Japan has the largest gender gap among industrialized societies. In fact, one global survey suggested that 70% of Japanese women felt that they did not have a voice in their country. As an advocate for girls' rights, Plan International wanted to both give such women the opportunity to voice their concerns, while also providing children with a perspective that could help them end the chain of gender discrimination that has continually affected Japanese women.

We realized that one of the most common sources for learning about outdated ideas was Japanese folk tales. What if we presented today's antiquated views of women as a series of old folk tales? Based on this concept, we established the "Ancient Tales of Women" project. We decided to create a two-pronged approach: a social media strategy for gathering ideas from actual women; and a series of illustrated children's books based on some of these ideas that would make it immediately clear to children how obsolete these views are.

[Using social media to free up women's voices]

Realizing that many Japanese women felt it was difficult to voice their concerns in public, we developed a social media strategy that gave women a platform for freely bringing up the outdated views of women they had to deal with on a regular basis. We then used many of their stories to create books written and illustrated in the style of Japanese folk tales. We distributed the books to schools and libraries to provide them with accessible materials from which children could learn about gender issues.

Instead of simply asking for ideas on social media, we encouraged women to write tweet-length folk tales—beginning with the words "A long time ago"—that described outdated views of women that they wish would be relegated to the scrap of heap of history. We believed this creative approach would be more likely to encourage women to open up about their experiences. As for the books, we wrote and illustrated them in the exact style of Japanese folk tale books to strike home just how obsolete these contemporary views are. We also created educational supplements that would allow the books to be used in classroom settings. Meanwhile, we published the books in both physical and digital form and distributed them to schools and libraries to make them easy to access for all children.

Our creative approach towards encouraging women to open up about their experiences resulted in the submission of over 3,000 Twitter stories. Furthermore, by expanding the stories into books, we were able to provide schools with materials that could be easily used as a child's introduction to gender issues. One role that folk tales play is to provide lessons that can be passed on to later generations, and by publishing these books, we created a series of stories that can encourage children to build a world that is free of gender-based concerns and discrimination.