Teach girls bravery, not perfection | Reshma Saujani

So a few years ago, I did something really brave, or some would say, really stupid. I ran for Congress. For years, I had existed safely behind the scenes in politics as a fundraiser, as an organizer, but in my heart, I always wanted to run. The sitting Congresswoman had been in my district since 1992. She had never lost a race, and no one had really even run against her in a Democratic primary. But in my mind, this was my way to make a difference, to disrupt the status quo. The polls, however, told a very different story. My pollsters told me that I was crazy to run, that there was no way that I could win. But I ran anyway.

几年前，我做了一件非常勇敢（或者有些人会说非常愚蠢）的事情。我竞选国会议员。多年来，我一直在政坛幕后安全地工作，做筹款人和组织者，但我心里一直想参选。现任女议员自1992年以来一直在我们选区，她从未输过选举，也几乎没人真正与她在民主党初选中对抗过。但在我看来，这是我改变现状、打破常规的一种方式。然而，民意调查结果却显示出完全不同的情况。我的民调人员告诉我，我竞选是疯了，说我根本不可能赢。但我还是参选了。

And in 2012, I became an upstart in a New York City congressional race. I swore I was going to win. I had the endorsement from the New York Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, snap pictures of me on election day, and CNBC called it one of the hottest races in the country. I raised money from everyone I knew, including Indian aunties, that were just so happy an Indian girl was running. But on election day, the polls were right. And I only got 19% of the vote. And the same papers that said I was a rising political star now said I wasted $1.3 million on 6,321 votes. And I was going to the math. It was humiliating.

2012年，我在纽约市的国会竞选中成为了一匹黑马。我发誓我要赢得选举。我得到了《纽约每日新闻》和《华尔街日报》的支持，还在选举日被拍下了照片，CNBC也称这是全国最热的选战之一。我向所有认识的人筹集资金，包括那些对一个印度女孩参选感到万分高兴的印度阿姨们。然而在选举当天，民调是对的，我只得到了19%的选票。之前说我是政治新星的报纸，现在却说我浪费了130万美元，换来了6321张选票。当时算着账，真是觉得无地自容。

Now before you get the wrong idea, this is not a talk about the importance of failure, nor is it about leaning in. I tell you the story of how I ran for Congress because I was 33 years old, and it was the first time in my entire life that I had done something that was truly brave, where I didn't worry about being perfect. And I'm not alone. So many women I talk to tell me that they gravitate towards careers and professions that they know they're going to be graded, that they know they're going to be perfected. And it's no wonder why. Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. They're taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A's.

在你误会之前，我要先说明，这不是关于失败的重要性，也不是关于勇往直前的演讲。我讲述我竞选国会议员的故事，因为那时我33岁，这是我一生中第一次真正勇敢地做了一件事，在这过程中我不再担心追求完美。我并不孤单，很多女性告诉我，她们倾向选择那些可以得到评价、可以做到完美的职业。这并不奇怪，大多数女孩从小就被教育要避免风险和失败，她们被教导要微笑、美丽、安全行事，取得全A成绩。

Boys on the other hand are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars, and then just jump off head first. And by the time they're adults, and whether they're negotiating a raise or even asking someone out on a date, they're habituated to take risk after risk. They're rewarded for it. It's often said in Silicon Valley, no one even takes you seriously unless you've had two failed startups. In other words, we're raising our girls to be perfect, and we're raising our boys to be brave. Some people worry about our federal deficit. But I worry about our bravery deficit, our economy, our society, we're just losing out because we're not raising our girls to be brave.

