Girls absorb unconscious stereotypes as early as preschool. They’re set on a particular track when they’re given Barbie dolls, or when they see mostly boy heroes as science whizzes. These early years are crucial. Early subliminal messages matter.
"There is an early window of opportunity to provide the nourishment, stimulation, and security children need for their brains to develop fully—and to help fulfill their own potential," according to Building Better Brains: New Frontiers in Early Childhood Development, a report from a 2014 UNICEF symposium where leaders in neuroscience presented their findings on the influences of experience and environment on child brain development.
Findings show that the neural pathways that affect how girls and boys perceive the world are created at a very young age.
According to Londa Schiebinger, a leading international authority on gender and science, and author of Has Feminism Changed Science?, girls are raised to be modest, while boys learn to exaggerate their intelligence, their successes, their prospects in life, and even their height. Girls also tend to defer to boys in class, even when they know as much as boys do.
You may have seen a video of the TED Talk about "power posing" and body language, given by Harvard social psychologist Amy Cuddy. Cuddy mentions the timid body language among girls in classes they take with boys. She noticed, for example, that in business-school classes, young women are much more hesitant than young men to express themselves. But she found that by changing their posture to come across more powerfully, these young women actually became much more confident.
Girls who have been trained to underestimate their talents encounter boys who overestimate their talents. The girls take at face value the boys’ estimations of their skills and think even worse of themselves.
Part of the reason that girls hold themselves to higher standards is that they believe there's something innately wrong with them when they fail. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, girls who struggle with failure have "fixed mindsets" according to Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck. A student with a fixed mindset might look at a poor grade as a criticism of her core self, rather than a reflection of her particular effort or skills. Those with "growth mindsets," Dweck writes, are able to accept failure more readily, since they view their traits as constantly under development. A poor grade doesn't mean that a student will fail a course. The tendency for girls to have a fixed mindset is greater than it is for boys, which means girls are under the impression that their abilities and intelligence are innate.
On the other hand, “men have two qualities that most women lack,” says Bruce Porter, chairman of the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at Austin. “They are cocksure. They speak out with confidence, even when it’s unwarranted. And they have Teflon baked into their fiber.” Overall, boys are more willing to fail than are girls and they don’t perceive failure in the same devastating way.
This confidence mindset and this baked-in-Teflon fiber are central to the entrepreneurial skill set. And the good news is that it can be taught.
Through my work at VentureLab, I've seen how entrepreneurial learning can not only spark girls’ interest in engineering, computer science, and technology, but it can also empower girls with the confidence to pursue their dreams, wherever they lead.
I explain the effects of failure further in my next post. In the meantime, I'd really love to hear from you, and how you, or the girls in your life, have dealt with the mindset of failure. How did it play out? Were you able to move forward, or did you let failure limit you? Let me know in the comments below.
