Should-a-girl-be-like-a-girl？.doc

Should a girl act like a “girl”?

Girls be perfect, boys be brave
Reshma Saujani (2016) in her TED speech recalled a story of herself running for the Congress, “because she was 33 years old and it was the first time in her entire life that she had done something that was truly brave.” Instead of conveying an idea of success and failure, she pointed out a problem that girls are socialized not to be brave but perfect. “Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. We’re taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A’s. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bar and then just jump off, headfirst.” The philosophy of education leads girls and boys to different way of development.
The imbalance can be seen everywhere in the industry world, in which the leading roles in almost all walks of life are played more by males than by females. There is a study conducted by professor Janet Hyde and colleagues (2006) revealing that there was little or no difference in mathematics performance between girls and boys in all of the 10 states in the US. Since it is the case, why does such situation appear when they grow up? It is due to anxiety, as Wynne Parry (2012) stated in “Math makes Girls More Anxious Than Boys”. Girls are anxious about mistakes they are likely to make in the process of calculating. They believe in “perfection or nothing”, and if there is any imperfection, they will give up, saying, “I can't do it at all”. But the real thing is that every accomplishment is a result of trial and error. If they dare not face it, they will be left behind.
That is why it is crucial to consider the existing way of educating the children. The problem falls not on the natural capacity of girls and boys, but on the nurturing, namely, the upbringing of children of different genders.
Internal gender inequality
The problem is deeply rooted in different gender roles the two parties are allocated with. A gender role is a set of societal norms dictating what types of behaviors are generally acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for a person based on their actual or perceived sex (WIKIPEDIA). Males are expected to be strong, while females to be soft and tender. Besides, teachers and parents hold the cliché that boys do better than girls in mathematics, coding, R&D, etc. Seriously speaking, such stereotype gives rise to gender inequality in economic world. HR tends to recruit male programmer rather than the female. Nevertheless, the paper does not deal with the HR’s choice in employment, but encourages females to apply for the position. In other words, girls should be taught to be brave, to make efforts in fields that they are regarded as not good, and accordingly they will be accepted.
There is one point in need of explanation. Even though it is advocated that girls be brave, it does not equal to acting like boys. Bravery is not a quality unique to boys. Thoughts like the above are themselves caged by conventional ideas. To let girls compete with boys in all aspects is away from the original purpose to make girls exploit their potential without the fear of not being perfect.
Like a girl
P&G released a series of advertising videos in title of “Like a girl” and was awarded for its positive content. The very essence of the advertisement is to bring girls with confidence so that they can accept themselves as girls. When the interviewer asked the interviewees to run, fight, throw like a girl, those who were relatively elder pretended to be weak, while a girl at her six or seven years old replied by running as fast as she could. “Like a girl” sometimes is seen as an insult, indicating that someone is not strong and afraid of difficulty. However, it is obvious that girls under 10 who are not formally taught do not think it in this way. In their mind, “Like a girl” means like themselves and they are confident, strong and persistent.
To review this issue in a larger context, feminism is to be incorporated. There is a mistake prevailing in common understanding of feminism. Similarly as is mentioned before, feminism itself is not to encourage women to defeat men in the races, but to ask for equal opportunities standing at the starting point to run. Feminism is not meant to give rise to conflicts between the two parties. It paves another way for women paralleling to that for men.
“Like a girl” differs from like a “girl”. The latter refers to the image in the eyes’ of the public while the former is what it naturally is. In terms of physical structure, females are inferior to males, so that they are not able to handle manual work as much as males do. The bad thing is that females themselves believe in that and take advantage of that to avoid risk and failure. Besides, the sense of inferiority spreads all through the society and becomes cliché at all. It takes time and effort to define which one comes first into being – self-cognition and social-cognition, but it is clear that social-cognition is a huge range covering all aspects of human activities and self- cognition is what should be made change in.
What should a girl be like? Lin Huiyin set a good example for girls of her generation, which has been leading the trend for girls pursuing the independent identity. A well-known saying from her goes “We are tender, but tenderness does not equal to compromise. Instead, we are strong, but in a tender way.” Girls need to be true to themselves. Make mistakes when they are unable to avoid them; try their best when they are eager to achieve something; be soft when they are in face of failure. As people cannot change the shape of a blooming flower, they cannot regulate what a girl should be like. Who can? The girls themselves do.
Socializing girls to be brave