另一方面，男孩们被教导要玩得粗犷，荡得高高的，爬到猴架顶端，然后头朝下跳下来。等他们长大成人，不论是谈加薪还是约会，他们已经习惯了冒险。他们因此而得到奖励。硅谷常常说，如果你没有经历过两次失败的创业，根本没人会认真对待你。换句话说，我们在培养女孩成为完美的人，而在培养男孩成为勇敢的人。有些人担心我们的联邦赤字，但我担心的是我们的勇气赤字。我们的经济，我们的社会，正在因为我们没有教女孩勇敢而损失巨大。

The bravery deficit is why women are underrepresented in STEM, in C-suites, in boardrooms, in Congress, and pretty much everywhere you look. In the 1980s, psychologist Carol Dweck looked at how bright fifth graders handled an assignment that was too difficult for them. She found that bright girls were quick to give up. The higher the IQ, the more likely they were to give up. Bright boys, on the other hand, found the difficult material to be a challenge. They found it energizing. They were more likely to redouble their efforts. What's going on? Well, at the fifth grade level, girls routinely outperform boys in every subject, including math and science.

勇气的缺失是女性在STEM领域、高层管理、董事会和国会等几乎所有地方代表性不足的原因。20世纪80年代，心理学家卡罗尔·德韦克研究了聪明的五年级学生如何处理对他们来说过于困难的作业。她发现聪明的女孩很快就会放弃。智商越高，她们越可能放弃。而聪明的男孩则会把困难的材料当作挑战。他们觉得这是一个激励，会更加努力。那么，这到底是怎么回事呢？在五年级的水平上，女孩在包括数学和科学在内的每个学科中都比男孩表现得更好。

So it's not a question of ability. The difference is in how boys and girls approach a challenge. And it doesn't just end in fifth grade. An HP report found that men will apply for a job if they meet only 60% of the qualifications. But women? Women will apply only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. 100%. This study is usually invoked as evidence that, well, women need a little more confidence. But I think it's evidence that women have been socialized to aspire to perfection and they're overly cautious. And even when we're ambitious, even when we're leaning in, that socialization of perfection has caused us to take less risks than our careers.

所以这不是能力问题，区别在于男孩和女孩应对挑战的方式不同。而且这种区别不仅限于五年级。一份惠普的报告发现，男性在只符合60%职位要求的情况下就会申请工作，但女性呢？女性只有在满足100%要求时才会申请工作，100%。这项研究通常被用来证明，女性需要更多自信。但我认为，这说明女性被社会化成追求完美，因此过于谨慎。即便我们有雄心，即便我们在努力争取，那种追求完美的社会化还是让我们在职业生涯中承担更少的风险。

And so those 600,000 jobs that are open right now in computing and tech, women are being left behind. And it means our economy is being left behind on all the innovation and problems women would solve if they were socialized to be brave instead of socialized to be perfect. So in 2012, I started a company to teach Girls to Code. And what I found is that by teaching them to code, I had socialized them to be brave. Coding, it's an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place with sometimes just a semicolon, making the difference between success and failure. Code breaks and then it falls apart.

因此，现在计算和科技领域有60万个职位空缺，但女性却被落在后面。这意味着我们的经济在失去那些如果女性被教导要勇敢而不是追求完美时，她们会带来的创新和解决问题的能力。因此，在2012年，我创办了一家公司，专门教女孩们编程。我发现，通过教她们编程，我让她们学会了勇敢。编程是一个不断试错的过程，试图把正确的命令放在正确的位置，有时候仅仅是一个分号就决定了成功与失败。代码会出错，系统会崩溃，然后需要重新修复。

And it often takes many, many tries till that magical moment when what you're trying to build comes to life. It requires perseverance. It requires imperfection. We immediately see in our program our girls fear of not getting it right, of not being perfect. Every Girls with Code teacher tells me the same story. During the first week when the girls are learning how to code, a student will call her over and she'll say, I don't know what code to write.

要把你想要构建的东西变成现实，常常需要很多很多次尝试，直到那个神奇的时刻到来。这需要毅力，也需要接受不完美。我们在编程课程中立刻发现女孩们害怕做错事情，害怕不完美。每个“女孩编程”项目的老师都跟我讲了同样的故事。第一周，当女孩们开始学习编程时，一个学生会叫老师过来，然后说："我不知道该写什么代码。"

The teacher will look at her screen and she'll see a blank text editor. She didn't know any better, she'll think that her students spent the past 20 minutes just staring at the screen. But if she presses undo a few times, she'll see that her student wrote code and then deleted it. She tried, she came close, but she didn't get it exactly right. Instead of showing the progress that she made, she rather showed nothing at all. Perfection or bust.

