Successful women shine light on failure

WOMEN’S Health Loddon Mallee held a community breakfast to celebrate International Women’s Day on Wednesday.

A consistent theme across speakers and those in attendance was womens’ relationship with failure.

Speakers included Dr Skye Kinder who featured on Forbes 30 Under 30’s Asia Social Impact list in 2021 and 2019 VIC Young Australian of the Year, and Alissa Van Soest, General Manager at Discovery Science and Technology Centre.

Dr Kinder grew up in Bendigo and said she knew from a young age that she wanted to be a doctor.

“It’s really important, and this sounds a little bit corny, but to believe in yourself, because sometimes nobody else will believe in you and you have to back yourself,” she said.

“Sometimes, when a door closes you just climb through the window, you don’t wait for another door to open, you break your way in to where you need to get to.

“That’s what I’ve discovered as part of my journey, if the door’s closed, I’ll just smash the window in and climb through that way.”

A strong advocate for science, technology engineering and maths education, or STEM, Ms Van Soest said that 75 per cent of future jobs were going to need those skills.

“Every day we have students come into the centre; I say to them today we’re going to fail, we’re going to fail many, many times; because every time we fail, we have a new opportunity to find a new answer, a new solution, a new way of doing things,” she said.

“We need to not shy away from failure, we need to embrace it and find it as an opportunity to find new solutions.

“We have people come to the centre, and with the best intentions, they say it’s great to have a space for boys, it’s good to see the boys having fun.

“It has nothing to do with gender, all children are curious…but over time we are asked to squash that curiosity, don’t ask too many questions.”

“We also need to work together, to make change, to solve those massive problems.”

Sammy Bourden works at Centre for Non-Violence and said there’s a prevailing idea in society, still, that, “If you do fail, you’re no good at it, you should just walk away.

“Whereas with our male counterparts it’s like you fail, you pick up, you keep going,” she said. “There’s definitely that gender imbalance when it comes to failure.

“I think as women we’re also our worst enemies, so we take failure very, very personally, and I think we just need to own it because that’s how you learn and that’s how you grow.”