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Part Two: Brave Is the New Black

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Redefining Bravery

As I write this, a watershed moment for women and bravery is playing out on the national stage. It began, of course, in the fall of 2017, when we witnessed just how awesome female bravery can be.

When the New York Times published a blistering exposé of Hollywood titan Harvey Weinstein revealing decades of sexual harassment, it unleashed a flood of personal stories. It felt like every day I’d get a fresh “Breaking News” alert on my phone about another powerful dude in entertainment, sports, academia, media, or politics who had used his status to harass, harm, and intimidate women into silence. Slowly at first, and then with shocking volume and speed, women joined the thunderous chorus of the MeToo movement and freed themselves from years of shame. They came out from behind the fear and said: No more. No more silencing our voices. No more playing nice. No more trading in our self-worth or accepting patronizing bullshit and abuse because “that’s just how it is.” The results were historic, as the previously untouchable careers and reputations of these men instantaneously were reduced to smoldering ashes.

The MeToo movement gave countless women their voices back, but it also showed the world what can happen when women band together and choose bravery. But it also gave us a different way to talk about bravery: why it matters, who has it (um, everyone), and, most of all, how we define what it means to be brave.

As of the writing of this book, we don’t yet know if this movement will inspire the long-term, systemic changes in the lopsided power dynamic we desperately need. But the trends we are seeing give me real hope. I watched with pride as Serena Williams broke the unspoken genteel rules of her sport and dared to take an emotional and defiant stand at the U.S Open against the obvious bias levied at her, in an effort to clear her name and speak out for all female tennis players. I sat glued to the television with awe watching a terrified but determined Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testify before the Senate about her assault at the hands of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. This is how women will change the world, one brave voice at a time.

We are seeing more and more women displaying bravery in so many ways, including daring to defy entrenched stereotypes, claiming our voices and speaking out against injustice, shattering glass ceilings, and much more. It’s time to redefine courage as a trait attainable by anyone and everyone, regardless of gender or biology.

Is Bravery a Male Trait?

Spoiler alert: No!

One of the most memorable responses I got to my TED talk about bravery was from a guy who posted a comment on the website Armed and Dangerous (its tagline: Sex, Software, Politics, and Firearms. Life’s Simple Pleasures…) arguing that women are less brave because of our ovaries. Yes, you read that right: our ovaries.

He claimed that women are naturally more cautious and fearful because evolution has wired us that way. According to him, “women have only a limited number of ovulations in their lifetime and, in the EAA (environment of ancestral adaptation), pregnancy was a serious risk of death. Contrast this with men, who have an effectively unlimited supply of sperm—any individual male is far less critical to a human group’s reproductive success than any individual female. Do the game theory. It would be crazy if women weren’t instinctively far more risk-averse than men.” Well, listen up, sir: my ovaries have no say in how brave I choose to be. His reasoning may sound logical and elicit nods of approval from his male cronies, but his science is faulty at best. These kinds of arguments are sadly commonplace and need to be dismantled, now.

Bravery is not innate. Males are not biologically ordained to be the braver sex, and testosterone isn’t the singular almighty ticket to courage. Unfortunately, this “men are hardwired to be braver” argument has been made many times in different shades. I’m sure you’ve heard any number of these variations: Our brains are wired differently when it comes to risk. Men are braver because they have more testosterone, or because they have been prehistorically programmed to woo reproductive partners with their bold prowess. I’m calling bullshit on all of it.

The evolutionary argument essentially comes down to reproductive success, or survival of the fittest. But this theory that male bravery is a trait that will enable the species to continue is also in need of a refresh. Today the whole Me Tarzan/You Jane notion of the big, burly caveman who fearlessly hunts down giant mastodons while his barefoot and pregnant wife hangs safely back at the cave ground nurturing the home and hearth is, to say the least, outdated. It may have taken millions of years, but we’ve evolved way past the days of a woman’s job being restricted to gathering berries, or baking pies, or mixing a dry martini and acting as pleasant ornamentation.

