DR.

CRISTAL GLANGCHAI
 STAND UP TO START UP
Teaching girls to embrace failure on their way to
entrepreneurial success.

Many of us have experienced the fear of failure and its inhibiting, sometimes debilitating
nature. What you may not know and what is startling about failure is how it affects
the sexes differently: Young girls and women are more influenced by negative feedback
and are quickly discouraged when they experience failure. While boys and men accept
failure more readily and react with a Teflon quality—“what doesn’t kill you”—to bounce
back and push ahead.

The reasons that so many girls fear failure are chronic and deep-rooted: subtle and
not-so-subtle gender biases, lack of self-confidence, nurtured apprehension, too few
female role models, reluctance to take risks and the pressure for perfection. Studies
show that looming failure dissuades girls and leads them to opt-out of things they
perceive as difficult or naturally suitable for boys. Thus begins a reinforcing fear-of-
failure feedback loop, where girls’ self-confidence is diminished and their subsequent
achievements are lowered, which is precisely what we don’t want.

I remember crying in a bathroom stall in junior high because I failed my first geometry
test. I remember telling my dad that I couldn’t do it. Calculating angles of a polygon was
just too hard. Instead of telling me that math wasn’t for me, he got me a tutor and told
me I could be anything I wanted to, but I had to work hard for it. And his message stuck.
Years later, my parents watched me become an engineer. So we need to encourage girls
to follow their interests even if they think it is out of their reach or difficult.

To teach girls to redefine and embrace failure, it’s important for us as parents and
educators to understand how girls internalize failure. For many girls, the pressure of
perfection limits them from taking risks, raising their hand in class, participating in new
activities, expressing their creativity and pursuing their dreams. By creating a freedom
of failure environment, we encourage girls to be curious, bold and daring, showing them
that it is okay to be wrong and at the same time to experience progression and eventual
success.

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 So how do we teach young girls to stand up to their fear, confront failures and start up
to achieve success? We must redefine failure and instill the growth mindset; nurture
girls’ self-confidence starting at an earlier age; we must give girls mentors, such as
strong women leaders who have walked a similar path; finally, we must not only expose
girls to failure, but we must also teach them that learning how to overcome failure will
eventually lead to great success.

In 2013, with these thoughts in mind, I started VentureLab, a nonprofit dedicated to

teaching entrepreneurial skills to children—with a particular focus on teaching girls. After
conducting dozens of camps and class modules I have found something remarkable:
When girls are exposed to entrepreneurial thinking, a profound change takes place. They
become aware of opportunities around them. They learn to problem-solve. They think
more critically and creatively. The result: They become more confident and experimental
in their ability to tackle challenges.

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 FAILURE “Young girls are change agents, they
look at the world and ask, how can I
& GENDER BIAS make it better?”
- Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO

Girls absorb unconscious stereotypes as early as preschool. They’re set on a track when
they’re given Barbie dolls, or when they see mostly boy-heroes as science whizzes.
These early years are crucial. Early subliminal messages matter. Studies of the brain
show that the neural pathways that affect how girls and boys perceive the world are
created at a very young age. Gender socialization begins even before birth. It continues
through people’s lives, affecting their behaviors, their choices, their perceptions, and
how they come to view themselves.

Even many well-meaning of expectant parents will stock up on pink blankets, pink
dresses, pretty dolls and girly things on finding out they’re going to have a girl. They simply
assume that a baby girl will already love the color pink and prefers dolls. When we make
assumptions about a child’s personality based solely on gender, we’re conditioning that
child toward certain gender expectations. When we do this, we announce that a girl is
expected to like pink, to adjust her infant worldview to conform with our ideas of what
a girl would do. These tiny, seemingly insignificant details can make a big difference in
how our child develops.

Parents and other adults don’t consider how this conditioning continues from the baby’s
perspective. When infants are whisked off to their pink rooms and dolls, then as they
infants are told they’re good girls because they’re well-behaved, beautiful, quiet and
never do anything “bad” or “wrong,” they learn to hold themselves in.

