Reprinted from MAKERS Team & The Washington Post
Are you holding your own daughter back? Here are 5 ways to raise girls to be leaders. Could we be hindering our daughters from becoming strong leaders?
According to the Washington Post, new research from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and its Making Caring Common project found that teen boys, girls and parents have biases against girls and women as leaders.
Richard Weissbourd, a Harvard psychologist who runs the Making Caring Common project, researched bias with the goal of helping children learn to be kind.
Research found that 23 percent of girls and 40 percent of boys preferred male political leaders instead of female, while only 8 percent of girls and 4 percent of boys preferred female political leaders, according to the Washington Post.
The research also found that 35 percent of all respondents would prefer to have a male boss while only 23 percent of respondents would prefer to have a female boss. According to the Washington Post, the preference for male bosses was even strong among female respondents.
Therefore we could unknowingly be holding our daughters back with unconscious bias against female leaders.
Weissbourd and Luba Falk Feigenberg, partnerships manager at MCC, came up with five ways for parents to prevent gender bias. They are:
1. Check your own biases
2. Engage your kinds in making your home a bias-free zone
3. Help kids kick stereotypes to the curb
4. Don’t just let “boys be boys.”
5. Build girls’ leadership skills and self-confidence
