Here is the full transcript of Reshma Saujani’s talk titled “Teach Girls Bravery, Not Perfection” at TED2016 conference.
CEO of Girls Who Code Reshma Saujani’s talk, “Teach Girls Bravery, Not Perfection,” shares her personal journey of running for Congress, emphasizing the importance of bravery over striving for perfection. She highlights the societal conditioning that encourages girls to avoid risk and aim for perfection, contrasting this with the encouragement boys receive to take risks.
Saujani discusses the consequences of this conditioning, including women’s underrepresentation in STEM fields, leadership positions, and their reluctance to apply for jobs unless they meet all qualifications. Through founding Girls Who Code, she aims to socialize girls to embrace bravery and imperfection by teaching them coding, a skill that inherently involves trial, error, and persistence. The program has seen significant growth, teaching 40,000 girls across all 50 states, and aims to address the gender gap in technology.
Saujani’s vision extends beyond coding, advocating for a cultural shift to empower young women to be courageous and accept imperfection. Her powerful message calls for a collective effort to build a society where girls are raised to be brave, not perfect, impacting future generations and industries.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
So a few years ago, I did something really brave, or some would say really stupid. I ran for Congress. For years, I had existed safely behind the scenes in politics as a fundraiser, as an organizer, but in my heart, I always wanted to run. The sitting congresswoman had been in my district since 1992. She had never lost a race, and no one had really even run against her in a Democratic primary. But in my mind, this was my way to make a difference, to disrupt the status quo.
The polls, however, told a very different story. My pollsters told me that I was crazy to run, that there was no way that I could win. But I ran anyway, and in 2012, I became an upstart in a New York City congressional race. I swore I was going to win. I had the endorsement from the New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal snapped pictures of me on election day, and CNBC called it one of the hottest races in the country. I raised money from everyone I knew, including Indian aunties that were just so happy an Indian girl was running.
But on election day, the polls were right, and I only got 19 percent of the vote. The same papers that said I was a rising political star now said I wasted 1.3 million dollars on 6,321 votes. Don’t do the math. It was humiliating.
Now, before you get the wrong idea, this is not a talk about the importance of failure. Nor is it about leaning in. I tell you the story of how I ran for Congress because I was 33 years old and it was the first time in my entire life that I had done something that was truly brave, where I didn’t worry about being perfect.
Raising Girls to Be Brave, Not Perfect
And I’m not alone: so many women I talk to tell me that they gravitate towards careers and professions that they know they’re going to be great in, that they know they’re going to be perfect in, and it’s no wonder why. Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. We’re taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A’s. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars and then just jump off headfirst.
And by the time they’re adults, whether they’re negotiating a raise or even asking someone out on a date, they’re habituated to take risk after risk. They’re rewarded for it. It’s often said in Silicon Valley, no one even takes you seriously unless you’ve had two failed start-ups. In other words, we’re raising our girls to be perfect, and we’re raising our boys to be brave. Some people worry about our federal deficit, but I, I worry about our bravery deficit.
Our economy, our society, we’re just losing out because we’re not raising our girls to be brave. The bravery deficit is why women are underrepresented in STEM, in C-suites, in boardrooms, in Congress, and pretty much everywhere you look. In the 1980s, psychologist Carol Dweck looked at how bright fifth graders handled an assignment that was too difficult for them. She found that bright girls were quick to give up. The higher the IQ, the more likely they were to give up. Bright boys, on the other hand, found the difficult material to be a challenge. They found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts.
The Impact of Socialization on Career Choices
What’s going on? Well, at the fifth grade level, girls routinely outperform boys in every subject, including math and science, so it’s not a question of ability. The difference is in how boys and girls approach a challenge. And it doesn’t just end in fifth grade. An HP report found that men will apply for a job if they meet only 60 percent of the qualifications, but women, women will apply only if they meet 100 percent of the qualifications. 100 percent.
This study is usually invoked as evidence that, well, women need a little more confidence. But I think it’s evidence that women have been socialized to aspire to perfection, and they’re overly cautious. And even when we’re ambitious, even when we’re leaning in, that socialization of perfection has caused us to take less risks in our careers. And so those 600,000 jobs that are open right now in computing and tech, women are being left behind. And it means our economy is being left behind on all the innovation and problems women would solve if they were socialized to be brave instead of socialized to be perfect.
Coding: A Path to Bravery
So in 2012, I started a company to teach girls to code, and what I found is that by teaching them to code I had socialized them to be brave.