Girls, Technology, and Confidence

As most people are aware, the female presence in technology is very, very minor. This is a result of far too many causes to discuss in a single post, but you'll probably be seeing a number of posts from me about this issue. These posts will likely be based largely on girls in the technology classroom, as well as how classroom experiences translate into the world beyond school. For the moment, a few recent experiences in my classroom have me contemplating confidence and self-esteem as one of the issues girls face in the technology classroom.

It would be great to get more girls starting out in technology. But at the same time, it's just as important to avoid losing the girls we've already got. In watching my students, I've been noticing that one of the things hurting my female students is that they don't have the confidence their male classmates have. One of the most striking differences I've noticed is how the students react to their own mistakes.

My boys tend to go right ahead and get started on an assignment, even if they don't actually know what they're doing. This tends to result in frequent (and significant) mistakes. I'll catch their errors and point them out, and the boys will say "Oh. Well, it's not that bad. I've got the idea, anyway." They know that they're talented and smart, whether or not they really are.

The few girls I have are usually more cautious when they get started. If they make an error, it tends to be a much smaller one than the boys make. Yet when I tell them they've got a minor mistake on their drawing, they don't say "Well, it's not that bad." The girls' responses are along the lines of "I'm really bad at this, aren't I?" or "I'm not very smart." They turn a minor error into a sign of a major personal flaw.

Unfortunately, my students aren't looking at this difference from the outside. The girls I teach see all their male classmates proclaiming their own awesomeness. Then they see themselves and each other saying "I'm not smart. I can't do this." They don't realize that the boys don't judge themselves in the same manner as the girls, so they take the confidence they see in the boys as a sign that the boys know what they're doing.

Not a single one of the girls I teach is incompetent, and most are quite good, but they're all overly hard on themselves. They don't have the confidence to say "Yes, I made a mistake. But I can fix it. And next time, I won't make that mistake." Instead, they tell themselves "I screwed up. I'm not good enough. I shouldn't be here." And if I can't convince them otherwise, they might not be here with me next year. They'll be with another teacher, taking a class they see as being more appropriate for a girl.

This doesn't apply only to my classes, or even just to technology. Girls in math and science are in a similar situation. Geeky girls tend to have some typically male interests, and we end up being compared to guys. We need the confidence to know that making a mistake doesn't make us inferior to them. Half the time, they're making the same mistakes, just not admitting to it. I can certainly understand the doubts my female students feel, having gone through the same thing all the way through college.

I was frequently the only girl in my classes, and even in college, the same issues of confidence applied. I was afraid to take risks for fear of messing up, and I was afraid to accept that I was a girl, because I felt like it made me inferior to my classmates. I did eventually learn to be comfortable with the idea that yes, I am different from the guys, but there's nothing wrong with that. And yes, they are better than me at some things.

I'm still not very comfortable with a table saw, and I never got the hang of soldering with a torch. Still, I have talents they don't have. Hand most of them an old SLR, and they won't even know how to focus it, let alone put together a good photo with it. Different interests. Different talents. This doesn't make me superior or inferior. Just different. It took me a long time to accept that, though, and I had to work through a lot of doubts about myself.

For a long time, I felt like I needed to be just like the guys in order to be good enough. I wish I could make the girls I teach understand that their best really is good enough.For now, I'm trying to figure out what to do to help the girls in my classes build up some confidence for themselves.

One of my girls has seemed like an entirely different person since the day she did something that got me thinking about this topic. One day, I walked over to see what she was doing, and she gave me a sad look and asked me "How did I mess up this time?" When I was able to tell her that she was doing the work perfectly, the change in her expression was amazing. I'd never seen her look so happy in my room before.

Later that day, when she finished the work before any of her classmates - and did a better job than almost anybody else in her class - she stared at me in disbelief when I told her how well she had done.

Ever since then, she's been an entirely different person in my room. She still makes mistakes, but she knows she's not stupid, and that she can do what I'm asking her to do. She's got the confidence I wish all the girls in my classes had. I want to find a way to give all my students, and especially the girls, that feeling of confidence.