Bravery in today’s world is far more than just physical prowess, and we see hundreds of examples all around us of girls and women being brave as hell in myriad ways. From transgender soldier Chelsea Manning who exposed classified information about government corruption, to Australian senator Larissa Waters who boldly laid claim to working moms’ rights and breastfed her daughter on the floor of Parliament, to the hundreds of women who risked their livelihood and reputations to blow the whistle on sexual assault at the hands of powerful men, we’ve amassed plenty of proof that the scope and definition of bravery has evolved mightily.

All this ends up being good news for us as women, because while we can’t change biology, we sure as hell can change our environment—or at least how we respond to it. Just like we learned to be perfect girls, we teach ourselves how to be brave women.

A New View of Bravery

In 2013, I had two major life events. I lost my race for public advocate and I suffered my third miscarriage a few months later. I was a mess. All these bad things were happening to me and I didn’t feel like I could stop them.

Not long after, my husband dragged me on a trip to New Zealand for our friend Jun’s wedding. Jun is a little bit of an adventure nut, so the entire trip was centered on getting his wedding party to do semidangerous things. One of the activities on the agenda was bungee jumping. Now, I am terrified of heights. As in, I want to throw up when I am at the top of a building, so you can understand why I really didn’t want to hurl my body off a bridge suspended only by an elastic band around my ankle. At the same time, my life felt out of control, and somehow I sensed that letting go of my fear of heights and going for it would allow me to let go of the lingering frustration and sadness I’d been carrying around, too.

So I jumped. Yes, in a tandem with my husband and with my eyes squeezed shut the whole time while I prayed to every Hindu god I knew, but I jumped. It was terrifying, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that flying through the air wasn’t also thrilling and liberating. After that trip, I came back to the States, restarted my career, and tried yet again to have a baby—both of which worked out better than I ever dreamed.

Which of these acts was the bravest? If you go by the traditional (a.k.a. male) definition of brave, you’d probably say the bungee jump. But true bravery is more than being a daredevil. I consider all three of these choices—the jump, the career reboot after a humiliating loss, the pregnancy attempt after three devastating miscarriages—personal acts of bravery. Bravery takes so many different forms, and they’re all important and valuable. All bravery matters because bravery feeds on itself. We build our bravery muscles one act at a time, big or small. This is what I mean when I say it’s time for us to redefine bravery, on our terms.

In a World Full of Princesses, Dare to Be a Hot Dog

So how do I define bravery?

Bravery is my friend Carla who walked away from a massively successful company she’d built because her relationship with her cofounder had grown toxic. It took her a few years to work up the courage to leave because she’d given so much of herself to building the business and had banked so much on its success and didn’t know who she would be if she was no longer a part of it.

Bravery is Sharon who gave up a comfortable twenty-five-year marriage and easy life because she knew deep down that she was gay and would regret it the rest of her life if she didn’t follow her heart. It’s my son’s babysitter Audrey who battled and survived breast cancer. It’s every woman who chose a life path or partner her family doesn’t approve of, who had a baby on her own, or honored her inner voice that said motherhood wasn’t the path for her. It’s every woman who went back to school or to work after her kids were born, and every woman who chose not to. It’s any woman who had the guts to shatter the illusion that she has it all together and ask for help.

Bravery is every woman who has spoken out against mistreatment, even if it meant risking her career or reputation. It’s every woman who let herself off the hook for making a mistake, who gives herself a pass for feeding her kids pizza every once in a while instead of a home-cooked meal, who, when she knows she’s wrong, says “I’m sorry” without being defensive or shifting blame.

It’s brave to rock who you are, loud and proud and without apologies. We see examples of this all around us, and not only in the expected places. Not long ago, a photo of a five-year-old girl named Ainsley from North Carolina went viral after she showed up for “Princess Week” at her dance class dressed not as Cinderella or one of the sisters from Frozen—but as a hot dog. Her dance teacher was so wowed by Ainsley’s gutsy choice that she posted a picture, and the Internet went nuts. Across the Twittersphere, people cheered for this little girl who unknowingly inspired every one of us who dream of letting our own freak flag fly. My favorite tweet: In a world full of princesses, dare to be a hot dog.

