How Two Bangkok Teens Revived a UN-Recognized Gender Group

In November 2023, two eleventh-graders at the International Community School of Bangkok relaunched a nonprofit that had sat dormant for three years. The organization, a UN-recognized student group called Fifty Squared, exists to argue one point: gender equality is unfinished business. Their own generation, new research suggests, is more divided over that argument than any generation before it.

A revival, not a launch

Fifty Squared didn't start with Premi and Dream, the ICS Bangkok juniors who now co-lead it. By their account on the show, the organization traces back to 2018, when ICS alumna Amy Jane founded it as a small campus club named for a simple equation: 50-50 equality between men and women, or "50 times 50," as one of the co-presidents explained, "the power of two." From there it grew into chapters across Thailand and, eventually, into India and Jordan. In 2020, the group received formal recognition from the United Nations.

Then the timing turned against it. Amy Jane and her co-founders graduated the same year COVID-19 shut down in-person clubs everywhere, and Fifty Squared went quiet. It stayed that way until 2023, when Premi and Dream reconnected with Amy Jane and tracked down former chapter leaders who, as one of them put it, still had "the same dreams and hopes and fighting for the same values." Their first project back was a fundraiser with HerICS, a fellow campus organization, aimed at a subject the co-presidents said still gets whispered about, not said out loud: period stigma. "You need to whisper: 'hi, hey, sorry, do you have a pad?'" one of them said, describing an instinct to hide something she called a normal biological cycle, not something to be ashamed of.

The riddle nobody solved

Midway through the episode, one of the show's co-hosts offered a riddle she'd heard from her sister days earlier: James and a doctor go fishing. James is the doctor's son, but the doctor isn't James's father. Who is the doctor?

The room sat with it before landing on the answer: the doctor is James's mother. The riddle's source said she'd tested it earlier that day on the marketing class that plans the show, and it took the group, including host Mr. Jason, several minutes to get there.

That's not a fluke. It's not new. Researchers at Boston University, Mikaela Wapman and Deborah Belle, ran a version of it (known in psychology circles as "the surgeon's dilemma") on college students and children as far back as 2014 and found only about 14% of undergraduates and 15% of kids ages seven to seventeen landed on the right answer on their own, according to BU's own research reporting. A larger follow-up study spanning nearly 7,000 participants found more than 70% still failed to reach the "mother" answer in its first round of testing. The riddle itself is a documented, replicated blind spot, so what stood out wasn't the trick. It was how quickly a group of media-literate teenagers, in the middle of actively discussing gender bias, still walked straight into it.

Where the gap still shows up

The guests backed up that instinct with numbers, citing a top-ten list built for the episode: women make up 34% of the U.S. STEM workforce, per American Association of University Women research; a woman earns 82 cents for every dollar a man earns, per the U.S. Government Accountability Office; and male CEOs outnumber female ones by roughly 17 to 1, a gap so wide that, per a New York Times count the guests cited, there are more sitting CEOs named David than there are women CEOs.

Two years on, the shape of that gap hasn't moved much. The National Girls Collaborative Project's most recent workforce statistics, published in April 2026, put women at 35% of the overall U.S. STEM workforce, but that number collapses by discipline: 26% in computer and mathematical sciences and just 16% in engineering, the two fields the show's guests singled out as the most resistant to change. The pay gap has proven just as stubborn. Multiple 2025 analyses, including wage data compiled by Payscale and the Institute for Women's Policy Research, put full-time women's earnings at around 81 cents on the dollar, meaning the gap the episode cited in 2023 has narrowed only fractionally, and by some measures widened, since then.

"If you're not starting to do something right now, when will you start?"

A generation increasingly split

The episode spent real time knocking down what the guests called the most persistent myth about their own movement: that feminists are, by definition, opposed to men. "We love men," one of the co-presidents said flatly, walking through the difference between a small radical fringe and the broader intersectional feminism Fifty Squared organizes around, which the guests defined as centering "overlapping forms of oppression" rather than any one group's grievance against another.

That myth-busting lands differently against research that has emerged since the episode aired. A 30-country Ipsos survey released in March 2025 found that men and women in their late teens and twenties are now more divided on feminism, gender roles, and women's rights than any other age cohort measured, including their own parents. Sixty-two percent of young men in the survey agreed they'd like their country to be "the way it used to be," compared with half of young women that age. Forbes, covering the survey that same month, framed it as evidence that the widest gender divide on feminism today runs inside Gen Z itself, not between young people and their parents.

At the same time, the appetite for organizing hasn't disappeared. If anything, it's concentrated. A United Way survey found that roughly a third of Gen Z respondents said they're regularly engaged in activism or social justice work, compared with about a quarter of millennials, with gender equity among the causes drawing the strongest support. UN Women's own reporting on youth movements, published the same month as the Ipsos data, framed today's teenage organizers, the kind of students running Fifty Squared's revived chapters, as driving change their institutions haven't delivered on their own. Fifty Squared exemplifies that pattern: a UN-recognized advocacy group, paused by graduation and a pandemic, brought back not by an institution but by two students who decided the gap between "50" and "50" was still worth arguing about.

Starting small, aiming wide

Asked for advice for someone who wanted to act but felt too young or too small to matter, neither guest reached for anything grand. "Dream big," one of them said, "and you can always start small," pointing to something as ordinary as a conversation, a shared article, a club. The other's version of the same idea was blunter: get educated, because in a world with this much available research, "not knowing" is a choice, not an excuse.

That framing has particular weight in Thailand, where the gap the show's guests describe isn't abstract. The World Economic Forum's 2025 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Thailand 66th globally, third among ASEAN countries behind the Philippines and Singapore. The country shows genuine strength in women's education (a category where Thailand's numbers topped the 2025 rankings outright) but a persistent shortfall in women's representation in leadership and political roles, the exact terrain the guests pointed to when describing STEM careers and executive suites as places women still have to fight to be taken seriously.

Fifty Squared is now actively recruiting new chapters in Thailand and beyond, betting that the model that revived it once (a small group of students deciding a dormant cause is worth restarting) can scale. Whether Gen Z's widening internal split makes that harder or simply makes it more necessary is, per the data, still an open question. The students running the club don't sound like they're waiting for it to resolve itself.

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