About

There's this thing that happens when women speak,

And it happens now even though women can vote,

Even though laws prohibit sex discrimination,                                         

Even though most of us believe in the importance of telling girls they can do anything boys can.

Women's words enter the universe, mix with all the things we cannot see like oxygen and carbon and unchecked sexism, until they reach their destination, sounding like something else entirely. They sound shrill. Dramatic. Questionable.

But don't believe that last paragraph. A woman wrote it.

Believe this, because Damon Young wrote it, and he's a dude:

Generally speaking, we (men) do not believe things when they’re told to us by women. Well, women other than our mothers or teachers or any other woman who happens to be an established authority figure. Do we think women are pathological liars? No. But, does it generally take longer for us to believe something if a woman tells it to us than it would if a man told us the exact same thing? Definitely!

That's What She Said is about fixing that.

a campus + community collaborative effort to make unheard voices heard

Our organizers collect stories from women of experiences they had that were based on gender (or their courage to not conform to one). The stories are short and long and hilarious and unnerving and all of the things in between. They need to be heard, and they need to be heard not just by those of us who have catalogues of the same; they need to be heard by those who don’t normally listen. We think we found the way.

The stories we've collected, left written in the first person, are handed to a different reader just before he walks on stage. One by one, those men open their envelopes and read a woman’s experience—out loud, for the first time, to the audience.