The Making of Her: Why School Matters

What on earth could be behind this extraordinary injustice in which she returns home from a hard day at work to run the vacuum cleaner under his well-rested legs? A few popular writers have made some creative suggestions. John Gray, author of the Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus books, has recently made a valiant stab at arguing that performing routine housework chores is actually selectively beneficial to women, including – if not especially – those with demanding jobs. His idea (which to my knowledge has not been empirically tested) is that because the modern woman has removed herself from her traditional home sphere with its babies, children and friends on whom to call with a pot roast, she has dangerously low levels of oxytocin coursing through her blood. (Oxytocin is a mammalian hormone associated with social bonding and social interactions.) Thankfully, however, ‘nurturing oxytocin-producing domestic routine duties like laundry, shopping, cooking and cleaning’ are available in plentiful supply. Phew! Such chores, however, have a very ill effect on men. For them, the priority is testosterone-producing tasks – for without the stimulating rush of that sex hormone, men become little better than limp rags (and not even ones that wipe themselves along the countertops).[2]

This fascinating debate will go on, but I’m inclined to agree with Cordelia Fine that the perceived differences in behaviour – and as part of that, learning preferences – are more to do with cultural and social influences than biology. In my experience, generally speaking, there are certain ways in which girls and boys tend to differ in their habits and behaviours. I say tend. Of course I know more about the girls – based on twenty-odd years of leading girls’ schools I can say for example that the girls I have known are often inclined to be self-critical, to be more concerned than their brothers about getting things right first time, to be dutifully good at planning and completing things (which is why they sometimes do better when assessed continuously and less well if taking exams). They are also sensitive to social dynamics and can read the subtext of conversations and behaviours very skilfully. This of course is linked both to why they value and nurture lasting friendships as well as why they are also so much better than boys at bullying. Where boys are inclined just to hit one other, girls can torture one another slowly over weeks using only gestures of their eyebrows, making the behaviour so much harder to detect and pin down. I also know that generalising is dangerous and there are many girls at St Paul’s who would pull me up for stereotyping and say they didn’t recognise themselves here. But actually these are my general observations, based on the 25,000 or so girls I have known. The question for us here is not so much whether they are different from boys – which in my opinion they are – but more how does that difference come about? Are girls born different, or is it that society makes them so because of its expectations? What actually can we say to justify educating girls (and therefore boys) separately?

In many ways, when I hear recent leavers from St Paul’s who are now making their way in professional life talk about their experiences, it is more and more clear to me that girls’ schools are indeed oddly out of step with some of the ‘realities’ of the so-called modern working world. In a well-regarded modern company, for example, a Paulina in her thirties told me recently how she was surprised at having to fend off the unwelcome advances of a more senior male colleague at work who would approach her desk, stand too close and suggest drinks after hours. When I asked why she didn’t tell him to get lost, she replied that as he controlled her promotion prospects and her pay, she had to be very careful. Another told me that when the male staff packed up on Fridays early to go and play football and she asked to join them, she was told that wasn’t how it worked and she might like to go and have a manicure instead. We may be providing a stimulating intellectual experience and nurturing a love of scholarship, but as regards preparation for life and work, our messages – our assumptions – about equality are by some standards hopelessly off-message. Because it turns out that the real world has a long way to go and still needs a great deal of cleaning up.

The disconnect is simple: at a school like St Paul’s (or Queenswood, or Sunny Hill where I was a pupil, or at most girls’ schools I’m aware of), girls learn an instinctive, fundamental confidence that far from being girl specific, has nothing to do with their gender. As one alumna wrote in a survey carried out amongst the 25–35-year-olds who had been to St Paul’s, ‘We commanded respect in our very nature.’ Note that masculine-sounding word ‘commanded’ which she uses without self-consciousness. Paulinas, along with other girls’ school-educated young women, assume that their opinions are of intrinsic interest, and are even happy to revise those opinions, as one inspection report memorably suggested, ‘if convincing evidence is put before them’. They take themselves seriously in the best way: they have never been taught to ‘play nicely’ because they are girls, to assume they will be less talented at science and maths, to defer to male opinion because it is more loudly expressed, or to assume they are being educated to be the wives of top men. If they are articulate, confident and full of opinions (as they tend to be) they do not expect to be treated as if this were unusual and slightly unfeminine, or actually rather admirable, given they are only girls. They enjoy sport, but generally prefer to play it rather than be WAGs on the touchline, watching their brothers and boyfriends play rugby. If the school play is Macbeth, they assume it is not beyond the talents of one of them to play the main part – in fact to play all the parts. In short, they think they can do pretty well anything, because at school, they can.