Reshma Saujani founded a company called “Girls who code”. Rather than doing something as great as eliminating the inequality between males and females, she would simply like to provide another way for girls to earn their living. In her speech, she emphasized that before teaching girls to code, they should socialized them to be brave. The philosophy of teachers in this organization is to let girls abandon the stereotype, rediscover their nature and be themselves.
Education as a method of making a difference is influential. But it is actually not effective in a short term, compared with other forms of encouragement. Suppose that companies offer much higher salary for female programmers than that for male programmers. It is certainly an incentive for girls to apply for such a position. However, it violates the equality principle upheld by the advocators, for there is a common sense that only the weak are in request of particular care. Education, on the other hand, takes much longer course to finally realize its goal. But the conceptual change it brings out is long-lasting and far-fetching.
Nevertheless, the premise of education is to be noted, which requires those who are educated ready to accept the information or knowledge. As people cannot wake up those who pretend to sleep, girls are unable to be taught brave if they are not willing to. That is why the paper puts emphasis on the self-cognition rather than the social-cognition, even though these two aspects are closely related to each other, where without the support of either one, the other cannot be improved.
Socializing girls to be brave, first of all, is to let girls know themselves. Knowing oneself is one of the most important and also the most difficult question for people to answer. Different from serious questions on which university should be chosen, which job should be taken and who should be married to, girls at their very young age need only to know what kind of fruit they would like to eat, without the fear that they may stain their beautiful clothes and be blamed as not a lady. Or they can make clear what is interesting to them, needless to consider that girls are expected to sing, dance or something alike.
Secondly, teach girls to follow themselves. Girls are conventionally given less freedom than boys, for they are more vulnerable to harm of all sorts. Care and concern from teachers and parents is a kind of restriction, making girls unable to choose life for themselves. Asking for more freedom does not mean rebelling against the authority, which plays a significant role in leading the way. But following oneself truly polished up one’s sense of responsibility, not only where they succeed but also where they come across failure.
Thirdly, encourage girls to make mistakes. Girls would like to be perfect in front of others, where what they need is perfection. In particular, when they get along with those who they have a crash on, they would like to show the best selves without any flaw. To let girls know making mistake is not as bad as it seems in their minds is a great progress. After all, where there is no mistake, there is no change. Where there is no change, there is no development.
Coding, as Reshma Saujani mentioned in the speech, “is an endless process of trial and error, of trying to get the right command in the right place, with sometimes a semicolon, making the difference between success and failure.” Moreover, in the battle filed of industry world, “no one even takes you seriously unless you’ve had two failed start-ups”. Girls have to realize what is more meaningful, perfect image or substantial fruit.
All the above are only the general methodology without the detailed measures to solve the problem. Situations vary from individuals to individuals, but the core idea entailed in each situation remains the same – girls through the course of development have to be cultivated with the concept of self-identity. They should grow up with bravery but not with the obsession in perfection.
Making a difference
At the very end of Reshma Saujani’s speech, she proposed that all guests in the hall tell every young women they know, such as their sisters, their niece, their employee and their colleague to be comfortable with imperfections, by which young women may leverage it and then build a better world for not only themselves but also each and every one in the society.
The fact that girls are socialized to be perfect while boys are socialized to be brave has become a social problem in view of the imbalance appearing in the industry world. It results from the conventional self-cognition of girls. Also, the gender inequality existing in people’s minds makes the things worse. As a matter of fact, “like a girl” should not be viewed as an offence. It means that girls need to be true to themselves and act as they would like to. In order to achieve this goal, girls are to be taught to know themselves, follow themselves, and most importantly, dare to make mistakes and abandon the illusion of perfection. What is encouraged is to work together to create a comfortable environment for girls where they need not pretend to be another one who is quite a lady in the eye’s of others, where they can be themselves without worries about not being loved, where they are brave enough to lead a better life.

References
[1] Saujani R. (2016). [EB/OL]
[2] Hyde, J. S. & Linn, M. C. (2006). [J] Gender similarities in mathematics and science. Science, 314, 599-600.
[3] Wynne Parry. (2012). [J/OL]
[4] WIKIPEDIA [DB/OL]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_role
[5] Carey R. N, Donaghue N, Broderick P, et al. (2011). [J]. ‘What you look like is such a big factor’: Girls’ own reflections about the appearance culture in an all-girls’ school. Feminism & Psychology, 21(3): 299-316.