When girls lack confidence it can affect how willing they are to take risks, changing their paths in life. But confidence can be taught. And sometimes it can be through doing something as simple as changing the way you stand or gesture.
You may know Amy Cuddy from her widely viewed TED Talk, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are.” When Cuddy and her colleagues were studying the role of gender in children’s body language in the course of a social developmental study “to identify the age at which kids start to associate expansive body posture with power and contractive postures with powerlessness,” they also discovered how body language works on confidence.
When Cuddy and her colleagues showed 60 children—half of them 4-year-olds, half 6-year-olds—images of gender-neutral dolls, they found a startling increase in “male-power bias” by age 6.
“[W]hile both groups showed a strong male-power gender bias, compared to the 4-year-olds, the 6-year olds were about three times as likely to see every powerful doll as male and every powerless doll as female,” Cuddy says. “And there were no differences between the scores of girls and boys—they were equally biased.”
She urges action. “When you see your daughters, sisters and female friends begin to collapse in on themselves, intervene,” Cuddy says. “Show them examples of girls and women in triumphant postures, moving with a sense of power, speaking with authentic pride. Change the images and stereotypes that kids are exposed to.”
Part of the problem is that “girls are raised to be modest, while boys learn to exaggerate their intelligence, their successes, their prospects in life, and even their height,” says Londa Schiebinger, author of Has Feminism Changed Science? “Girls who have been trained to underestimate their talents encounter boys who overestimate their talents,” she says. “The girls take the boys’ estimations of their skills at face value and think even worse of themselves.”
What is the cost of women’s lack of confidence? Fewer women in the sciences, for one thing. Schiebinger calculates that it takes 400 ninth-grade boys—but 2,000 ninth-grade girls—to produce one PhD scientist.
This has to change for the future good of the population, for business and technology and for the country. That's why we weave confidence-building throughout our middle school and high school curriculum. Our programs provide guidelines for creating a safe, fun space to explore new ideas, take risks, and see the value in the creativity that comes when you allow yourself to experiment.
I'd love to hear from you about your experiences with the girls in your life, and their confidence. How are you nurturing this sense of self in them? Thank you for sharing.
