Brave, Not Perfect

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 certain they can get a high grade in—no matter how interested they are in the subject. This continues through college, as they automatically close doors to career paths they could potentially love. It’s not a coincidence that male economics majors outnumber women three to one; research done by Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldin revealed that women who earn B’s in introductory economics are far more likely to switch majors than those who earn A’s (while their male counterparts stick with it, B’s be damned).

Appearing stupid is a huge concern. In perfect-girl world, being judged harshly by one’s peers is the ultimate mortification; and it’s been shown to be one of the main barriers girls face when they think about doing anything brave. For Destiny, math had always been a challenge. But the boys in her middle school made her feel far worse about it. “I’d be up at the board for a long time trying to work out a problem, and they’d say something like, ‘You’re so dumb,’ or they’d laugh, and I’d get all flustered. It made me not even want to try to do math anymore. Why put all this effort in, just to get it wrong, and get yelled at by the boys?”

I know how she feels. When I was in law school at Yale, I remember sitting in my constitutional law class wanting desperately to contribute but feeling too intimidated. I mean, I was a girl from Schaumburg, Illinois, who was one of the first in my community to go on to an Ivy League grad school. All my classmates seemed so smart and impeccably articulate, and I didn’t want to seem stupid in comparison. So I’d write out in my notebook exactly what I wanted to say, then I’d rewrite it three, four, a dozen times. By the time I worked up the courage to raise my hand, class was usually over.

Of course, the fears of not measuring up extend beyond the classroom. Amanda wanted to try lacrosse in high school but didn’t because she’s “not athletic.” She summed up in two sentences a familiar sentiment I heard expressed in so many different varieties: “I just felt like if I couldn’t do it well, I didn’t want to do it at all.”

It’s important to understand that for girls, failure is defined as anything that is less than the proverbial A+. It’s black and white: you either totally rock or totally suck. To them, failure isn’t just painful—it’s colossal, devastating, and to be avoided at all costs. So if they can’t rock it, they skip it.

The Fixed Mindset

When Amanda declared that she didn’t dare try lacrosse, she fell victim to a type of thinking that Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck famously outlined in her brilliant book Mindset. In a nutshell, Dweck identified two different belief systems about ability and intelligence.

The first is a fixed mindset. A person with a fixed mind-set believes that their abilities are innate and unchangeable. You’re either smart or you aren’t, talented or untalented, athletic or not at all, and there’s not much you can do about it. The other is a growth mindset, which is based on the belief that abilities can be developed and cultivated through effort. Regardless of whatever natural level of ability or talent you are born with, you can learn skills and improve.

These are the hallmarks of a fixed mindset:

• An urgency to prove oneself again and again.

• Deep concern about making mistakes and failing.

• A reluctance to expose deficiencies.

• Seeing imperfections as shameful.

• The expectation that one will do well on something right away and if one doesn’t, the loss of interest or self-admonishment for having put in the effort.

• The tendency to see failures as a measure of one’s worth and allowing those failures to define the person.

• Being solely focused on the outcomes. It doesn’t matter what one achieved or learned along the way. Not hitting the final mark means failure. And failure means that one isn’t smart, talented, or good enough.

Sound familiar?

When you tell someone with a fixed mindset that they are smart or talented, they etch these messages into the “this is how I am” truth in their minds. That sounds like good, positive self-esteem building, but the problem is that after being showered with such praise of their perceived innate abilities, they fall to pieces when they encounter setbacks. Why? Because they take any failure, however insignificant, as a sign that maybe they aren’t as innately smart or talented as they thought.

A fixed mindset also holds us back from trying anything outside our comfort zone. How many times have you begged off doing something spontaneous and potentially fun with, “I’m just not adventurous,” or turned down an invitation or opportunity because “that’s just not who I am”? That’s the fixed mindset at work.

Not surprisingly, girls are more prone to a fixed mindset than boys. This is partially because, as Dr. Dweck’s research showed, parents and teachers tend to give boys more “process praise,” meaning they reward them for putting in effort, trying different strategies, sticking with it, and improving, rather than for the outcome. In the absence of this kind of process praise, girls come to believe that if they can’t get something right away, they’re dumb. You can see how this impacts us later in life, as we take even the smallest daily mistakes as indicators of fundamental limitations. We forget to pick up the school supplies our kid asked for = we’re bad moms. We get a ticket for a broken taillight that we’d been meaning to take care of = we’re idiots. We see a failure as a definitive condemnation of our worth, rather than seeing ourselves and our abilities as works in progress.

The single best example I can point to of girls being trapped in a fixed mindset is in relation to STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, math). As you might imagine, being the founder of an organization that teaches coding to girls, I hear the refrain “I’m just not good at math” a lot. Like Destiny, who cringed when the boys made fun of her for taking so long up at the board to solve a math problem, or like the girls who delete their work in coding classes, it isn’t a lack of interest or capacity in these subjects that scares them off, but a perception that they’re fundamentally bad at it. After being told outright—or subtly, through the micromessages we’ll talk about in the next chapter—that boys are naturally better at math and computing (they aren’t) and that girls are innately more suited for humanities (again, not true), they believe to their core that their abilities in these subjects—or lack thereof—are carved in stone.

Of course, they aren’t. Carol Dweck points out that no one is born with a fixed mindset; in fact, we all come prewired with a desire to learn and grow. It’s only once children begin to evaluate themselves (I’m smart/not smart) that they become afraid of challenges. Thankfully, as adults, we can undo that long-ago wiring by taking on the practice of bravery in the here and now.

