Women vs Feminism

Why We All Need Liberating from the Gender Wars

Joanna Williams

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781787144767
• eBook ISBN: 9781787149403
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

There's never been a better time to be a woman. Thanks to those feminists who fought for liberation, young women today have freedom and opportunities their grandmothers could barely have imagined. Girls do better at school than boys and are more likely to go to university. As a result, women are taking more of the top jobs and the gender pay gap has all but disappeared. Yet rather than encouraging women to seize the new possibilities open to them, contemporary feminism tells them they are still oppressed. 

Women vs Feminism: Why We All Need Liberating from the Gender Wars challenges this stance, unpicking the statistics from the horror stories to explore the reality of women's lives. It argues that today's feminism is obsessed with trivial issues – skinny models, badly phrased jokes and misplaced compliments – and focuses on the regulation of male behaviour, rather than female empowerment, pitching men and women against each other in a never-ending gender war that benefits no-one.  

Feminism today does women no favours and it's time we were all liberated from the gender wars.

PART ONE

WOMEN’S LIVES TODAY

CHAPTER ONE

SCHOOLING FOR SUCCESS

Schools are on the front line in the gender wars. St Paul’s Girls’ School in West London is one of Britain’s leading independent schools. Having wealthy parents is not enough to secure entry; potential pupils must also pass a competitive exam. Former students include famous actors, authors, academics and Members of Parliament. In February 2017 St Paul’s made the news following the announcement of a new ‘gender identity protocol’ that would permit pupils to take boys’ names and wear boys’ clothes. From the age of 16, girls will now be able to request that their teachers refer to them as boys or address them using gender neutral pronouns. One report suggests ten current pupils want to take advantage of the new guidance.¹

St Paul’s is playing catch-up to the more forward-looking Brighton College, another independent boarding school. A full year earlier, Brighton College announced that the distinction between boys’ and girls’ school uniforms had been abolished in order to accommodate transgender students. A statement issued by the school noted that, ‘Public schools are usually seen as bastions of conservatism but Brighton College feels it is time to break ranks.’² Meanwhile, delegates at the UK’s National Union of Teachers conference passed a motion calling for children as young as 2 to be taught about transgender issues and same sex relationships.³ In American universities students in some classes are asked to state their preferred gender pronouns when they introduce themselves, and debates about the provision of gender neutral bathrooms have become a national talking point. In Sweden it became a legal requirement for schools to challenge gender stereotyping in 1998.⁴ Teachers are encouraged to use ‘hen’ as a gender neutral pronoun to avoid propagating sexist assumptions.

In the past, a combination of socialization and coercion meant girls were denied access to the same educational opportunities as boys. Girls were less likely to study a full range of academic subjects; they achieved lower exam results and did not carry on to university at the same rate as men. Feminists successfully challenged the low expectations schools and teachers held for girls, and today, as this chapter shows, a very different picture emerges. At every stage of their education, girls are now outperforming boys and yet the influence of feminism on education shows no signs of diminishing.

Education is increasingly viewed by teachers, campaigners and policy makers as a key site for influencing the next generation and shaping society. As such, national governments charge schools with responsibility for an array of economic and political goals such as skills training, entrepreneurship and social mobility. It can seem as if there is no problem that can’t be solved by putting it on the curriculum: schools teach children about sex and relationships, healthy eating, internet safety, environmental awareness, budgeting and a whole host of other issues. Teaching subject knowledge is blurred with a more explicit promotion of values, at the forefront of which is feminism. Schooling has taken on board political goals concerned with encouraging children to think about gender and sexuality in new ways. This chapter explores the impact of feminism upon education and asks what girls’ educational success means today.

GIRLS ARE OUTPERFORMING BOYS

Girls do better at school than boys. All around the world, irrespective of the status of women or the levels of gender equality within a society, it is girls who are notching up more exam passes in almost every subject and at every level.⁵ This is not a recent phenomenon; in both the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), girls have been outperforming boys for well over a quarter of a century. Neither is it the case that girls are doing just a little bit better than boys; they are so far ahead that some British universities now have twice as many female undergraduates than males.⁶ Meanwhile, in America, over 60 per cent of all bachelor degrees are awarded to women.⁷

