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‘This might be wrong’: Exploring female fear of failure in the classroom, workplace

Three women question themselves and others around them. "Women have been socialized to aspire to perfection and are overly cautious,"  Reshma Saujani said. "Even when we’re ambitious and we lean in, that socialization of perfection has caused us to take fewer risks in our careers."
Three women question themselves and others around them. “Women have been socialized to aspire to perfection and are overly cautious,” Reshma Saujani said. “Even when we’re ambitious and we lean in, that socialization of perfection has caused us to take fewer risks in our careers.”
Photo credit: Gabby Kaplan

“I’m sorry, that was a stupid question.” “I hope that made sense.” “I’m not sure if I got this right, but…”  “I don’t know what I was trying to say there.” “You guys probably know better than I do.”

Do any of these phrases sound familiar? These are all examples of how women underestimate and question their intelligence. Whether it is in the workplace, classroom or someplace else, women often find it hard to escape the fear of failure.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, this fear stems from atychiphobia, the feeling of inadequacy and self-doubt. In her Ted Talk, CEO of Girls Who Code Reshma Saujani suggested that a woman’s fear of failure can also originate from girls being socialized to always strive for perfection.

As stated by the Harvard Business Review, “Women are regularly exhorted to demonstrate self-confidence as a strategy to progress their careers, raise their pay and become more successful at work.” However, a study conducted by the American Psychological Association found that “confidence is not just gendered — it’s weaponized against women.” In other words, women are often pushed to put themselves out there, but when they do, they may be punished for being overly confident.

In the classroom

English teacher Sara Rubin has taught at co-ed and single-sex schools throughout her teaching career. She said that compared to boys, girls are much more likely to use self-deprecating language when speaking about themselves in class.

“Absolutely across the board, it is girls who almost exclusively exhibit that kind of language,” Rubin said. “[It is] this idea that they should only be presenting themselves in a way that is useful to someone else … When adding to a conversation, there’s this fear of ‘What if I’m not actually doing a service to this conversation?”

Listen to the short storytelling slideshow below to hear about data collected on the female fear of failure at Archer.

Carol Dweck, an American psychologist, conducted a series of studies to see how fifth-grade girls and boys reacted to new and challenging material. The results showed the girls giving up easily while the boys saw through the challenge. Associate Director of Columbia’s Motivation Science Center Heidi Grant Halvorson interpreted this data to signal that even though the girls were generally smarter, their self-doubt hindered their success.

“At the fifth grade level, girls routinely outperform boys in every subject, including math and science. So there were no differences between these boys and girls in ability, nor in past history of success,” Halvorson wrote in article. “The only difference was how bright boys and girls interpreted difficulty — what it meant to them when material seemed hard to learn. Bright girls were much quicker to doubt their ability, to lose confidence and to become less effective learners as a result.”

Rubin said she once taught a boy who was verbally exhibiting self-doubt in class, which surprised her since it was usually the girls demonstrating that behavior. It was not until halfway through the semester that she found out he was transgender.

“For me, it was like a light bulb,” Rubin said. “I understood that there had been a socialization in his life where, up until a certain age, he was socialized as a girl and the power of that was still so strong.”

Freshman Kayla Stone attended a co-ed school before joining Archer in seventh grade. She said that Archer has given her the opportunity to speak her mind without facing judgment.

“At my old school, I felt that my teachers called on boys in my class more often than girls, even if girls were raising their hands,” Stone said. “I would feel worried about being judged if I tried to answer a question and got it wrong. But being at Archer, I’ve learned that it’s okay to make a mistake.”

In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, a columnist covering economics, public policy, immigration and politics, argued that women should embrace getting B’s in college. She analyzed data that unpacks whether men or women are more likely to stick with their chosen professional field for extended amounts of time.

“I fear that women are dropping out of fields such as math and computer science not because they’ve discovered passions elsewhere,” Rampell wrote, “but because they fear delivering imperfection in the ‘hard’ fields that they (and potential employers) genuinely love.”

In the workplace

Kathleen Delaney is a civil litigator who established her own firm Delaney & Delaney LLC in 2002. She said unapologetic risk-taking is essential to fostering a successful career for women.

“It’s important that people be willing to take risks in life and in their careers,” Delaney said. “If your fear of failure paralyzes you, then you’re never going to succeed at anything.”

Delaney said that she did not experience signifigant of fear of failure in law school. However, there were a few classes where Delaney had to maintain a hardworking attitude to succeed in a fast-paced learning environment.

“In law school, they would call on you out of the blue and put you on the spot and ask question after question after question. That [was] a nerve-wracking experience when you never knew whether it was your day to get called on or what the questions were going to be,” Delaney said. “I just worked really, really hard to make sure that I wouldn’t fail, and, at the end of the day, I graduated number two in my class.”

Rubin said Archer teachers are particularly conscious of societal gender norms, and this awareness has led to fewer apologies from her fellow female faculty members. However, she does see women struggling to use their voices in male-dominated organizations she is a part of outside Archer.

“In outside organizations, for example, it is more likely that a man will steamroll over a woman in a conversation, which makes women feel less comfortable speaking up in large group conversations,” Rubin said.

While Delaney said she can not afford to apologize frequently in her line of work, when she does, it often serves as a way to sugar-coat telling a person with authority that they made a mistake.

“I was arguing in front of a panel of three judges, and one of the judges asked me a question that wrongly assumed something that was in the record,” Delany said. “I had to say, ‘I’m sorry, Your Honor, but you just have that wrong.’ That wasn’t apologizing for what I said — I was just trying to soft-cuddle the fact that I was going to be telling the judge that she had something wrong.”

Strategies to handle the female fear of failure

Stone stressed the importance of women trusting themselves in learning environments. She said she often uses “rough draft thinking” at school when she is unsure about her answer.

“In Ms. Deming’s English class, she taught us that we could always share something and that it could be a ‘rough draft thought,” Stone said. “You take a chance to answer something without people judging you. It is a rough draft. It doesn’t reflect badly on you.”

As a lawyer, Delaney said over-preparation is crucial. She added that it makes encountering failure nearly impossible in her line of work and other settings.

“If you know that you are better prepared than anyone else, and you’ve worked harder, and you know your case better,” Delaney said, “then that will help you build your confidence and minimize that fear.”

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