Teach Girls Bravery, Not Perfection | Reshma Saujani
I absolutely love Ted Talks. I love that they’re thought provoking and clever, that they’re self contained, and that they’re just long enough to take a break from revision without finding, hours later, that you’ve accidentally ended up watching three episodes of Hawaii Five 0. I love them so much that a few friends and I have recently started doing TEDx Tuesdays – where we each send a talk we’ve found for the others to watch every week.
When my friend Alex sent me a talk by Reshma Saujani earlier this week, I found that its content particularly resonated with me. Saujani, one of the founders of Girls who Code, spoke of a desperate need for us to Teach Girls Bravery, not Perfection.
She opened the talk by recounting a decision she made, at the age of thirty-three, to run for Congress in New York. She ran against all odds of success and ultimately ended up losing the election. The decision that she made to run, however, she looks back on as the:
‘First time in my entire life that I had done something that was truly brave. Where I didn’t worry about being perfect.’
The reason for this, she believes, is that girls are taught from a young age that they should avoid risk. Boys, however, are taught ‘to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars and then just jump off, headfirst’. We’ve thus created an environment where:
‘We’re raising our girls to be perfect, and we’re raising our boys to be brave’.
The impact of this, Saujani highlights, continues to have a huge effect on our society. It changes the way that boys and girls approach challenges at school, it encourages women to gravitate towards careers and subjects that they know they can achieve perfection in, and it’s reflected in an HP report which found that ‘Men will apply for a job if they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women... will apply only if they meet 100%’. She believes that the caution socialised into women explains why so few girls code, and why women remain underrepresented in politics.
The idea that women and girls are socialised to aspire to perfection in themselves is something that is exemplified – not only by my own outlook and attitudes – but by all of the women in my family. My (often militant) perfectionism has manifested itself both a blessing and a curse. It’s not something that I can honestly say has ever impaired my work, more likely having done the opposite, but it has ensured that I consistently put pressure on myself that is entirely unnecessary. I regularly achieve what my father deems to be perfect at the expense of the good. Which also comes at the expense of a great deal of caffeine, a few sleepless nights, eight redrafts and then hours spent staring at an entirely finished essay to make sure I haven’t missed anything. The impact that it can have on other areas of my life is something that I am only now beginning to recognise, and to encourage myself to see when I should draw the line. The pressure for perfection that we impress, both upon ourselves and upon others, isn’t constructive or inspiring.
Despite this, perfectionism was not something that I was ever conscious might have stopped me taking risks. I regularly surf in large, risky conditions. I’ve run against other brilliant candidates in society and sports club elections. I got a job, on a whim, in Portugal one summer and ended up staying there for 6 months. I’ve travelled alone in China and Indonesia. I’ve always considered myself quite capable of taking risks and putting myself under pressure.
Having reflected on Saujani’s words, however, I’ve increasingly realised that the risks I’ve taken are often with the security that I know what I’m doing. I would never put myself forward for something unless I was entirely confident in my own ability to excel, or at least complete it. The two sports that I have pursued at University are two that I have done all my life; Surfing and Latin and Ballroom Dance. I chose two things that I take comfort in being great at and as a result met a number of people who were entirely like myself. I have never applied for a job that I didn’t know, beyond any doubt, that I could do well. I take risks, but only when I am comfortably sure of my own ability. Which isn’t actually taking risks at all.
So I've decided, from now on, to stop striving for complete, unobtainable perfection. Instead I'm going to try and do one brave thing a week, whether that's something completely new or nominating myself for something I wouldn't have otherwise.
Saujani ends the talk with a request: ‘I need each of you to tell every young woman you know… to be comfortable with imperfection’. Encouraging women to let go of perfection, and embrace the possibility that even without the guarantee that it will work, something might still be worth doing.
While it'll be a long time before I’m quite, as Saujani suggests, 'comfortable' with imperfection, I've decided that I'm no longer going to let it stop me from being brave.
