Brave, Not Perfect. Reshma Saujani

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

       Perfection or Bust

      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.

      “What’s fascinating is the extreme amount of work they put into everything, and how much they underestimate their performance,” she said. “I work with a lot of highly intelligent girls, and the quality of their writing is superior to what most adults can produce. But I constantly hear, ‘I couldn’t possibly turn that in.’ They write and rewrite five times. They’d rather ask for an extension than turn something in they think isn’t perfect.”

      As soon as one paragraph or paper is polished to perfection, it’s on to the next. There’s no break in the cycle because it’s rare that their extreme efforts don’t pay off. “Perfection begets more perfection,” Meredith explained. “Every time a student overstudies or rewrites something five times and gets a good grade, it gets reinforced that she needs to do that again to succeed.”

      For every girl who writes and rewrites her papers until she’s bleary-eyed, there’s a woman who reads (and rereads, and rereads . . .) an email, report, or even a simple birthday card before sending it to make sure it hits precisely the right note, or spends weeks planning the ideal dinner party or a family trip to make everyone happy, or changes her outfit six times before leaving the house. We revise, rework, and refine to get things just right, often to a point of obsession or frustration that takes us out of the game.

      Whether I’m speaking at a private school in New York City or at a community center in Scranton, Pennsylvania, I ask the girls in the audience the same question: “How many of you strive to be perfect?” Almost without exception, 99 percent of the hands in the room shoot up. Not with embarrassment—with smiles. They know they’re trying to be perfect and are proud of it! They’re rewarded for that behavior so they see it as a virtue. We heap praise on our girls for getting good grades, being well behaved and well liked, and for being good listeners, polite, cooperative, and all the other qualities that earn them gold stars on their report cards. We tell them that they’re smart and talented, pretty and popular. They respond to these messages positively and wear them like a badge of honor. Is it any wonder that they see perfection as the only acceptable option?

      In perfect-girl world, being judged harshly by their peers is the ultimate mortification; many girls and young women told me they won’t post pictures on social media that are anything short of perfectly posed and meticulously edited. They’ll take and retake a picture dozens of times to make sure it’s flattering. One seventeen-year-old who suffers from a mild case of scleroderma, an autoimmune disease that caused a small patch of hardened skin on her forehead, admitted that she will anxiously spend up to an hour trying to take the perfectly arranged selfie in which her “patch” is 100 percent concealed by her long bangs. To make matters even more agonizing, the new thing is to go in the complete opposite direction and post “no filter” photos, which becomes a whole other level of pressure to capture that selfie that’s “perfectly imperfect” without filters.

      Girls will freely admit that they’re afraid to blemish their records, so they don’t take classes they aren’t СКАЧАТЬ