This week I was enthralled by the Australian 14-year-old Olympic Skateboarder Arisa Trew, who became Australia’s youngest ever Olympic Gold medallist. Apart from her extraordinary skill on the skateboard, it was her interview with the media that captured my heart. 

Arisa could easily be a Year 8 St Catherine’s girl. She spoke with a joyous zeal and hadn’t lost her childlike enthusiasm for life. She is a happy teenager who just happens to excel in her sport and appears unaffected by the many and concerning influences that teenagers are exposed to these days. 

Body image and expectations of what it means to be ‘beautiful’ saturate our media, especially on the ever-invasive social media platforms. Twenty years ago, global personal-care brand, Dove, launched the Campaign for Real Beauty. Dove’s goals were to change how women are represented in the media and to encourage the media, the beauty industry, and society to realise how harmful unrealistic expectations about appearance can be for adolescent girls and women. Dove made significant gains in helping girls and women learn to love their true beauty regardless of the unrealistic messages they received. This included improved body confidence and self-esteem. However, 2024 has brought new challenges significantly impacting girls and women in this space –in the form of AI. 

Despite so many interventions aimed at supporting girls and women in this journey, the reality of attitudes towards beauty is confronting. In their 2024 global report on women and beauty, Dove found that two in every five women would be willing to “give up a year of their life to achieve their beauty ideals.” In fact, one in every five would go so far as to give up five years of their lives to achieve false definitions of beauty. 

Dove’s global report suggests that AI is perpetuating highly unrealistic beauty standards. A tool that can be used for good is placing girls and women at risk by contributing to the spread of harmful beauty content dominating social media and the digital world.  

So, what can we do to halt this deterioration in women’s self-esteem and body appreciation? AI is here to stay, and it has been predicted that by 2025, 90 percent of online content will be AI-generated. With this being the case, we need to act and step up to tackle the negative outcomes affecting girls and women who are viewing unrealistic AI-altered and generated content. 

We need to help improve girls’ and adolescents’ low body esteem because they are the ones most impacted by unrealistic beauty expectations. Trials of body image programs for girls schools in Australia have already shown that body esteem can be improved for both girls and their mothers, which is one way we can begin to address this challenge.   

While the statistics may be shocking, the news is not all dire. Despite the concerns raised in Dove’s latest report, an increasing number of girls and women are recognising that true beauty is more than just appearance, and that “a person’s soul or inner spirit can change their perception of their physical beauty.” 

Watching Arisa Trew perform on her skateboard and her unaffected personality in media interviews showed me that here was a girl ‘just doing it!’ to quote a well-known advertising line. Arisa wasn’t thinking about who to impress with her looks, she was focused on doing her thing on the skateboard to the best of her ability. Our girls here at St Catherine’s also have the opportunity to ‘just do it’ whether it be in academics, sport, music, or other endeavours. Our students are constantly reinforced with the notion that it is who they are and what they do that defines them.