老师看着她的屏幕，会看到一个空白的文本编辑器。她不清楚实际情况，会以为学生过去的20分钟只是在盯着屏幕发呆。但如果她按几次“撤销”键，就能看到学生写了代码然后又删除了。学生尝试过，接近成功，但没有完全对。因此，学生选择不展示她的进步，而是展示一无所有。要么完美，要么放弃。

It turns out that our girls are really good at coding. And it's not enough just to teach them to code. My friend, Lev Brie, who's a professor at the University of Columbia and teaches intro to Java, tells me about his office hours with computer science students. When the guys are struggling with an assignment, they'll come in and they'll say, professor, there's something wrong with my code. The girls will come in and say, professor, there's something wrong with me.

原来我们的女孩在编程方面真的很厉害。但仅仅教她们编程还不够。我的朋友Lev Brie是哥伦比亚大学的一位教授，他教Java入门课程。他告诉我，在他的办公时间，男生们在做作业遇到困难时，会说：“教授，我的代码有问题。” 而女生们会说：“教授，我有问题。”

We have to begin to undo the socialization of perfection, but we've got to combine it with building a sisterhood that lets girls know that they are not alone. Because trying harder is not going to fix a broken system. I can't tell you how many women tell me, I'm afraid to raise my hand. I'm afraid to ask a question because I don't want to be the only one who doesn't understand the only one who's struggling. When we teach girls to be brave and we have a supportive network cheering them on, they will build incredible things.

我们必须开始改变对于完美的社会化要求，同时也要建立一个让女孩们知道她们并不孤单的姐妹情谊。因为单靠更努力并不能修复一个有缺陷的系统。我无法告诉你有多少女性对我说她们害怕举手、害怕提问，因为她们不想成为唯一一个不懂、唯一一个在挣扎的人。当我们教会女孩们勇敢，并且有一个支持她们的网络在背后加油时，她们将能够创造出非凡的事物。

And I see this every day. Take for instance two of our high school students who built a game called tampon run, yes, tampon run, to fight against administration taboo and sexism in gaming. For the Syrian refugee who dares show her love for her new country by building an app to help Americans get to the polls. Or a 16 year old girl who built an algorithm to help detect whether a cancer is benign or malignant in the off chance that she can save her daddy's life because he has cancer.

我每天都能看到这样的事情。比如，我们学校的两名高中生，他们制作了一款名为 "卫生棉跑酷" 的游戏，对抗社会对女性卫生用品的禁忌和游戏界的性别歧视。还有叙利亚的一位难民女孩，她勇敢地通过开发一款帮助美国人投票的应用程序来表达对新国家的热爱。或者一个16岁的女孩，她设计了一种算法，用来判断癌症是良性还是恶性的，因为她希望能有机会拯救患有癌症的父亲的生命。

These are just three examples of thousands, thousands of girls who have been socialized to be imperfect, who have learned to keep trying, who have learned perseverance and whether they become coders or the next Hillary Clinton or Beyonce, they will not defer their dreams. And those dreams have never been more important for our country. For the American economy, for any economy to grow, to truly innovate, we cannot leave behind half our population.

这只是数以千计的例子中的三个，数以千计的女孩被教育成不完美的样子，她们学会努力，学会坚持。不论她们将来成为程序员，还是下一位希拉里·克林顿或碧昂斯，她们都不会放弃自己的梦想。这些梦想对我们的国家从未如此重要。对于美国经济，乃至任何经济体要成长和真正创新，我们不能忽视我们人口中的一半。

We have to socialize our girls to be comfortable with imperfection and we gotta do it now. We cannot wait for them to learn how to be brave like I did when I was 33 years old. We have to teach them to be brave in schools and early in their careers when it has the most potential to impact their lives and the lives of others. And we have to show them that they will be loved and accepted, not for being perfect, but for being courageous.