This continues to varying degrees into girls’ teen years, but that early groundwork is
already firmly laid and girls know that being well-behaved, beautiful, gentle, and never
doing anything wrong -- or never making mistakes -- is what being a good girl means.
Girls raised like this go on to believe that they must attain perfection or they won’t be
“good.” Anything short of perfection is failure. And failure is not an option.

Not only does socialization affect in a subliminal way how a child experiences the world,

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 it influences how other people interact with a child. People treat a girl in a completely
different manner than they do a boy. You can test this for yourself if you have a baby.
Dress the baby in opposite-gender clothing for a day and go out among strangers. It will
immediately become apparent that other people react differently to a child based on
the child’s perceived gender. And how other people interact with us plays a huge role in
shaping who we become.

Girls are raised to be modest, while boys learn to exaggerate their intelligence, their
successes, their prospects in life, and even their height, according to Londa Schiebinger
a leading international authority on gender and science, and author of Has Feminism
Changed Science? Girls tend to defer to boys in class, even when they know as much as
boys do. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy echoes Schiebinger’s findings and in her studies
about “power posing” she shares that girls’ body language can often be hesitant. When
girls do raise their hands, it’s often timidly. Girls who have been trained to underestimate
their talents encounter boys who overestimate their talents; the girls take the boys’
estimations of their skills at face value and think even worse of themselves.

Part of the reason that girls hold themselves to higher standards is that they believe
there’s something innately wrong with them when they fail. Girls who struggle with
failure have “fixed mindsets,” according to Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck.
A student with a fixed mindset might look at a poor grade as a criticism of her core self,
rather than a reflection of her particular effort or skills. Those with “growth mindsets,”
Dweck writes, are able to accept failure more readily, since they view their traits as
constantly under development. A poor grade doesn’t preclude that a student will fail a
course. The tendency for girls to have a fixed mindset is greater than it is for boys, which
means girls are under the impression that their abilities and intelligence are innate.

There is no such thing as what we might consider “the fixed brain,” writes Eric Jensen in
Teaching with the Brain in Mind (1998). Jensen explains that the brain is always learning
and adapting. This is what is known as neuroplasticity. So even the brain is capable
of getting back up after a failure and trying again. While our neural pathways may be
carved out at very early ages based on what we experience and what we are taught, it
doesn’t mean that we have to be stuck with them forever.

For a young girl who has been trained since birth that she is somehow less capable
than a boy at understanding the topics within the STEM subjects of science, technology,

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 engineering and math, she may believe that she is intrinsically a failure at math. But that
fixed mindset is merely an illusion of a remarkably adaptable brain. Her thinking may be
fixed, but her brain isn’t. Though she may have missed out on some of the important
early learning stages of mathematics, and her related neural pathways may be less
developed as a result, there is nothing at all stopping her from overcoming that mindset
and learning something new and even challenging. With hard work and determination,
a girl can actually forge new neural pathways in her brain.

The old saying that you can achieve anything you set your mind to is absolutely and
completely true: you can change your own brain. Jensen even mentions research in the
area of neuroplasticity and music, which has shown that “playing a musical instrument
consistently over time can literally remap the brain’s real estate.” What we practice
and try to do over and over is what we become good at. The difference with the neural
pathways developed in early life and those formed later is that those early pathways
are formed by the environment and a child’s socialization, with little actual input from
the child itself. Changing those pathways later in life requires focused intention. The
individual is responsible for reforming those pathways.

It takes a certain confidence. Again, confidence is something that can society programs
early. “Men have two qualities that most women lack,” says Bruce Porter, chairman
of the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at Austin. “They are
cocksure. They speak out with confidence, even when it’s unwarranted. And they
have Teflon baked into their fiber.” This confidence mindset and this baked-in-Teflon
fiber are central to the entrepreneurial skill set. And it can be taught. I believe that
entrepreneurial learning can not only spark girls’ interest in engineering, computer
science, and technology, but it can also empower girls with the confidence to pursue
their dreams, wherever they lead. Overall, boys are more willing to fail than are girls and
they don’t perceive failure in the same devastating way.

