Girls Room

Young people are deeply impacted by on-screen images; what they see shapes their relationship with their bodies and beauty standards. In fact, young people today report feeling anxious about their appearance more often than about career prospects or money. This results in low body confidence and beauty anxieties that keep them from being their best selves, which in turn affects their health, friendships and even performance at school.

This is why the Dove Self-Esteem Project and ATTN: joined forces to present Girls Room, a five episode scripted series from Emmy award winning writer, producer and actor Lena Waithe and rising director Tiffany Johnson.

Girls Room is based on the Dove Self-Esteem Project’s academically sound research into body image, and was co-created with academic experts from the Centre of Appearance Research at the University of West England to ensure educational impact. According to studies, there are six core factors that significantly influence girls’ body confidence. To contextualize this research for audiences, five of those six factors were personified through the episodes and characters that directly tied back to each theme.

We followed each character, Minnie, Melba, Thelma, Gloria and Carlotta, from the school bathroom back to their own personal bathrooms. In her own way, each character confronts one of the barriers to self-esteem that teen girls face everyday, including social media, teasing and bullying, body image issues, and challenges with respecting and looking after yourself.

Girls Room was the first-ever scripted series created in a cinematically vertical format optimized for IGTV, with the intention of reaching young girls where they already spend their time. Overall, Girls Room garnered 5.1M total views and 72K engagements across ATTN:’s social channels - successfully reaching the target audience of A13-18. Of the 3.2M teens reached by the series, 97% were female.