It just might be that today’s youngest generation of girls could teach us a thing or two about bravery. My friend Valerie has a daughter who has known she was transgender from the time she was seven years old. Valerie helped her transition at that young age from James to Jasmine, and when Jasmine started a new school the following year, no one knew. She kept her birth identity a secret, unsure of whether she would be made fun of—or worse. In one of the most moving acts of bravery I can imagine, when her class was learning about gender identity, little Jasmine came out and told her classmates her secret. For a few short moments, they sat in surprised silence before gathering around to give Jasmine hugs of support and tell her they were proud to be her friend.

Bravery is taking an unpopular stand when everyone expects you to go along with the program—and then refusing to back down. In January 2017, a few days after President Trump was inaugurated, I received a phone call from Ivanka Trump’s office inviting me to the White House to discuss a computer science education initiative she was spearheading. Then, a few days later, the president signed the executive order blocking the entry of citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries. As the daughter of refugees myself I felt both sickened and a strong obligation to stand up for the many Muslim girls who participate in Girls Who Code. I declined Ms. Trump’s invitation to partner with this administration.

Later that year, many big-name tech leaders gathered at an event in Detroit to celebrate the Education Department’s commitment of $200 million for computer science education. Many were and still are my friends and industry colleagues. I did not attend, again feeling I had to take a stand against an administration that has inflicted such harm through its bigotry.

I felt so strongly about this that I decided to double-down and agreed to write an op-ed for the New York Times explaining my position. I’ll level with you: I was terrified the morning it was due to come out. I believed so deeply in what I was saying, and at the same time knew that some people in the tech industry would be very pissed off. It’s very hard to stand up to powerful people, and I was acutely aware of the fact that there could be real fallout. I knew I could lose funding, because I called out some of Girls Who Code’s biggest supporters, mostly tech giants and leaders who would not appreciate having their moral courage called into question. But I knew I had to brave my fear and do what I thought was right. I would rather have stood up to this issue than be silent in the face of a bully just because I was beholden to my funders.

Amazingly, the backlash I was braced for never came. Instead, donations for small amounts poured in from all over the country, along with notes of gratitude and support. Teachers who longed to see more diversity wrote to cheer me on, moms wrote to say “thank you” for my stance because, as one said, “There are things that should never be normalized.” My point here isn’t that I should be congratulated; it’s that risky acts—like taking an unpopular stand—might be scary, but they often end up being the ones that are most appreciated and celebrated.

It takes guts to be the first one to do something, to break new ground. Take the brave women who called out Bill Cosby, Bill O’Reilly, Roger Ailes, then presidential candidate Donald Trump, investors in Silicon Valley, and many others, even knowing there was a strong likelihood that no one would believe their stories. This was before the Harvey Weinstein floodgates opened, unleashing the groundswell that became the MeToo movement—which makes what these women did even braver. Their stories were largely discounted, their reputations were irreversibly smeared, and they were subjected to vicious threats and hateful attacks in the media, and yet, they refused to back down.

For a short while, it looked like all their pain was for nothing. But as we now know, it was anything but. Though they had no way of knowing it at the time, these women opened a tiny crack in the fault line, which grew into one of the biggest earthquakes in our modern social history. Without them, who knows if MeToo ever would have happened? One thing I know for sure is that bravery is contagious, and when even one lone woman stands up, it inspires so many others to do the same.

Those are the big, public forms of bravery. Yet the quiet ones we tackle in our private moments are just as valuable. One of my Girls Who Code alums, Valentina, decided to grow out her natural curly hair in her junior year of high school. This may seem like an insignificant decision, but at her school, this just wasn’t done; the standard of beauty was sleek, flattened hair. Did some kids make rude comments? Yes. But after so many girls told her privately that they wished they had the guts to do the same thing, Valentina decided to start a club at her school called Know Your Roots. “Society makes us feel like we need to straighten our hair just to fit in,” she said. “I didn’t know how many other girls felt insecure and struggle with feeling beautiful with their hair just as it is.” Bravery isn’t always about doing the biggest, boldest, baddest thing. Sometimes it’s braver to give yourself permission to be true to yourself by not doing something that is expected of you. When my son was born, for example, I assumed I would breastfeed him for as long as possible. That’s what every book (and nurse in the hospital…and other mom I met…) told me I was supposed to do, and of course I wanted the very best for him, so I committed to it. I was going to be the best mom ever, damn it!

