Like a girl

When the #LikeAGirl campaign exploded across social media in 2014, its emotional clarity felt almost effortless - as if the world had simply been waiting for someone to point out what the phrase “like a girl” really meant. But the power behind the ad came from filmmaker Lauren Greenfield, whose decades of documentary work on girlhood, identity, and self-esteem uniquely positioned her to make an advertisement that felt less like marketing and more like a cultural reckoning.

For years, Greenfield had been chronicling how young women navigate beauty standards, gender expectations, and the pressures of growing up in an image-saturated world. When Always approached her to direct a campaign addressing the crisis of confidence girls experience at puberty, the partnership was natural. Their research had revealed a startling phenomenon: puberty is the single steepest drop in girls’ confidence, and the everyday insult “like a girl” reinforces that decline precisely when girls are most vulnerable.

Greenfield built the film around a simple but revealing experiment. She asked participants - boys, young women, and prepubescent girls - to perform everyday actions “like a girl.” Older participants instinctively mocked the phrase with flimsy, self-conscious gestures. But when younger girls were asked to run or fight “like a girl,” they did so with unfiltered strength and sincerity.

This unscripted contrast became the heartbeat of the film. It exposed the moment when confidence fractures and a harmless phrase becomes a cultural burden. Greenfield, with her documentary instincts, immediately recognized that authenticity - not messaging - was the campaign’s real power. The result reframed an insult into an anthem, turning #LikeAGirl into a global touchstone, inspiring school curricula, sparking academic debate, and winning top industry honors, including multiple Cannes Lions.

For Greenfield, whose work often exposes the pressures placed on girls and women, the campaign offered something rare: the opportunity to document a problem and simultaneously challenge it. Like a Girl remains one of the most influential pieces of branded storytelling in modern advertising, a testament to how documentary truth-telling can reshape cultural language.

And Greenfield’s impact continues to expand. Her new five-part series for FX/Hulu about kids and social media, “Social Studies,” won the Gotham Award for Breakthrough Doc Series in 2025, and received nominations for the Emmys, the Independent Spirit Awards, and is the most-nominated series for the upcoming Cinema Eye Honors in January 2026. Next year, the work will open as a major multi-media museum exhibition at Fotografiska Berlin on September 24, titled Lauren Greenfield: Social Studies. Featuring video projections, installations, and photography, the exhibition will subsequently travel to Fotografiska Stockholm, Oslo, and Tallinn.