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 THE “We often get punished for
making mistakes and therefore
FAILURE EFFECT try to avoid them.”

Our schools are oriented to brand temporary setbacks with a permanent capital F. Our
society’s platitudes—“Learn from our mistakes,” and the cheerful, “If at first you don’t
succeed, try, try again”—are contradicted by “the reality that we often get punished
for making mistakes and therefore try to avoid them—or cover them up—as much as
possible,” writes Alina Tugend in Better by Mistake, The Unexpected Benefits of Being
Wrong. Research shows “how parents and teachers often unwittingly encourage such
an error-avoidance mindset and how such children grow into adults who fear and dread
making mistakes.”

Our mixed messages about failure have created an environment that stresses out
children and teens, particularly girls and young women. For example, high-schoolers
must calculate whether to take advanced courses and risk their GPA, which can have
lifelong consequences. When our children attempt and fail, they are written off as not
making the cut. Our schools and institutions use failure to sift for talent and intelligence,
then eliminate the children who failed—as if intelligence is set in stone. Some boys have
that Teflon quality, but for many girls and boys, failure becomes a brand of shame and
inadequacy burnt into their psyches. They blame themselves for what they perceive as
their failure.

Fear of failure, and believing you are a failure, inhibit the creative process, the metalogics
of feelings and intuition that are essential to an entrepreneur’s ingenuity. “One of our
educational failures is a lack of serious recognition and attention towards the ‘gut feeling’
or inclination of common sense,” says Dr. John Burnside, chief of internal medicine
at the Hershey Medical Center in Pennsylvania. Such lack of recognition is especially
important for girls. A girl who is paralyzed by the constraints of perfection isn’t likely
to pursue quantitative subjects where learning is cumulative and answers are typically
right or wrong.

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 Lifting the stigma of failure can allow girls to be in touch with their senses—muscular
feelings, physical sensations, intuitive sensations, kinesthetic responses, and mental
imaging, all of which play important roles in scientific thinking. Instead of being
disembodied, scientific learning becomes real; physics becomes physical.

All of this illustrates the importance of reframing girls’ interpretations of mistakes and
setbacks so that girls become more willing to risk failure. We need to condition girls not
to internalize failure, but to view mistakes dispassionately and to learn from them. This
is perhaps the most important single entrepreneurial skill. Fortunately, entrepreneurial
education offers an antidote to the ill effects of standardized tests and grading as it
teaches failure as part of the scientific method.

Failure is important, it yields information—whether it’s questions missed, or a hypothesis

disproved. Failure means LEARNing what not to do and trying again a different way. You
come up with a hypothesis, you test it, and it either works or doesn’t, but it gets you
closer to a solution.

Look at history, there many well known scientists, innovators and entrepreneurs who
failed their way to success. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and J.K. Rowling are just a few.
Thomas Edison always said, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention
with 1,000 steps.” Just as failure did not define these now-famous individuals, we need
to teach girls that failing will not define them as a failure. Instead, we instill in them the
belief that they have the potential to overcome challenges and, with persistence, they
will achieve their goals.

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 THE COST “A girl who tries hard but
lacks confidence can
OF FAILURE fade away.”

Girls begin K-12 with the same potential as boys, but by the end of high school the
number of female students in the subjects of science, technology, engineering and math
(STEM) has dwindled substantially. Research published in ScienceDaily’s “Math-Gender
Stereotypes in Elementary School Children” shows that girls make determinations about
their math and science aptitude as early as 2nd and 3rd grades. By their teens, girls may
lack the confidence to push forward in math and science. Worse, parents and teachers
often discourage these girls by redirecting them to language-based subjects. Without
a mentor who can guide them into science, technology, engineering and math, girls do
not have someone to look up to for leadership and support while pursuing these STEM
subjects.