When they emerge into a workplace and a wider society which rather lags behind in that everything is still pretty much weighted in favour of men, where organisations work according to male tastes, behaviours and preferences, they just don’t get it. One former head girl, who visited St Paul’s to address the students about her career in the decade since leaving, put it this way: ‘I just had no idea that it would be so much more challenging making your career as a woman – at school, it never occurred to us – everything seemed possible.’

Everything seemed possible because it was. Despite some progress, the realities in the so-called ‘wider world’ of unequal pay, unequal promotion prospects and unequal opportunities generally are a continuing concern to everyone who would wish to see society benefiting – equally – from the talents of both men and women. Girls go out into the workplace, full of confidence and capability, and come up against a very different culture: at one extreme, they may be subjected to active prejudice or harassment: being excluded from the Friday afternoon game of football or being pursued by the older boss. But equally disturbing is that experience that some women describe of becoming invisible – their views going unheard or ignored. This was a new idea to me until comparatively recently; I experienced it for the first time myself when attending the conference of a traditionally male-dominated professional organisation. It was a very odd feeling standing in a circle at a drinks reception and feeling like a pane of glass – I could easily have disappeared without anyone noticing. Ah, so this is what they talk about, I thought.

Change is afoot in some quarters, stimulated by the more recent opening up of the question of gender identity. A case in point was the decision in summer 2017 by the then newly appointed (female) artistic director of the Globe Theatre, Michelle Terry, to commit to ‘gender-blind’ casting and a 50/50 split of male and female roles – presumably because, otherwise, men would be getting the lion’s share of the great Shakespearean parts, as they always have done. This is great, but I reflected that in girls’ schools, gender-sighted – rather than gender-blind – casting in drama productions has always ensured that women win not just half, but all the most significant roles, producing generations of practised Macbeths, Hamlets and Henry Vs. It was with some satisfaction that I thought how well prepared these girls’ school-educated actors would be for the new and more empowering approach to casting at the Globe. That even-handedness and neutrality is of course emphasised further when we also see men playing female roles with great brilliance: who can forget Mark Rylance as Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, for example. Twice as many actors to choose from, twice as many roles to audition for, and it becomes about talent and skill, not about the limitations of gender.

This is all very well, say the detractors of single-sex schools, but the real world is mixed – what’s the point of pretending otherwise? Girls just have to get used to it (which usually means playing nicely to get what they want), so they might as well start at school. Of course education must prepare young people for reality, for society as it is. But it must and can do more: inform and drive the values by which that society is shaped. When all things are equal – my former head girl and I agreed – there may be no further need for single-gender schools. But it seems that despite some excellent work going on to change things (spearheaded by men as well as women) we are still very far from that point. Until then, St Paul’s and its fellow girls’ schools have a vital and influential role to play in ensuring the continued disruption of social norms, so long established that no one even thinks of them as norms. The impetus towards genuine equality cannot be assumed but must be actively led by the talented and confident young women emerging from our gates. Whether girls are wired differently or not really does not matter in the end. Either way, what we’re dealing with is a society that has deep-rooted, often subconscious expectations about women and structures which still limit the contribution they can make. While this is so, we need to educate girls themselves to change that. The case for girls’ schools is as much about preparation for what is to come, as it is about the experience of the here and now.

So what do girls’ schools do differently? Many things. By freeing girls to be themselves so they don’t feel the pressure to conform to predetermined patterns of behaviour, girls’ schools make them more aware of how the media seeks to manipulate them. They train a lens on the problem to make girls think critically. In doing so, they give a framework to evaluate the image of girls in today’s media. Is that the image we want for ourselves? What is the image of female attractiveness to which young women are taught to aspire, for example? Who is shaping it? The insidious encouragement to conform to an absurd idea of beauty embodied by emaciated fashion models has, for example, caused great damage to many young women’s self-esteem and health. We want them to pay attention to this and develop the resilience to reject it, because nobody else is going to in an industry that is making money out of controlling them in this way. When the then editor of Vogue, Alexandra Shulman (a Paulina herself) came to talk to the girls at St Paul’s about her career in fashion journalism, as part of the weekly Friday lecture programme, this highly intelligent, unexpectedly normal-looking woman – chic in a reassuringly rumpled way – was asked by one of the girls what she was doing about the fact that Vogue’s models looked ‘emaciated’. Her magazine was still implicitly promoting the idea that size zero should be every girl’s dream. Her reply was that she saw the problem but this was down to the designers: with clothes being created for tiny figures, fashion editors could only provide tiny models to wear them. I looked at the faces of her difficult-to-impress audience and saw politeness warring with scepticism. Surely this was an issue on which a female-run magazine like Vogue should be making more of a stand? As so often, it was in the post-lecture informal conversations that the most interesting thinking emerged; here about the tension between principles and commercial imperatives – an example of how a girls’ school can give time to foregrounding a subject of special significance for women and enable untrammelled discussion.

