Reshma Saujani - Brave, Not Perfect

You can’t make this stuff up.

Nearly everything I’d read, researched, witnessed, and interviewed experts about over the past year was playing out right in front of me. Go figure: a classic illustration of how boys are socialized to be brave and girls to be perfect, right here on a little asphalt playground less than ten minutes from my apartment.

At the same time we’re applauding our girls for being nice, polite, and perfect, we are also telling them in not-so-subtle ways that bravery is the domain of boys. What I saw that day on the playground reminded me of another scene I’d witnessed just a few months earlier in Shaan’s swim class. Parents were encouraging their timid sons to “be tough,” and shouting with glee when their boys jumped into the deep end. If one of the little girls in the class was afraid to jump in, however, her fears were met with soft, reassuring coos: “It’s okay, honey . . . just take my hand . . . you don’t have to get your face wet.” This one really made no sense to me; I mean, how do you go swimming without getting wet?

This isn’t just casual observation on my part. Studies show that parents provide much more hands-on assistance and words of caution to their daughters, while their sons are given encouragement and directives from afar and then left to tackle physical challenges on their own. We start with protecting girls physically, and the coddling continues on from there.

So many of these patterns are perpetuated because as parents, we’re punished socially for violating them. A woman named Kelly told me a story about a group excursion she took to Oregon with her son and daughter, along with several other families. After taking a mountain bike ride, they hiked up a cliff where the rocks create a natural slide into the water. Their guide, Billy, helped all the kids out onto the rocks and offered them a push down the slide. The boys all went right away, but Kelly’s usually courageous daughter was nervous. Instead of encouraging her the way he had done with the boys—that is, by just giving them a little shove—Billy helped her off the cliff and gently assured her that she didn’t have to go if she didn’t want.

Meanwhile, Kelly, knowing that her daughter is usually fearless, was hollering from the bottom, “Go, Ellie!” When it became clear that Billy wasn’t going to give her a nudge as he did for the boys, she screamed up the cliff, “JUST PUSH HER!” Everyone around was horrified . “Every adult on the tour gave me the side-eye,” she remembers. “They didn’t even try to hide their judgment about how I was encouraging someone to push my daughter to be brave. We’re not supposed to do that to our daughters.”

The belief that boys are tough and resilient while girls are vulnerable and need to be protected is both deeply and widely held. In 2017, the World Health Organization released a groundbreaking study done in partnership with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Across fifteen countries, from the United States to China to Nigeria, these very gender stereotypes proved to be universal and enduring; and the study found that children buy into this myth at a very early age.

This “girls are softer” mentality extends beyond the playground, often straight into the classroom. One problem is what girls focus on when they’re given difficult feedback. When girls are told they got a wrong answer or made a mistake, all they hear is condemnation, which sears like a flaming arrow straight through the heart. They go straight from “I did this wrong” to “I suck” to “I give up,” rarely stopping at “Oh, I see how I could do this better next time.”

The bigger problem, however, is how adults respond. To spare the girls’ fragile feelings, we naturally temper anything that sounds too critical. More protection, more soft-pedaling, more steering girls to what’s “safe,” more feeding the self-fulfilling prophecy of girls as vulnerable. But if they are constantly shielded from any sharp edges, how can they be expected to build any resilience to avoid falling apart later in life if (more like when) they run up against real criticism or setbacks?

Boys, on the other hand, have repeatedly been shown to bounce right back from criticism or negative feedback, so we don’t hold back. Brad Brockmueller, one of our Girls Who Code instructors who teaches at the Career and Technical Academy in Sioux Falls, readily admits that teachers feel they need to tailor their feedback differently for boys and girls. “If boys try something and get it wrong, they’ll just keep trying and coming back,” he said. “With girls, I have to focus on what they got right first before telling them what doesn’t work, then encourage them.” He recalls the time he had the class making network cables and one of the girls got frustrated because she couldn’t get it right. “She wanted to give up, but to keep her going, I had to reinforce how much of it she’d gotten right and how close she was to nailing it. Some of the boys came up to me with a cable that wasn’t well done and I literally took a scissors and chopped off the end and said, ‘Nope, not right; try again.’ And they did.”

Brad also currently coaches the girls’ basketball team, which he’s found to be much different from his experience coaching the boys. “With girls you have to stay constantly positive,” he says. “If you go negative or critical, they just shut down and there’s nothing you can do to pull them out of that funk. If boys lose, it’s just a game . . . they figure they’ll play hundreds of games in their high school career, they’ll get over one loss. For girls, a loss is personally defeating. They think, ‘Why am I even playing basketball at all?’”

Debbie Hanney is the principal of Lincoln Middle School, an all-girls school in Rhode Island. She sees many parents caught between wanting to teach their daughters resilience and wanting to shield them from the sting of failure. She describes how, when a girl gets a 64 on a test, parents immediately swoop in and focus on how their daughter can get that grade up or take the test over. “We try to explain it as one thing on the continuum, but parents are understandably nervous in this day and age. It’s hard trying to encourage them to let their daughters fail,” she says.

It’s deep stuff, this urge to protect and shield girls from disappointment and pain. Even more profound are the long-term effects, which many of us feel today as grown women. If we think about how horrified we are by the idea of failing, whether it’s a serious rejection or a little mistake that we ruminate over for days, we can see how avoiding disappointment in our early life sliced into our resilience. We just didn’t get the practice we needed to give us the bounceback that life demands. The good news here is that it’s never too late. We can build resilience through bravery, and in later chapters, I’ll show you how.

When girls first walk into our Girls Who Code program, we immediately see their fear of not getting it right on full display. Every teacher in our program tells the same story.

At some point during the early lessons, a girl will call her over and say she is stuck. The teacher will look at her screen and the girl’s text editor will be blank. If the teacher didn’t know any better, she’d think her student had spent the past twenty minutes just staring at the screen.

But if she presses “undo” a few times, she’ll see that her student wrote code and deleted it. The student tried. She came close. But she didn’t get it exactly right. Instead of showing the progress she made, she’d rather show nothing at all.

Perfection or bust.

Dr. Meredith Grossman is a psychologist on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. With its concentration of highly competitive private schools, it is arguably the high-pressure-school capital of the world. She works with many girls to help them manage anxiety, and I asked her to tell me a little about what she sees on a daily basis.