The “#LikeAGirl” campaign by Always and Leo Burnett was one of the darlings at Cannes last month, pulling in 14 Lions, including a Glass Lion for its positive influence on the depiction of women. After nearly a year of empowering girls by breaking down a harmful phrase that gets tossed around all too often, a new video in the campaign has debuted.

Instead of just focusing on how the phrase “like a girl” impacts a girl’s self-esteem, the new spot goes broader, looking at the other things society tells young girls about what they can and cannot do. It then shifts to older girls and asks them about the activities they’ve quit because of what they’ve been told.

[iframe_youtube video = “VhB3l1gCz2E”]

Some of the girls mention the very specific things we might expect to hear – that girls can’t be strong, that they can’t play sports – but also covers more abstract things like always being happy, the pressure to be perfect or the fact that media depicts women as objects that need to be saved by men. But, much like in the original, it’s one of the younger girls that offers the most wisdom about how to overcome these barriers: by simply trying your hardest and proving that you can do whatever you set your mind to. All the girls interviewed then get to have a moment of catharsis, destroying boxes that have all the things they’ve been told they couldn’t do written on the side.

Credits:

Brand: Always (P&G)
Agency: Leo Burnett