Girls’ schools don’t just concentrate on protecting their pupils: they also empower them, confidently promoting a positive ‘can-do’ philosophy. There are no barriers, real or perceived. In terms of academic life, for example, girls do not face unspoken prejudices about subject choices. No one is particularly amazed that you like physics. An enormous amount has been written about why physics is seen as a male subject: more boys take it at A level and beyond so it is seen as inhospitable to girls; it is associated with ‘hard’ skills, such as making circuits, which are typically perceived as isolated and not involved with other people, and hence also ‘unfeminine’. Textbooks also tend to employ traditionally boy-friendly examples, such as car construction. All this is changing gradually, but physics is still a subject where girls are having to fit in. That said, and somewhat to my surprise, I was gratified to learn about a recent international initiative to encourage more young people into engineering through designing, 3D printing and racing Formula One-inspired cars. This scheme, F1 in Schools, has attracted girls in large numbers. Where the girls win out is in the leadership and organisation: the mixed teams have proved more successful in galvanising themselves to raise funds and see through the project than those with boys only, and guess what? The most successful teams of all are those who have a girl as the leader.

The great head start in a girls’ school of course is that the whole curriculum is tailored to their interests. There is no subject area or activity in which girls do not excel or are seen as less apt or capable, or where their capability is seen as somehow surprising or counter-cultural. The scientists are all girls, as are all the mathematicians. The significance of this has been highlighted in a new way now that we are seeing so much more emphasis on capability in the STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) and their link to higher pay. In the summer of 2017, Emma Duncan wrote a very well-researched article for The Times (‘Maths for girls is the way to close the pay gap’) arguing that as the best-paid jobs are in technology and computing, and as boys tend to choose maths more often and do better at it than girls, the answer to closing the pay gap is to have more girls do maths. This recommendation is already long since in place in girls’ schools, where maths and science are not, and never have been, seen as boys’ subjects – where so-called ‘maths anxiety’ isn’t a thing and where girls take up these subjects with all the enthusiasm and confidence you could wish. The Girls’ Schools Association, for example, analyses the take-up of all A-level subjects in its schools against national data, revealing that a girl educated in a GSA school is twice as likely to take maths and two and a half times as likely to take physics as her peers in all other schools taken together. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the numbers applying to read physical sciences, medicine and dentistry at university from GSA schools far outstrip national figures.

As well as giving them unprejudiced access to the curriculum, training women to expect to lead is also a vital part of their education. A girls’ school is fertile ground for the emerging leader as there are so many opportunities to take initiative and show responsibility. In most schools, you can aspire to be form captain – or library monitor, or playground helper, or lunch queue supervisor – from the age of eleven. Later you may graduate to being on the school council or being captain of a sports team. And eventually you may reach the heights of house captain or even prefect. I recently saw a magazine advertising the open day of a distinguished co-ed competitor of ours in London. The photograph showed two smartly dressed senior pupils: a dark-haired boy looking confidently out at the camera and a blonde-haired girl, a little shorter as shown in the picture, looking happily up at him. Here was an image of confident leadership, certainly, but what an unfortunate and presumably unconscious message about gender. In a girls’ school, there is no question of being marginalised: girls hold all the senior leadership positions; all sports teams have a female captain, the first violin in the orchestra is always a girl and, as we’ve seen, girls get the chance to play the leading roles, whatever the school play.

Those youngest girls who joined a month or so ago are getting to know one another, gradually piecing together their independent world of school, letting their parents into it a little, inviting them to watch their netball matches, or describing their teachers perhaps – and all the time keenly observing the older girls and their ways. As they become more confident, they become bolder: the senior girls say to me (as they do every year): ‘We were never as confident as that! I used to be terrified of the girls in the senior school! Yesterday I actually saw a MIV girl roll her eyes when I told her to go to the back of the lunch queue! What’s happened?’ So the new ones are settling in well, I’d think wryly … The desire to lead and the confidence for it is often there from an early age and will receive regular encouragement throughout the school.

Some of my most rewarding times as a head have been spent with these all-female student leadership teams. The moment of appointing the new head girl was always a particular high point, making up as it did for some of the less edifying exchanges that occasionally took place in my office. The girl would arrive having been sent to see me. She must have had a good idea of the reason but could not be quite certain. The door would open and I’d invite her in. A cautious, slightly stilted exchange ensued:

‘Juliet, with the strong support you have received from your peers and from the staff, I’m delighted to invite you to become the next head girl. Of course I mustn’t assume you would want this … What do you say?’

‘Err … thank you very much …?’

‘I mean … you’d like to accept? You’ll be happy to do it?’

‘Totally … Yes!’