A gender attainment gap emerges almost as soon as children start school. At age seven, British children take national curriculum assessments in reading, writing, speaking and listening, maths and science. Girls do better than boys in every area with the biggest attainment gaps occurring in reading, writing, speaking and listening. Boys do marginally better at reaching the highest levels in maths and science.⁸ By the time they are 16, girls perform significantly better than boys in national assessments (in England and Wales, GCSEs). In 2016 the attainment gap between boys and girls at this age was the largest in over a decade at 8.9 per cent. 71.3 per cent of GCSEs taken by girls were awarded at least a C grade, compared to just 62.4 per cent of exams sat by boys.⁹ Success aged 16 leads to a greater number of female students continuing along an academic route to take ‘A’ levels aged 18, the exams still most closely associated with university entry. It’s not just in the UK: in the US too girls are more likely to receive a high school diploma. In 2014 in the State of California, 84.7 per cent of girls graduated from high school compared to only 77.1 per cent of boys.¹⁰

Success at school results in more women than men going on to university.¹¹ Gender has come to be more closely correlated with the likelihood of attending and graduating from college than family income. Research from the American Brookings Institute suggests that ‘the female advantage in college attendance and completion among recent cohorts is about half as large as corresponding gaps between students in the first and second quartiles of the income distribution’.¹²

In Britain, women students first began to outnumber men at university in 1992 and this has remained the case every year since. In 2015 young British women were 35 per cent more likely to go to university than their male peers and 57.5 per cent of students were female.¹³ On some courses, such as veterinary science and subjects allied to medicine, over 75 per cent of students are now female. What’s more, women are more likely to stay the course, complete their studies, and perform better than men. Whereas 79 per cent of women get at least a 2.1 degree classification, only 70 per cent of men score this highly.¹⁴ Importantly, this attainment gap exists even when comparing the results of students who entered university with exactly the same levels of prior academic achievement. American women are also going to university in greater numbers than men and doing better once there: they are less likely to drop out and more likely to attain a higher degree classification. In 2008, US universities awarded more doctorates to women and this has remained the case every subsequent year.¹⁵ In 2015, American women taking postgraduate degrees outnumbered men by 135 to 100.¹⁶

A DRAMATIC CHANGE

The educational performance of girls has undergone a phenomenal transformation over a relatively short period. Up until the late 1980s, it was boys who did better at school and men who went on to university in greater numbers. Well into the latter half of the twentieth century, boys and girls rarely received the same education. Assumptions about the lives children would lead as adults meant boys and girls studied different subjects: boys studied woodwork or metalwork, while girls were taught the domestic skills considered necessary for their future role as wives and mothers alongside some academic subjects. There was often little expectation that girls would continue on to higher education or pursue a career.

Women first began to go to university in greater numbers following the expansion of higher education in the decades following the Second World War, although this was limited to predominantly middle-class women. By 1970, women comprised roughly 30 per cent of the UK student population. Some women who were students at this time report ‘endless derision’ from an older generation of male academics who questioned, sometimes publicly, their right to be at university. This could extend to not marking work completed by women, refusing to allow them to take part in seminar discussions or subjecting them to mockery in the lecture hall. The battle to overturn not just the practical restrictions that limited women’s access to education but the attitudes of both male and female family, friends, teachers and lecturers was long and hard fought. Feminist campaigners strove to improve educational opportunities for girls and their success is evident in the improvement in girls’ performance we see today.

Nowadays, in most Western countries, it is taken for granted that boys and girls should have the same educational opportunities. Although boys and girls might, on average, perform better in different subjects, or prefer some subjects to others, students tend not to be excluded from particular classes on the basis of their gender. Likewise, although single sex schools still exist, they teach a national curriculum, or the common core in the US, and generally enter pupils for nationally recognized exams. It is mostly accepted that boys and girls can learn the same subjects in the same school, sitting side by side.

It was in the 1980s that girls started outperforming boys at school and increasingly continuing on to higher education. Since this time, the educational landscape has changed very quickly. In America, the proportion of women in work with a college degree trebled between 1970 and 2014, increasing from 11.2 to 40.0 per cent.¹⁷ The pace of change means that commentators and educators alike have been left behind. Having been used to considering girls as the underrepresented and disadvantaged group, the new reality of girls outperforming boys provides an inconvenient challenge to the traditional feminist narrative. In response, many campaigners have either doubled down on their original claims or searched for more specific areas in which girls can still be said to be underperforming in comparison to boys, such as in physical sciences and computer studies. A backlash to this dominant narrative, in the form of a panic about the underachievement of boys, is beginning to emerge. As a result, an honest appraisal of the educational performance of both boys and girls is difficult to establish.

UNDERACHIEVING BOYS

In July 2016 the British charity Save the Children published an evocatively-titled report, The Lost Boys, in which it sought to lay bare ‘the potentially devastating and lifelong consequences for boys in England who start school significantly trailing girls in basic early language skills’. It highlighted the fact that ‘boys are nearly twice as likely to fall behind girls by the time they start school’.¹⁸

One group has attracted particular cause for concern: white working class boys. In 2016, only 26 per cent of white British boys on free school meals (shorthand for a family on a very low income or state benefits) achieved five top GCSE grades including English and maths – the benchmark for school success. This compared with 40 per cent of black boys and 63 per cent of all other pupils on free school meals. Martin Daubney, a journalist concerned with men’s issues and the founder of the Men and Boys Coalition, describes poor white boys as ‘the new educational underclass’.