Once I went back to work, things got complicated. I found myself frantically searching every three hours for a private bathroom to pump, spilling breast milk down my blouse in tiny, smelly airplane bathrooms, and setting my alarm for 5 a.m. to get in a feeding before leaving for work. I was frustrated, exhausted, and miserable—not to mention pissed as hell at my husband for not having to deal with breastfeeding. Where was the joy of new motherhood I’d been promised? I turned to my friend Esther Perel, the renowned psychotherapist and relationship expert, for help. When I told her what was going on, she looked at me, and said plainly, “Just stop breastfeeding.” Bam! Her words hit me like a ton of bricks. I had literally never even considered that it was an option not to breastfeed. I stopped, and within days, I fell in love with being a mother. Finally, I could be the parent I wanted to be for my child, instead of continuing on as a pumping, crying, frustrated mess.

For every woman like the above-mentioned Sharon who bravely left a marriage, there’s another woman who bravely chose to stay. For many years, it was believed that the bravest choice a woman can make when her spouse cheats is to leave and strike out on her own, not least because of the shame attached with getting a divorce. However, as Esther points out in her new book called The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, it isn’t divorce that carries the stigma anymore. These days, choosing to stay if a partner has been unfaithful is looked down upon far more. And yet, for some, it may be the right choice. “Women have all kinds of reasons why they decide this one experience won’t be the deciding factor in a decades-long relationship, and they should be able to do that without the fear of judgment of everyone around them,” she says.

It’s brave to respect yourself enough to say no to something you don’t want to do, especially if it means disappointing a friend or loved one. It’s nuts how hard this can be sometimes, isn’t it? Our perfect-girl training that urges us to be helpful and accommodating at all costs is damn hard to shake. How many times have you agreed to go to a party, sit on a committee or board, volunteer at your kid’s school, lend a family member money, or do a big favor for a friend that deep down you really didn’t want to do? It takes guts to be able to say, “I’m sorry but I just don’t have the time to take that on right now,” and even more guts to say, “Thank you, but no,” without the apology or excuse (I’m still working on that one…).

When you’ve got the “perfection or bust” conditioning, it’s brave to put yourself out there and do something when you’re not sure you’ll succeed. Sue Lin worked for months on a treatment for a new comedy show and was terrified to send the pitch email to the content buyer at Netflix for fear she’d fall to pieces if it were rejected. But she prayed on it and hit send anyway. Marissa was terrified to start dating again after her divorce, but she wrote up a profile and joined an online dating site anyway. She knew, as we all do, that there are no guarantees, but she also knew that she was 100 percent more likely to meet someone by putting herself out there than by staying home binge watching Downton Abbey.

Bottom line here is that we need to recast bravery as far more than one-dimensional. It’s broad, complex, and context-specific—that is, a person may be bold in one area but not another. You can be bold and fierce in your entrepreneurial spirit but skittish in dating, or perfectly comfortable investing in the stock market but wouldn’t in a million years skydive. I’ve stood and given speeches in front of tens of thousands of people, but the thought of getting up to do karaoke at a friend’s birthday party scares the hell out of me.

It’s also deeply personal. For some, rappelling off a cliff is the bravest thing imaginable; for others, it’s giving a speech in front of twenty people. Soldiers who fight on the battlefield are brave; so are the women who fight for the right to birth control and reproductive choice. First responders who step up to save lives are brave; so are the women who risk their livelihood to speak up about sexual assault at the hands of powerful men. Senator John McCain was brave in September 2017 when he crossed party lines to stand up for what he believes; so was Shonda Rhimes when she made interracial couples the norm on her groundbreaking hit television shows.

It’s all bravery, and it all matters.