我们必须让我们的女孩习惯于接受不完美，而且我们必须现在就开始。我们不能等到她们像我一样到了33岁才学会勇敢。我们要在她们上学和职业生涯初期就教会她们勇敢，因为在这个阶段，这对她们自身以及他人的生活影响最大。我们还要向她们展示，她们会因勇敢而被爱和接受，而不是因为完美。

And so I need each of you to tell every young woman you know, your sister, your niece, your employee, your colleague, to be comfortable with imperfection. And so I think that when we teach girls to be imperfect and we help them leverage it, we will build a movement of young women who are brave and who will build a battle world for themselves and for each and every one of us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Question, thank you.

因此，我需要你们每一个人告诉你们认识的每一位年轻女性——你们的姐妹、侄女、员工、同事——要接受不完美。我认为，当我们教会女孩们接受不完美并帮助她们利用它时，我们会建立一支勇敢的年轻女性队伍，她们将为自己以及我们每一个人创造一个更美好的世界。谢谢。谢谢。谢谢。谢谢。谢谢。谢谢。谢谢。谢谢。谢谢。谢谢。有什么问题吗？谢谢。

It's such a powerful vision you have. You have a vision. Tell me how it's going. Like, how many girls are involved now in your program? Yeah. So in 2012, we taught 20 girls. This year we'll teach 40,000 in all 50 states. And that number is really powerful because last year we only graduated 7,500 women in computer science. Like the problem is so bad that we can make that type of change quickly. And you're working with some of the companies in this room even, right? Who are welcoming graduates from your program?

你有一个非常有力量的愿景。你有一个愿景。告诉我现在进展如何。比如，现在有多少女孩参与到你的项目中了？好的。在2012年，我们教了20个女孩。今年，我们将在全美50个州教导4万名女孩。这个数字非常有力，因为去年我们只有7,500名女性在计算机科学专业毕业。问题如此严重，以至于我们可以如此快速地做出改变。你甚至还与一些在座的公司合作，对吧？这些公司欢迎从你们项目毕业的学生。

Yeah. We have about 80 partners from Twitter to Facebook to Adobe to IBM to Microsoft to Pixar to Disney. I mean, every single company out there, and if you're not signed up, I'm going to find you because we need every single tech company to embed a girls who code classroom in their office. Some stories back from some of those companies that when you mix in more gender balance and from their engineering teams that good things happen. Great things happen. I mean, I think that it's crazy to me to think about the fact that, you know, right now 85 percent of all consumer purchases are made by women. I mean, women use social media at a rate of 600 percent more than men.

是啊。我们大约有80个合作伙伴，从推特到脸书，从Adobe到IBM，从微软到皮克斯再到迪士尼。我是说，几乎每家公司都参与了，如果你还没加入，我会找上门去，因为我们需要每一家科技公司在他们的办公室里设立一个"女孩编程"教室。有些公司反馈说，当他们的工程团队中加入更多性别平衡后，会有好事发生，还有很多令人惊喜的事情。我觉得，现在想想都觉得不可思议，毕竟，目前85%的消费者购买决策是由女性做出的。也就是说，女性使用社交媒体的频率是男性的600%。

We own the internet. And we should be building the companies of tomorrow. And I think when companies have diverse teams and they have incredible women that are part of their engineering teams, they build awesome things. And we see it every day. Bresham, you saw the reaction there. You're doing incredibly important work. This whole community is cheering you on. Thank you. All power to you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

我们掌控互联网。我们应该着手创建明日的公司。我认为，当公司拥有多元化的团队，并且有出色的女性成员参与工程团队时，他们会创造出令人惊叹的事物。我们每天都能看到这些例子。Bresham，你看到了大家的反应。你正在做非常重要的工作。整个社区都在为你加油。谢谢你。祝你一切顺利。谢谢。谢谢。谢谢。谢谢。谢谢。谢谢。谢谢。

Thank you.

谢谢。