Eileen Gu’s Message of Equality Clashes With Reality in China
- Gold medalist’s elite upbringing gave her rare springboard
- American-born skier must toe Communist Party line to succeed
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When champion skier Eileen Gu was a 12-year-old American middle school student she gave an impassioned speech against stereotyping women as “motherly caregivers.” She urged girls to fight the gender pay gap.
“People aren’t accepting that women can be what they want to be yet,” Gu said to the student assembly at her $40,000-a-year all-girls private school in San Francisco. “I encourage you all to step out of your comfort zone and show the boys we’re just as powerful as they are.”