Undoing the subconscious programming of what it means to be a woman is an act of feminist rebellion: Chapter 2 Childhood and School
BORN IN A GENDERED SOCIETY
It starts from a young age, when we’re basically little sponges absorbing and interpreting everything we see and hear.
We quickly learn through subtle and not so subtle cues that certain toys are for us and some aren’t. We learn that boys are wild, strong, powerful superheroes, while we are princesses, cute, made of candy floss, saccharine sweet and insubstantial, designed to melt away as if we were never there.
Boys are actively encouraged to play with primary coloured building blocks, trains and pirate ships, while girls get pastel dolls, kitchens and princesses. Even though most major toy shops no longer sort by “boys” and “girls”, girls are pictured playing with a kitchen and boys are pictured with a workbench. All the while we marvel at the “natural” difference in the brains of boys and girls as they get older and boys’ “natural” inclination for construction tasks becomes apparent.
The way we talk to and about girls and boys starts to make itself known. “Boys are praised more for getting things right, girls get praised more for good behaviours. Girls are criticised more for making mistakes, whereas boys get criticised for bad behaviour.[1]”
What we hear is that girls are more likely to be told to be careful, to be spoken to about emotions while boys hear words like achievement, proud, or strong more than girls do. “In other words, when we tell little girls to “be careful” but comment, “What a boy!” when our sons attempt the same feat, the stereotype becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy...Dads speak more openly with daughters about sad feelings while using more achievement-oriented words with sons.[2].”
In our first books, we see male doctors and pilots while women are nurses and flight attendants. Gender roles become clear to us, from classic fairytales by Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson, to Disney princesses. Classic fairytales could be discussed in vast detail all on their own but it is worth noting a few themes. In The Little Mermaid, our heroine is willing to sacrifice her voice, and all she’s ever known, to marry a prince (in the original tale, spoiler alert, she loses her life too). Sleeping Beauty is a passive participant in her own story, consigned to snooze her way through the years until she’s rescued. In fact most fairytale heroines spend much of their own stories waiting for princes to come and rescue them. No, I know, not all. But Moana and Merida just show that they are the exception, while Cinderella is the rule.
All this means that, before we even get to school, we’ve started to build a picture of the rules that apply to us in order to be accepted. We’ll be praised for being well behaved, we’ll be more likely to play with dolls than trucks, we’ll learn that it’s better to be pretty than strong, and we’ll start forming the understanding that, even when it’s our own story, it’s incomplete without a man to save us.
LEARNING AND OUR PLACE IN THE WORLD
And so, to school, where we further learn what we can and can’t do, where we might and might not belong. Although we perform just as well as boys in all subjects, we’re slowly encouraged away from science, maths, design and technology, because we learn they’re not for girls. Caroline Criado Perez talks about “Brilliance Bias” in her book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed For Men. Brilliance bias is the assumption that, when we describe someone as brilliant, or a genius, we’re automatically likely to assume we mean a man. “When girls start primary school at the age of five, they are as likely as boys to think women be “really, really smart”. But by the time they turn six, something changes.”[3] A lack of women represented in stories, in textbooks, and talked about in real life starts to inform us that it’s not a space we are made to inhabit. So by the age of nine, girls who perform as well as boys in maths, will believe it isn’t for them.
It continues as we move through the education system. Using science as an example, in spite of being just as good, and enjoying it just as much[4], girls choose it less from GCSE and beyond. “Not a single woman’s name features in the national curriculum for Science GCSE”[5]. It’s harder now for girls and boys to name prominent female scientists to the same amount they can name male ones. When getting to A-Level, “while over half of male A-level students enrol in at least one maths or science subject, the equivalent for female students is 37%.”[6] The OECD reports that, “internationally, girls tend to show more caution in STEM fields, and feel more anxiety.”[7]
Girls may be less likely to put their hands up and feel confident in these subjects because it’s already been embedded in us that we get more criticism when we get things wrong and are praised more when we get it right. If we learn a place or space isn’t for us, we could be forgiven for being even more nervous about going in there and risking it being wrong.
The data for uptake of STEM subjects builds this persuasive argument that girls are simply less interested than boys. Perhaps it therefore becomes convenient to say that girls don’t have a preference for STEM, that they don’t want to study it, that we’re more likely to choose something else. By claiming it’s simply a natural occurrence or an active choice, it’s very easy to excuse the gaping chasm between men and women in these fields as simply a product of nature, and not of a system that has been telling us we don’t belong there.
[1] Gina Rippon, The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain (2019), p. 305.
[2] Cornwall, Gail, " What Science Really Says About Boys and Girls," Parents Magazine (October 2018)
[3] Criado Perez, Caroline, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed For Men (2019), pg 100.
[4] Teach First, Missing Elements: Why ‘Steminism’ matters in the classroom and beyond. (2020)
[5] Department for Education, Biology, Chemistry and Physics: GCSE subject content, 2015 (updated 2019) and Department for Education, Combined science: GCSE subject content, 2015 (updated 2019)
[6] Department for Education, Revised A level and other 16 to 18 results in England (2018/19, 2020)
[7] OECD, The ABC of Gender Equality in Education, (2015)