Silenced Voices

On a gray afternoon in late January, I sat around a conference table talking with a group of high school girls from Harlem. Kim, the most opinionated of the group, sat up straight with unusual presence for a girl her age. All outward signs pointed to a confident, secure young woman so I was surprised when she shared her inner reality with us.

“I feel like whenever girls speak up for themselves, we get slapped down for it because it seems like we’re being bossy,” she said. “Especially if I stand up for myself as a black woman specifically, boys really don’t get it. If a boy does it, it’s like he’s a boss man . . . but if it’s me, I’m just an angry black woman. Boys will say dumb stuff like they only like light-skinned girls . . . if I speak up to them, they tell me I just like to complain and dismiss me.”

“But you’re pretty outspoken,” I said. “Does their reaction have an effect on you?”

“Please . . . you think I want to be smacked down for what I think all the time?” Kim put on a good show of sounding tough as she spoke, but I could hear a tiny tremor in her voice. Her bravado didn’t quite match the vulnerability peeking through. After a beat and a few hard blinks of her eyes, she explained that she just found it easier to stay quiet than deal with the boys trying to put her down. “Everyone thinks I don’t care but I do,” she continued. “I feel like anything I say will just turn into a whole big thing, and then everyone will get into it and turn on me, too, so I don’t bother.”

The other seven girls around the table all nodded knowingly. Don’t be too much, don’t say too much, and definitely don’t say anything that makes you sound angry or bossy. Got it.

From the time girls are young, they’re trained to keep a lid on anger in the face of an affront, unlike boys who are trained to stand up for themselves, or retaliate. This explains why girls (and women) will do almost anything to avoid rocking the boat, and why they choose to downsize their personal power and swallow negative feelings, rather than be seen as boastful or face the horror of confrontation. Praised on the one hand by parents and teachers for being polite, agreeable, and “well behaved” and, on the other, punished by their peers for speaking out, the docility girls are rewarded for as children translates directly into a lifelong habit of suppressing their instinct to speak up and take a risky stand. Mansplaining and dominance plays aside, it’s not surprising that findings show women speak less than 75 percent of the time than men do in conference meetings.

Modesty—another prized virtue for girls—also plays a hand in keeping us quiet and meek. I recently heard a story about a sixth-grade graduation ceremony in suburban Ohio, where a handful of kids were presented with awards for academics or leadership. A mom of one of those students described the scene for me: When a boy won an award, he would saunter up to the stage with a swagger. More than one “dabbed”–a hip-hop dance move that lots of pro athletes use in moments of triumph. When a girl won, she would throw her hands up to her face feigning a look of shocked surprise as if to say, Who, me? You want to give an award to me?

So why don’t girls dab, too? Because if being a confrontational bitch is the first cardinal sin for girls, being seen as conceited runs a close second. So they downplay, demur, and hold back. Add ten, twenty, thirty years to this story and we see that modesty devolved into an uncomfortable meekness. It makes us squeamish to self-promote our professional accomplishments (possibly because we know other women will judge us for it, just like we’d judge them), yet our male colleagues proudly trumpet theirs. We underestimate our abilities and hold off going for a job unless we are absolutely sure we’re 100 percent qualified, while men charge ahead if they come in around 60 percent qualified. We undervalue our contribution to a collaborative project and give more credit to our male teammates, as a fascinating study from Michelle Haynes of the University of Massachusetts and Madeline Heilman of New York University revealed.

At age thirty-eight, Vanessa is a successful dermatologist. She’s one of those people who radiates competence, so you wouldn’t think that she’d fall prey to the same trepidation about touting her accomplishments. Yet on a routine visit to get her teeth cleaned, her (older, male) dentist, upon hearing what she does for a living, immediately launched into a story about his son who was a resident in medical school. “I just sat there as he went on and on about how I should call his son because he could probably give me some good advice about the business,” she said. “I was thinking, huh? Never mind that I own my own practice with three associates, or that I’ve been listed as a top doctor in national magazines. I still sat there not feeling brave enough to tell him it was probably his son who should be calling me for advice.”

Caught in the “double bind” that says we need to be assertive and confident if we want to get ahead, but knowing we’ll get heaped with disapproval if we do, we tread lightly. When someone compliments us, we humbly deflect. This is one I definitely struggle with. Every time someone introduces me before a speech, they inevitably read off the awards I’ve won. Then I’ll get up there and make a joke about how my dad probably put them up to it. I’m pretty sure no guy would ever do that.

Quiet. Contained. Modest. Diligent. Likable. Easy to get along with. You can see how all these accolades might have earned us high praise in girlhood but aren’t necessarily doing us any favors as grown women.

Now, if you’re a parent reading this and thinking, I’ve totally screwed up my daughter—or are getting ready to blame your own parents for doing a number on you—let me stop you right there. The pressures on girls to be perfect does NOT all come down on the parents. It’s important that we understand how ingrained these cultural norms are, and how hard it is for them not to become internalized. As you’ll read about in the next chapter, more and more it’s about the messages girls are getting from the culture we live in, and their parents are caught with them in the same tangled net. But don’t despair—all hope is not lost, for you or for your daughter! As psychologist Dr. Meredith Grossman says, “It’s not about parents screwing up. It’s about becoming aware of these internalized beliefs and making different choices.”

We can reverse and relearn these habits—and help our daughters do the same—with just a little awareness and practice. And in Part Three I’ll share my best tips, ideas, and strategies for doing exactly that.

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