abundance of employment opportunities in STEM, particularly in the tech world, some of which we cannot yet even fathom, are before us in the not-too-distant future.

“Experts predict that the metaverse will add $5 trillion to the global economy by 2030, and 2023 will be the year that defines the direction of the metaverse for the next decade.” (Forbes, 2022) Not only that, we are expected to see exponential progress in the incorporation and efficiency of AI, Green Technology, Robotics and more, in our daily lives.

The truth is, for the average person, unless they work in Tech and/or are very well-read on the latest technological advances, most of these innovations are overwhelming and hard to fully grasp or comprehend. It is incredibly easy to bury one’s head in the sand and just stick to what is known and understood in our current reality, but that is not what we want for your girls! We are devoted to empowering girls to take on tomorrow with self-confidence, equipped with all the skills they need to learn and thrive!

Consequently, we are delighted to announce that we are going to be expanding to empower girls through a variety of disciplines. Throughout the course of the next year, we will be launching Girl Boss STEM Academy, where we will be doubling-down on our commitment to empower girls, except we’ll be using a plethora of vehicles. Girl Boss Chess will remain one of those vehicles that we use, but we will also be launching Girl Boss Digital World! This will be a platform for your girls to learn coding, website design and development and much more! And this is just the first step…

We hope to also launch Girl Boss Science and Girl Boss Maths in the near future, so that we can continue to serve your girls in the best way possible!

No matter how any of us may try to stall time, the sometimes hard truth that we have to accept is that time slows down for no one and the seemingly distant future that we envision is never as far out as we think it is. The most important thing that we can do for our girls is to truly turn them into Girl Bosses today and prepare them for tomorrow, by teaching them that confidence is just as important as competence, when it comes to achieving future success.

We hope you and the girls around you will come on this journey with us. We’re so glad to be able to partner with you to build this beautiful future we envision, where Girl Bosses thriving is no longer an exceptional headline, but an unremarkable norm.

Sally Sampson