“She’s a Good Girl”

Tom Petty is my favorite singer in the whole world.  He has a song you may have heard of, called “Free Fallin'”.  There are a couple of relevant lines in that song:  “She’s a good girl, loves her mama…”, “And the bad boys, are standin’ in the shadows, and the good girls, are at home with broken hearts.”

We were all raised to be “good girls”.  Quiet, thin, agreeable, smiling, helpful, good listeners, unselfish.  I have always been a “good girl” – I didn’t smoke or drink in high school, I was valedictorian, I felt horrible the one time I didn’t make my curfew, I wore dresses, I liked the color pink (well, still do, but it is a really flattering color), and incredibly, I never had detention.  Not once.  One of my greatest regrets of the middle school – high school years?  Never getting detention. Would it have been so bad?  Would the world have ended?  No – I would have just been a normal teenager, and I probably would have been a bit more comfortable with deviating from the “good girl” script.

As the years went on, I became more comfortable with imperfection – I got some Bs in college, I had messy relationships and even messier breakups, I had crappy jobs, I lived with weird roommates, I moved to Mexico, and finally, I gave up my last effort at being a “good girl” – burning out in a “helping” career I hated and made no income – and transitioned to tech, coding specifically.

During this transition, which was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, mentally, emotionally, and financially, I started to realize the benefit of trying.  The benefit of applying for jobs, even if I wasn’t 100% qualified. The benefit of asking questions, of doing exactly what I wanted to do, of not asking permission, of not putting up with abuse in the workplace.  When a coworker expressed a wish for his daughter to be successful in a tech career like I had been, wondering what had worked for me, I suddenly realized that teaching a girl to be a “good girl” is the worst possible thing anyone could do.

I just finished watching a TED Talk that addresses this issue – “Teach Girls Bravery, Not Perfection” by Reshma Saujani. I kept thinking about my “good girl” theory.  “Perfect” is the ultimate goal of the “good girl”, and something I have to overcome every day.  Saujani captures a lot of points really well – we are missing out on so much potential by raising girls who believe that nothing (as demonstrated in her “blank text editor” example) is better than something done imperfectly.  She also expresses how writing code is a great way to become comfortable with imperfection, which I’ve found to be very true in my life as well.

Although the “good girl” mystique has already done a lot of damage to adult women trying to succeed in jobs that they aren’t “perfect” at, or apply for jobs they don’t meet 100% of the qualifications for, or run complicated lives that will never be “perfect”, going forward we can be disruptive, ask questions, make jokes, be ironic, make messes, fail over and over, forget things, procrastinate, work too much, be lazy, and pursue dreams that no “good girl” would ever get to experience.