Exposé d'anglais sur la socialisation

Who is Reshma Saujani

I decided to present a TedTalk entitled « Teach girls bravery, not perfection ».

The speaker is a 41 years-old woman, Reshma Saujani. She is Indian-rooted but was born in Illinois. She is graduated from the university of Illinois, from Harvard and Yale. But most importantly, she is a politician of the Democratic party.

And Reshma starts by telling us her story. In 2010, she decided to run for Congress, whereas she had always been a shadow politician : she had been fundraiser, organizer, such as in Clinton’s campaign for president in 2008). While everybody was telling her she was crazy to do so, she ran against Carolyn Marly, who had been in place since 1992. Finally, Reshma only got 19% of the votes.

Indeed, she lose, but what she points out is that it was the first time in her life that she was taking a real risk, that she was doing smthg really brave. Plus, she wasn’t aware of failure or of not being perfect.

Girls learn to be perfect

Because we are teaching our girls to smile, to be pretty, to be perfect, not to be brave. On the contrary, boys are told to be brave, and courageous. Reshma uses a term that in my opinion is really interesting, which “socialisation of perfection”

At school

And this starts at the youngest age. Some studies show that doing an exercise, girls tend to give up easier than boys because they are afraid not to get it right and not to do it perfectly. In other words, girls prefer to show nothing at all, than showing something tat is totally correct.

And moreover, because girls want to achieve this perfection, they don’t want to show they are imperfect. Thus, they tend to be afraid to speak or to ask a question in a course. And I think we have all seen this at scpo : when it comes to asking question to a lecture’s teacher, boys are much more represented than girls.

At work

And this scheme that starts I wouldn’t say at kindergarten but at least in primary school, is recurrent into a woman’s life, including into her working life. As a matter of fact, Reshma Saujani explains that women tend to apply for jobs in which they know they are going to be perfect. And she gives really relevant figure: men will apply for a job if they fit 60% of the qualification, versus 100% for women.

Unravel this socialisation of perfection

We have to unravel this thing of perfection around girls. Facing this “socialisation of perfection”, Reshma Saujani wants to build a sisterhood to show girls that they are not alone. And I think this is very interesting, because at the moment, I believe there is a brotherhood, but not a sisterhood. Why I say so is because in daily life, I feel like boys tend to get along really easily when they don’t know each other, which is not the case for girls. And there is a simple place where we can see this : the beach. On the beach, you will see men talking to other men, asking for a volleyball party or anything. And women will be much more suspicious about other women. So okey, this is a caricature, but this is a true trend. And it remembered something I read in a book entitled We should all be feminist, by a Nigerian feminist Chimamanda Ngozi. She says : « We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, but for the attention of men. » So perharps we are still into a patriarchal society in which girls are told to be perfect, in order to find the best outcross, the best husband they can. And what is crazy is that all this is implicit.

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