At university, it often happens that girls who had been among the top performers in
high school, and were used to excellent grades, feel devastated at getting a C grade in
STEM subjects. While young men in general bounce back from receiving lower grades
at the university level, women tend to internalize, and are quick to decide that their
failure must be innate. Many of these girls conclude that they are not smart enough to
continue their education and subsequent career in STEM, resulting in fewer and fewer
women represented in STEM industries. Chances are that many girls have never met a
woman in technology and engineering positions.

We are failing our girls when they perceive boys to be better at math, science, computers,
and technology. Learning differently doesn’t mean that children’s potential is gender-
assigned. Entrepreneurial skills are about possibilities, not limitations. What if girls
learned entrepreneurial skills long before college? Could girls as young as pre-K be
taught to approach learning and life with an entrepreneurial mindset?

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 THE “Failure is scary. It takes a lot of courage
to understand that succeeding is really a
FAILURE SHIFT long list of successive failures.”

Too often, girls are taught that the absence of failure equals success. Moving from the
pressure of perfection to the freedom from fear involves taking a look at this underlying
need to be perfect. The cure for perfectionism is simple enough: It’s imperfection. It’s
getting it wrong. It’s learning how to fail, to value and to appreciate failure as something
that can teach you. It is learning how each stage of a project yields actionable
information…that each step can enlighten or, at worst, eliminate a dead-end course
of action. In order to accept imperfection, girls need the support and understanding of
family, teachers and community.

Entrepreneurial education infuses failure with positive meaning. It offers strategies

for changing how girls see failure. It gives girls what I call “practice at failure.” Girls
learn that everyone fails. It’s how you deal with failure that makes all the difference.
At VentureLab, successive failures are built into the curriculum. This provides girls with
a safe environment to examine the role of failure in real time, in supportive groups of
peers. For many girls, a VentureLab entrepreneurial class is the first time that they have
seen failure as a valuable, vital part of learning. They discover that there’s something
transformative about learning, that they have within themselves the ability to create
and grow an enterprise, that they actually have the tools to carry an idea forward and
override obstacles.

With entrepreneurial experience, girls come to see failures as steps in learning, and they
can apply this thinking to any challenge in life—academics, relationships, family, sports,
service, and career—even to standardized tests themselves.

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 FAILURE IS “Failure is our
friend!”—that is, when
OUR FRIEND we learn from it.

We can’t change the educational system overnight, but we can counteract its
discouraging influences and we can change how girls treat failure. Starting now, we
can create a positive environment for failure. This involves simple demonstrations of
cheering on girls and letting them know that we’re proud of them when they rebound
from failure, when they look for opportunities to help them learn from setbacks, and
also when we introduce new ways of teaching and evaluating students.

What’s so exciting about teaching entrepreneurial skills in such a setting is that girls:

• Are free to take risks and make mistakes without hurting their
grades.
• Put into practice their ideas to make something new.
• Learn to work with teams on problems that interest them.
• Define their own projects.
• Take risks knowing that risk-taking is leading them toward better ideas
and innovations.
• Take on challenges that they’d never have accepted if their efforts
were being graded.

In entrepreneurial education, the focus is on can, not cannot. In every VentureLab

entrepreneurial class or camp, instructors ensure that there will be plenty of
frustrating, laughable, “What was I thinking?” failures. How do we ensure this? Simple:
We encourage girls to try new ideas, to test them, to stretch beyond their skill set,
and to take a shot at things that no one thinks will work. The truth is, things usually
don’t work. That’s the beauty of it. We need only create an environment where failure
is anticipated, welcomed, analyzed, and celebrated. Even so-called epic fails: We’ve
been known to shake a can of carbonated water and spray the team, or break out New

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 Year’s Eve noisemakers. When I say we celebrate failures, I really mean it.

VentureLab students learn that the mistakes that count the most are the ones that they
make on the way to developing ideas. Students learn to take small calculated risks in
multiples, testing prototypes that are likely both to fail and to offer valuable information
about what works and what doesn’t. Girls learn to fail wisely and repeatedly, avoiding
the single catastrophic failure of thoroughly untested ideas.

