Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

‘Felt Like Betrayal’: List Ranking Girls Circulates Around Maryland High School

At a high school in Maryland, there’s a list circulating that ranks a group of female students on their looks, The Washington Post reported.

The list includes the names of 18 girls in the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School, in a heavily Jewish area of Maryland.

The list, typed in the iPhone Notes app, was written up more than a year ago, according to the Post. It began circulating this month as more people found out about it.

The girls felt violated and betrayed. They began to worry about each move, concerned the boys would be “editing their decimal points,” Lee Schwartz, one of the senior girls on the list, told the Post.

“Knowing that my closest friends were talking to me and hanging out with me but under that, silently numbering me, it definitely felt like a betrayal,” she said. “I was their friend, but I guess also a number.”

It recalls the early days of Facebook — CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially founded the social media giant as a platform to rank female students.

Alyssa Fisher is a writer at the Forward. Email her at [email protected], or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.