Many of us have experienced the fear of failure and its inhibiting, sometimes debilitating nature. But many of us may not realize something startling about failure: it affects men and women differently.
Young girls and women are more influenced by negative feedback and are quickly discouraged when they experience failure. Boys and men, on the other hand, tend to accept failure more readily and react to it with a Teflon quality, letting it slide off them. They think along the lines of: “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” and bounce back and push ahead.
The reasons that so many girls fear failure are deep-rooted: subtle and not-so-subtle gender biases, lack of self-confidence, nurtured apprehension, too few female role models, reluctance to take risks and the pressure for perfection.
Studies show that looming failure dissuades girls and leads them to opt-out of things they perceive as difficult or naturally suitable for boys. For example, women who earn below an A in introductory economics classes are far more likely than their male peers to switch majors, according to a "Gender and the Undergraduate Economics Major," a paper by Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard University.
This is the kind of thing that reinforces a "fear of failure" feedback loop, where girls' self-confidence is diminished and their subsequent achievements are lowered, which is precisely what we don’t want.
When I was in junior high, I remember crying in a bathroom stall because I had failed my first geometry test. I remember telling my dad that I couldn’t do it. Calculating angles of a polygon was just too hard. Instead of telling me that math wasn’t for me—and reinforcing a looming sense of failure—he got me a tutor and told me I could be anything I wanted to be if I worked hard for it. And his message stuck. Years later, my parents watched me become an engineer. We need to encourage girls to pursue their interests even if they think they are difficult or out of their reach.
In this series of blog posts, I will look at how we can teach girls to become entrepreneurs as they also learn to accept and leverage failure. Failure is part of the entrepreneurial process, and not a sign that you should give up what interests you.
Next, I will look at the importance of parents and educators understanding how girls internalize failure. In the meantime, I'd love to hear from you! What experiences did you have in dealing with failure? How did you move past them? Let me know in the comments below.