Frequently, girls who pass through our classes are a bit surprised to find that while their
ideas or experiments failed, often repeatedly, in the end it was they who succeeded.
Many girls are amazed that a perfect score or top grade isn’t the goal in our course.
The goal is learning to think like an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs aren’t discouraged by
failures, at least not for long. They learn from failures.

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 FAILING “You don’t go through
things, you grow
UPWARD through things.”

Mistakes are normal. Everyone make mistakes. They are to be anticipated and faced
head-on for the lessons they hold. This is a revelation for so many girls that it bears
repeating: You will make mistakes, and it is up to you to figure out what you can learn
from them. Let honesty, humor and wisdom guide you. Fail upward. Emerge stronger.

Girls need challenges and grit to grow up strong, like trees in the wind that withstand
the weather. A “perfect” upbringing—if there is such a thing—often lacks the stress,
tension and challenges that anyone needs in order to become resilient. Girls need to
“stand up to the storm” as much as boys do. The best way for parents to guide their
daughters is not to protect them, but to prepare them with grit-building experiences
and to equip them with entrepreneurial skills, to condition them to learn from failures.

Failure is the shared common denominator among many entrepreneurs, says Amy
Wilkinson, who interviewed 200 highly successful entrepreneurs, including Sara Blakely,
the creator of Spanx. Wilkinson calls such successful failure strategies “failing wisely.”
Failure itself didn’t generate the success of these extraordinary entrepreneurs. Learning
from failure was the key. Wilkinson’s entrepreneurs didn’t hide from failure nor did they
hide their failure from others. To fail wisely, they placed small bets, set a failure ratio,
believed enough to persist, and turned setbacks into strengths. The Silicon Valley startup
mantra, “Fail early, fail often,” echoes this.

Entrepreneurs don’t give up. They have grit, a tenacious, dogged perseverance that
drives them toward their goals. When they’re knocked down, they pick themselves up,
dust themselves off, and incorporate what they’ve learned into their next moves. They
refrain from casting blame.

Grit is an essential element of the entrepreneurial mindset. It has two parts. One
is resilience, a positive response to failure or adversity. The other is perseverance, a
tendency to maintain interest and stay on task in the face of obstacles. Grit means
not enabling a behavioral pattern of abandoning tasks just for the sake of change or

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 because they’ve gotten tiresome. It’s about seeing things through and developing
mastery, even though along the way the process can be uncomfortable, frustrating,
difficult, discouraging, or at times boring. It means picking yourself up and being excited
that you get to try again, this time knowing more than you did before.

Teaching girls lessons in failure is part of the entrepreneurial experience. VentureLab

ensures that accomplished students get multiple doses of failure, and that struggling
students learn that failing is part of any entrepreneurial experience. Both kinds of
students realize that it’s not only okay to fail, but that failure is expected of entrepreneurs.
VentureLab students learn not to let failures keep them from going wherever their
interests take them, and that failing can actually be an advantage. It isn’t necessary to
start out already good at something. It might not even be possible. All that’s required is
that you brave failure—and that you always have grit.

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 TALKING “What have
you failed at
ABOUT FAILURE today?”

Dinner conversations at the Blakely household had an unusual twist. Each night at the
table, Sara Blakely’s father would ask her, “What have you failed at today?”

By the time she entered college, Sara Blakely was steeped in failure and experienced
at rebounding. She had a sunny outlook and the sort of confidence that comes not
from conventional achievements but from facing down failures and then plowing them
for the lessons they could yield. In working through her various attempts at activities
like singing and sports—both failures—Sara developed an indefatigable persistence.
She learned that failure offers lessons she could never get in class. Through successive
failures, Sara discovered her talents, passions and deep inexplicable interests. She
learned to welcome small failures as a way to push herself. She became comfortable
with failures and didn’t let them pull her down. No, Sara wouldn’t become a singer or a
soccer star. Nor would she become a lawyer (in college, she scored poorly on the Law
School Admissions Test). Instead, Sara would become an entrepreneur—and the first
self-made female billionaire in U.S. history.

