How the education of girls influence their future career choice?

Reshma Saujani, an American lawyer and politician, claims that we raise our daughters to be perfect and our sons to be brave, and that is why girls are afraid to take risks. Everywhere you look, brave women are the ones who succeeded.

In the 90’s, an American psychologist named Carol Dweck studied how girls and boys approach different tasks. She found that the brightest girls were also the ones who gave up first. The higher a girl’s IQ was, the faster she gave up. The most intelligent boys, on the other hand, saw difficult tasks as challenges and became filled with energy. Most of the time, the boys doubled their energy output in order to succeed.
How can this be? The reason for this phenomenon is obviously not a lack of ability on the female side. But rather the reason is that women were educated to aim for perfection and perfectionism. Therefore, they are more careful. If there are many programming jobs available on the market, most women will not even apply for the jobs, unless they are completely certain they will succeed.

Should we educate our girls otherwise?
According to Reshma Saujani, the founder of the global organization, “Girls Who Code,” women’s employment trends will change only if we educate our girls to be brave instead of perfect. It was for this reason that Saujani decided to found, “Girls Who Code” in 2012. She believes that by teaching girls to code, she is teaching them to be brave, daring, and unhesitant.

How does learning to code help daringness and risk taking?

Programming is a long process that requires putting the correct order in the correct place. Sometimes the difference between success and failure is tiny. It requires many attempts until what you planned to build and establish actually succeeds and comes to life. The activities of programming require perseverance, the ability to deal with imperfection (lack of perfectionism), the ability to take responsibility, and more.In her research, psychologist Carol Dweck tested how girls coped with imperfect products. In her research, she found that fifth grade female students did not show incomplete parts of their work, even when they were very close to the solution. The boys in the class, however, did show their programs to the teachers – even though they knew that they had not reached the full, perfect solution.

How can we ensure that we don’t leave the girls behind?
During the past four years, Reshma Saujani has proved through the course of her program that girls who learn to be brave are successful. These girls succeed in producing amazing products, and building excellent applications and algorithms. It’s important to remember and to understand that we cannot leave the girls behind. We have to teach them in school to be brave and not to fear imperfection. They need to know that they are appreciated, not because they are perfect but because they are brave. When girls learn not to be perfect, many options suddenly open for society as a whole.

The purpose of Reshma Saujani’s program is to teach girls to express themselves through programming. Many people think of programming as dry math, but in reality, learning programming also teaches an entire learning process. In most of the classes, students do not know what they are learning. In programming, the students learn the concept in-depth: they learn about the design process; about how to transform an idea into something tangible; about how to take complex ideas and simplify them; about how to take different bugs and fix them; about how to work together with friends; and so on and so forth. In addition, learning programming requires perseverance when things do not advance as planned.
These qualities are important for many aspects of life, not just for programming.

It doesn’t matter what career these girls choose when they grow up. That’s because they will certainly use these skills that they learned as children, during their programming studies.

 

Read about:

Girls Who Code  – Official Website

Reshma Saujani – Founder of “Girls who code” (Wikipedia)