Many women experience swagger and success in the classroom.

Wendy says “My swagger in school began in a computer science class. The professor asked a difficult question and everyone in class decided to support the class brain’s approach to the problem.  I saw that there was a problem with that strategy and stuck to my own approach.  I was the only one in class to get it right.”

My swagger moment was deciding to become a college instructor when I was in a class taught by an opinionated chauvinistic man.  He gave his opinion on real estate development as if it were fact.  He said that any developer who did more than he had to – that gave back anything to the community was an amateur – a boy developer.  He could not even conceive of such as thing as a girl or woman developer.  I argued with him during class for the first half of the semester and then realized that I was potentially going to flunk the class.  So instead of arguing, I made an outline of the class that I would teach.  I called it Real World Planning.  I showed the outline to a professor friend and before I knew it, I was teaching Real World Planning – offering a variety of opinions and points of view – and did so for eight years.

Sixty nine percent of the successful women asked as part of the survey “Defining Success,” conducted by the Girl Scouts ranked achievement in educational settings as the primary influence on their adult success.