In America, by contrast, it is black boys who are getting left behind. According to research carried out by the American National Education Association (NEA), 42 per cent of black students attend schools that are under-resourced and performing poorly and black boys are three times more likely to be suspended or expelled from school than their white classmates. Black and Hispanic boys make up almost 80 per cent of those enroled in special education programmes. Although black males comprise 9 per cent of the student population, they constitute 20 per cent of all students classified as ‘mentally retarded’. The NEA’s 2011 report, Race Against Time: Educating Black Boys highlights that ‘less than half of black male students graduate from high school on time’ and ‘only 11 percent of black males complete a bachelor’s degree’.¹⁹

For the first couple of decades after girls began to outperform boys at school and go onto higher education in greater numbers, relatively little attention was paid to the comparative drop in boys’ performance. Girls were considered merely to be correcting a historical injustice and taking advantage of the opportunities that should have always rightfully been theirs. Worrying about the underachievement of boys was seen as a ploy to detract attention and hard won resources away from girls. Even today the underperformance of boys is often played down. In 2014 the British government noted: ‘The problem of white “working class” underachievement is not specific to boys; attention to both sexes is needed’. Daubney notes that ‘boys have had few political allies in the corridors of power. Nobody, it seems, cares about our failing boys’.²⁰ Dr Gijsbert Stoet, professor of cognitive psychology at Leeds Beckett University agrees: ‘When it comes to boys falling behind, the real scandal is that this isn’t a scandal’, he argues. We can only imagine the outcry if girls had been falling behind boys for the past three decades.

Most recently, championed by the likes of Daubney, attention has focused on the need for ‘boy friendly’ pedagogy and male role models in schools. One project, based in New York and launched in 2015, aims to recruit 1000 male teachers of colour over 3 years. Mary Curnock Cook, the Chief Executive of the UK’s university admission service, UCAS, has raised concern about the men apparently ‘missing’ from higher education. Widening participation initiatives that once focused solely on the educational achievements of girls have slowly begun to shift attention to boys.

In contrast to well-established projects designed to encourage girls to study science, campaigns aimed at boys tend to be piecemeal and underfunded. More worrying are the assumptions driving such initiatives. The University of Edinburgh’s Educated Pass scheme, for example, aims to get boys ‘hooked’ on university through links with local football clubs.²¹ Not only is there an assumption that all boys are interested in football, there is clearly a view that higher education is not exciting in its own terms and boys need to be ‘tricked’ into participating through conversations about football.

THE MOST INTELLIGENT GENDER

The growing gender attainment gap has given new impetus to attempts at drawing a connection between gender and intelligence. Biological explanations for intelligence once focused on men’s larger brain size but today, in a complete about turn, neuroscientists point to the female brain developing earlier than the male brain. Researchers from Michigan State University have found evidence of superior cognitive ability in girls as young as 2, with girls between 2 and 7 performing better than boys in tests of general intelligence.²² This early advantage is then said to stick with girls throughout their time in formal education.

This turn to biology presents a view of gender differences as ‘hardwired’ and intelligence as an innate characteristic that can be measured and recorded, much like height or eye colour. However, whereas no one would seriously seek to make a link between eye colour and intelligence, correlations between gender and intelligence are looked for and then found. Some, like the University of Cambridge psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, rehabilitate old stereotypes. He argues: ‘The female brain is predominantly hardwired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hardwired for understanding and building systems.’²³

As Cordelia Fine notes in her excellent debunking of the science behind sex differences, ‘The neuroscientific discoveries we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books and sometimes even journals tell a tale of two brains – essentially different – that create timeless and immutable psychological differences between the sexes.’²⁴ Unfortunately, as Fine explains, however neat the link between brain differences and gendered ways of thinking and behaving may appear, such claims ‘simply reflect – and give scientific authority to’ majority opinion. ‘When we follow the trail of contemporary science,’ Fine counters, ‘we discover a surprising number of gaps, assumptions, inconsistencies, poor methodologies, and leaps of faith.’ The problem for neuroscientists is that ‘the culture in which we develop and function enjoys a “deep reach” into our minds’.²⁵ The world in which children develop today is one that assumes gir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Part One Women’s Lives Today
• Part Two Private Relationships, Public Concerns
• Part Three Feminism then and Now
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Author Biography
• Index