When I first joined the Girls Empowerment Network staff back in 2010, if you had asked me what my passion was, I probably would have told you: “I want to help girls have high self-esteem.” Many, many things have changed in the world, my life, and this organization I’m so proud of since then; one of the most important of which is our discovery that building girl’s self-efficacy is actually one of the most impactful ways to bring girls’ empowerment to life and is at the core of what we do best!
How did Girls Empowerment Network discover our connection to self-efficacy?
Back in early 2018, I had the opportunity to work on a team at Girls Empowerment Network that was doing a deep dive on refining our mission language. At that point in time, our agency was enjoying a 20+ year reputation in the Austin community for providing excellent services to empower girls. We were a few years into our expansion into Houston, and we had held our first We Are Girls Dallas event.
As we grew, it was becoming more clear that we needed to improve how we explained our mission, impact, and value effectively and concisely in the community. This committee was under the leadership of a consultant who donated her expertise to the process (huge SHOUT OUT to Nickie Froiland, at Froiland Consulting!) She interviewed a cross section of our stakeholders. She shared with us what we suspected…our programs had glowing reputations among girls, educators, and parents. Our donors and volunteers truly enjoyed working with us. But there was a problem…we were known loosely as “for girls’ self-esteem” and we were not doing a great job at explaining how we were truly impacting girls and improving their lives.
By far, the most powerful moment in that committee work was the day that we explored self-efficacy. We had been examining all of the language in our curriculum or past marketing materials. I’ll never forget the feeling of staring at the dictionary definition of self-efficacy and the excitement that started to rise in me as I read those simple words: “self-efficacy is one’s belief in their own abilities.”
There it was—I knew it and everyone on the committee was saying they know it too…that is exactly what we’ve been doing for 20 years AND we thought that maybe it would be something that we could truly track and measure, so that we could better quantify our impact for our supporters. The series of events that unfolded after that day launched our organization onto the next level of brand sophistication, growth, sustainability, and scalability which is a beautiful story for another blog post. For now, I want to tell you a bit more about the power of building girls’ self-efficacy.
So why exactly do we talk about self-efficacy at Girls Empowerment Network, and what is it?
To reiterate, put into its simplest words, self-efficacy is a girl’s belief in her own ability to succeed. It is a research-based principle for us; we know that giving girls a strong belief in themselves has an important impact on academic success, future career achievement, and long-term positive outcomes. (You can read more from Girls Empowerment Network’s Director of Impact, Dr. Sarah Miller Fellows’ writing on that here.)
In other words, self-efficacy serves as the foundation upon which most future successes are built. To help demonstrate what I mean, I like to often give a few examples:
1) Say we want to increase women’s representation in STEM fields, a noble and often cited goal. How does self-efficacy connect? The idea is that if we get girls on their Middle School robotics team, they will learn extremely valuable STEM content and skills, which they will carry forward. But without a basic belief in themselves that they CAN join the robotics team and are capable of participating, girls will not even raise their hands to join. So, if we wish to close the gender STEM gap, increasing girls' self-efficacy is actually the first key step.
2) Or take another, very different scenario—a teen girl is a relationship with a boy who she feels is becoming increasingly controlling and she wants to break up. If she believes that she will be capable of speaking her truth, asking her friends and family for support so that she can accomplish this incredibly scary task, she is going to be much more likely to place that extremely necessary phone call sooner rather than later.
How exactly is self-efficacy different from self-esteem?
Self-efficacy is internal to each person (in this case, adolescent girls) and is something that we can increase by giving them access to safe spaces to try out new skills and master experiences (more on that below).
Self-esteem, on the other hand, is “an individual's subjective evaluation of their own worth.” The trouble with focusing only on a “subjective evaluations of your own worth” is that this can be impacted by a litany of factors you cannot control. Let’s use an example from an adult perspective to drive home what I mean: You have “high self-esteem” about your public speaking skills. But one day you have a really bad presentation and someone leaves you a terrible review. In this case, that external force could cause your “subjective evaluation” of your own public speaking strengths to plummet. You might start thinking “I suck at this. Why am I even in this field?” But the next time you have a speaking engagement, and you’re on fire, jiving with your audience, that self-esteem would likely rise again…putting you on a bit of a roller coaster internally.
On the other hand, if you have high self-efficacy about your public speaking, you will BELIEVE in your own abilities to do it, no matter what external forces say about you. When you have an off day and you get that negative review, you’ll take it seriously as a growth opportunity, but you won’t start to think that this setback means something negative about you as a person or that it makes you a “failure.”
You’ll believe that you have what it takes to learn from the feedback and improve—so you will learn from the feedback and improve, without sacrificing a sense of self in the process.
How does self-efficacy building come to life in our programs and how do we measure it?
Self-efficacy can be general, or it can be domain specific. At Girls Empowerment Network, we have identified six domains that we feel are critical to building girls self-efficacy so that they can achieve the futures of their dreams. Our curriculum is oriented to increase girls’ self-efficacy in one or more of these areas:
1) Critical thinking
2) Communication
3) Creativity
4) Collaboration
5) Confidence, and
6) Coping skills.
Naturally, we call them our “Six Cs” and one of the best things about using this framework to impact girls’ self-efficacy is that we can measure each of these domains through a carefully planned evaluation process, designed especially for our programming. Our self-efficacy survey tools allow us to demonstrate the changes in self-efficacy levels for girls who go through our programming and prove our impact the community in a tangible and measurable way.
Of course, as a feminist, I believe that the path to equity for ALL women and girls will take many solutions; some of which challenge oppressive structures. But one critical tool that must be in the feminist tool kit is increasing girls’ self-efficacy. I’m extremely proud that this is exactly what Girls Empowerment Network is giving this generation of girls and young women.