So a few years ago, I did something really brave, or some would say really stupid. I ran for congress
But in my heart, I always want to run
But in my mind, this was my way to make it different to disrupt the status quo.
and the same paper that said I was a rising political star now said I wasted 1.3 million dollars on 6321 votes.
Now before you get the wrong idea, this is not a talk about the importance of failure.
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.
Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. We are taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A's.
We are raising our girls to be perfect
he found that the bright girls were quick to give up.
this study is usually invoked as evidence that, well, women need a little more confidence.
But I think it is evidence that women have been socialized to aspire to perfection
and so those 600,000 jobs that are open right now in computing and tech, women are being left behind, 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, but sometimes just a semicolon making the difference between success or failure. Code breaks and then it falls apart, and it often takes many, many tries until that magical moment when what you are trying to build comes to life.

we immediately see in our program, our girls fear of not getting it right, of not being perfect.

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 what code to write." The teacher will look at her screen, and she'll see a blank text editor.
If she didn't know any better, she'd think that her student spent the 20 minutes just staring at the screen. But if she presses the 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 shows nothing at all.
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 is struggling

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