Brave Like Women

It’s no coincidence that our society has adopted the phrase “she’s got balls” as a perverse compliment for when a woman does something bold or gutsy. The implication, of course, is that men’s testicles are their seat of bravery and power. Well, just like we don’t need to be like men to be brave, we definitely don’t need to be like men to succeed. This is old, tired thinking that I’m so over.

It’s not as though acting like a dude really gets us anywhere anyway. At work, even when women adopt the same career advancement strategies, they still get lower pay. We’ve heard again and again about the double bind we face: If we aren’t nurturing, warm, and kind, we aren’t liked—but we get shut out of leadership positions if we are. We’re damned if we’re confident, outspoken, and gutsy, and doomed if we aren’t. Study after study shows that when women display stereotypically “masculine” traits such as toughness or nonverbal dominance (i.e., staring someone in the eye when speaking), they can come up against intense backlash. The receptivity to women displaying assertive behavior in the workplace just isn’t there. I want to add, “For now.” I am confident that if we reach back and start rewiring kids early, cutting out the gendered behaviors at the pass, we start changing this generationally.

But what about us here and now? To escape this double bind, we need to become brave not like men, but brave like women. We need to say, fuck the traditional rules and definitions, and do it our way, because we know that our contributions are just as valuable—if not more so. It’s time to play to our strengths instead of hiding them, no matter how “masculine” or “feminine” we think they are. Women are more emotional than men? Awesome. I say that’s an asset, not a liability, and the research backs that up. As just one of many examples, a report from PriceWaterhouseCooper and the Crowdfunding Center showed that women are 32 percent more successful at generating funds via crowdfunding than men. Why? Because they use more emotional and inclusive language in their pitches, which investors found more appealing than the clichéd sports and war metaphors and the typical dry business language.

It’s the same with women and risk-taking. Yes, women are generally more risk averse than men. But where you might say timid, I say intelligently cautious and thoughtful. There’s a reason why so many speculated that the economic crisis would never have happened if it were Lehman Sisters running the show.

We have spent so much time trying to figure out how to get into the game following the rules written by men. That makes about as much sense to me as trying to explore uncharted territory by following somebody else’s path. We can’t become unique by copying someone else’s formula any more than we can become successful by striving for someone else’s definition of success. And really, what’s the point of succeeding by someone else’s rules anyway?

We need to change our approach and do things authentically. Being brave like women is about making choices based on what we want and what makes us happy, not what others expect or want for us. If being a senator or a Fortune 500 CEO are your true goals, awesome! But they don’t have to be. Just as there is no one “right” way to be brave, there is no one universal definition of success.

Look, we know the biases against women exist in the workplace, in politics, and elsewhere. There are real structural challenges against women. There’s no denying that. Of the five hundred thousand elected officials in this country, 79 percent are still white men. Does that mean that if you’re a brown-skinned woman you shouldn’t run for office? Of course not. It means you should accept the challenges, recognize you might fail, and do it anyway.

I’m not telling you to just try harder to achieve your goals. What I am telling you is not to let fear stop you from going after them. I’m telling you not to give up before you try. If you succeed, the success will be even sweeter because it was fueled by courage and by genuine passion. If you don’t, you may be disappointed but you will still feel proud, because it will be what Carol Dweck calls an “honest failure.” We’ve come a long way, but the reality is that it will still be a while before we see big changes in the gender equality landscape. That’s the bad news. The good news is that how we respond and act in the face of these obstacles is up to us. I believe we need to stop trying to wrestle for power, respect, and opportunities from others and instead bravely make them for ourselves.

Don’t misunderstand me: I think we need to keep pushing as hard as we can for cultural change. It’s not okay for our girls to grow up in a world that tells them they have to starve themselves to meet some unrealistic standard of beauty, or that getting a degree in computer programming or speaking their minds is the exclusive domain of boys. We need to create a better world for them and for ourselves, and I believe we do this by defining bravery on our own terms one cause, one goal, one failure, one hot dog in a world of princesses at a time. We do it by cultivating the bravery that lives inside each and every one of us.