Girls Who Code: The Effective Way to Defeat Gender Bias
By Shlomo  Maital
 
         Reshma Saujani
  In virtually every country,  women are paid less than men, for equal work.  Women are under-represented in high-tech,  senior management, politics, legislatures (except Iceland) – everywhere. 
   What can be done?   Pass laws?  It doesn’t work.   Let’s analyze the underlying true cause.  According to Reshma Saujani, in a powerful TED talk,  it is because boys are taught to be bold risk-takers, while women are socialized to be … perfect.  To get it right. 
    Boys who are taught computer coding try it, make mistakes, try again…   in an experiment, girls taught to code had blank computer screens…because they erased their trials, since they were not perfect.  
     Let’s teach our girls to be bold risk-takers! Let’s teach our girls bravery, the same way we teach our boys.    This is Reshma’s message.  She should know – she was one of the ‘I have to be perfect’ girls,  Yale Law, etc.,    until she figured it out.  She has helped launch a movement that hopefully will bring many more women into engineering and high-tech and to senior management.   Here is a short piece from her TED talk:
     “For the American economy, for any economy to grow, to truly innovate, we cannot leave behind half our population [women].   We have to socialize our girls to be comfortable with imperfection,   and we’ve got to 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.  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,   because 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 better world for themselves and for each and every one of us.”