Sara Blakely’s patented invention was Spanx. She has built an entrepreneurial empire
upon this product, revolutionizing the women’s undergarments industry. Sara saw a
problem—women wanting to appear shapelier and smoother in their clothes, losing the
visible panty lines—and she attacked how to solve it from a woman’s perspective.

Her father’s question, “What have you failed at today?” cultivated in Sara Blakely a
constructive approach to failure and her carry-on entrepreneurial spirit. Sara considers
this spirit a real gift: “My dad growing up encouraged me and my brother to fail,” she
says. “It’s really allowed me to be much freer in trying things and spreading my wings
in life.”

How do you speak to your children and students about failure? Do you create an
environment and engage in a dialogue with your children where failure is a tool for
discovery? One of the VentureLab exercises with elementary-school children is to

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 brainstorm ways to think of failure. Girls learn that failure has a vocabulary all its
own, and it is fraught with connotations. Here are some connotations our VentureLab
students offered for failure:

Setback Messed up Lesson

Challenge One more down Now we know
Opportunity Hit a wall Time to redesign
Epic fail Experience Teachable moment
Blunder Goof Screw up

It’s apparent that children internalize the way in which we talk to them about failure.
Say, “I am proud of you,” when a child makes a mistake and accepts it in the right spirit.
The home should be a safe place for children to tell you the truth about the parts of
their lives that aren’t going so well. Make failure safe. Demonstrate unconditional love
by being somewhat oblivious to easy achievements while enthusiastically supporting
children in pursuing and discovering their own passions. Celebrate achievements that
require perseverance and learning from failures—not just talent or luck. Children have
a remarkable ability to overcome failure and bounce back when they are on a path that
interests them. The phrase, “I believe in you,” really matters. Girls carry those words
as they learn from setbacks, stay on task, and deliver on the promises they make to
themselves.

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 CONCLUSION

Girls can be taught a confidence mindset, to persevere through failures and setbacks
in pursuit of their goals. When their self-image is unchained, and their self-confidence
unleashed by shifting their thinking from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, girls
become unstoppable change agents. By teaching girls in an entrepreneurial setting, we
help them to welcome failure, to learn from their mistakes and to stand up proudly with
confidence in themselves.

Often, VentureLab girls who learn entrepreneurial skills go on to emerge from their
protective shells and develop and present products to their surprised parents who’ve
never seen their daughters demonstrate such remarkable confidence. These girls aren’t
simply inspired: Their transformation is inspiring, and astonishing to anyone still inclined
to underestimate a young girl.

Our motivation to teach girls an entrepreneurial mindset and can-do skills is not
only about gender equity, but our nation’s future. Our global leadership depends to a
great extent on the ability of our entrepreneurs to create companies and jobs out of
innovations in technology. That is the genius of our economy, but also its vulnerability.
We cannot become complacent. We need new, young, courageous, growth-minded
entrepreneurs—men and women—to start and build the businesses of the future.

We need women who instinctively think and act like entrepreneurs in all kinds of
endeavors because they have internalized a growth mindset. The growth mindset
encompasses success as learning, developing and testing new ideas, solving problems
creatively and collaboratively, persevering through setbacks, building grit, gaining deep
knowledge, and—most especially for girls—developing confidence. It is less about filling
in the correct bubbles on a standardized test, and more about developing students who
could write a better test themselves.

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 Whatever their ultimate calling, every girl can learn to stretch, can discover reservoirs of
inner strength, gain confidence, and develop a growth mindset—all crucial elements in
STEM learning. Girls will have more grit, become wiser with failures, meet role models,
cast themselves in new roles, and imagine themselves advancing their innovative ideas.
I believe this so strongly that through VentureLab I am providing an open-source toolkit
for parents and educators. Together, let’s equip our daughters with entrepreneurial
skills to spark their interest in STEM—and to light the path for those who will become
the leaders and entrepreneurs who will create the companies and jobs of the future.

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