And as she struggled to contain her delight in an attempt to convince as being entirely unflappable and mature, we would go on to discuss the practicalities of the announcement, before inviting in and appointing, together, the deputy head girl and team of prefects. By the time they had all been sitting shifting uneasily on my sofas stealing glances at each other with polite restraint for ten minutes, I realised they were about to burst so would release them into the school – hearing, once they thought themselves out of earshot, an explosion of excited mutual congratulation and pent-up laughter.

The novelty over, it was impressive to see how quickly these teams would organise themselves without fuss, choosing the areas to work on during the year and hatching plans: building relationships with the younger year groups to tackle friendship issues or bullying; giving an assembly on phubbing (no, I didn’t know what it meant either: it’s tapping away on your phone when someone is trying to speak to you – a form of ‘snubbing’) or helping with revision strategy for those taking GCSE. I loved to watch the economical efficiency with which they would divide up a problem, assign tasks, get things done. And of course I watched them learning some of the lessons of leadership: the challenges of getting large groups to work together, the difficulty of fronting something your peers don’t necessarily like (‘Look, guys, we have to get to morning registration on time … okay? Just get over it’); the difference between the people who talk and those who get things done. It was with both sympathy and amusement I watched them one year plan their summer ball in liaison with the boys’ school prefect team, which obviously had more pressing things to think about:

‘How’s everything going with the ball?’

‘Well … We met with them [the boys] last week and they hadn’t really done anything since the previous meeting? They kind of just sat around wanting to know if they could bring their plus-ones … Why would we want girls from other schools at our ball? I mean … Then they were just arguing about the price. So we’re going to see some venues this weekend. Do they actually even care if this gets organised?’

Those girls were important role models for the younger students. In a girls’ school, there are also strong role models of female leadership amongst the staff. While there are of course female heads of mixed schools, and even of boys’ schools, male head teachers still predominate, especially in the private sector. In girls’ schools, girls learn that it’s normal for a woman to be in charge and that just as girls aren’t expected to prefer certain subjects, women don’t have to be the ones fulfilling the more traditionally pastoral or caring roles, underlining gender expectations about their skills and preferences. A woman can be pastoral deputy head but she can also be finance director – or indeed take on any other responsibility that interests her without it seeming unusual.

Importantly, it isn’t only girls who need to learn to accept and be at ease with the idea of female leadership – boys do too. Many of the boys growing up in today’s schools will find themselves working for female bosses; if this seems awkward to them, they will be at a disadvantage. The key at school level is for the staff to model relationships of genuine equality and unforced mutual respect. To that end, schools should try to ensure they do not have a predominantly single gender common room but one where roles of responsibility and leadership are held by both men and women. Boys’ schools might look to ensure that they have women in their senior leadership teams (and not only in pastoral posts, where they underscore the idea that women are best at looking after people) and girls’ schools should welcome employing capable men, including in those posts. I found it hugely beneficial and enriching in both the schools I led to have a mixed staff team, adding to the diversity of perspective and demonstrating to the girls that talented men had no difficulty in working with a female leader; to work in a girls’ school was to be a modern man, not to be emasculated and therefore commit career suicide. But perhaps the ultimate female role model was created when a much-admired and well-liked member of the senior leadership team at St Paul’s became the first woman in the 700-year history of Eton College to be appointed as its ‘lower master’, the most senior education post after the headship itself. This was an immensely proud and exciting moment for both schools – proof if it were needed that girls can indeed aspire to do anything.

A girls’ school then is where tomorrow’s women can really flex their capability, expand into all areas of potential interest and revel in learning for its own sake. They can unselfconsciously display their intelligence and curiosity, regardless of those powerful age-determined notions of popularity, attractiveness or peer pressure. Even super-confident Paulinas report that they don’t necessarily do this in a mixed group, where even bright girls can have a tendency to check themselves and to dumb themselves down, especially if hormones are coursing round the system and getting mixed up with the brainpower. Where girls are accustomed to being heard and being valued for who they are, irrespective of what they look like or what they wear (did we have to endure so many cartoons of Theresa May’s animal-print shoes?), they are encouraged in their capacities as confident individuals, leaders and agents of change.

Every school has its own personality which is only partly a matter of whether it educates boys, girls, or both. As the head of a girls’ school with a brother school just across the river, I had ample chance to think about the benefits and drawbacks of single-sex education in relation to two specific institutions. I came to know St Paul’s boys’ school in both a professional and personal capacity, because my son Adam was a pupil there, thriving on the academic stimulation and strong sense of tradition. As a mother I liked the proudly masculine ethos, in which personal responsibility and brotherliness were encouraged through the vertical tutor system, where boys of different ages were grouped together in a form. I saw my son grow in confidence, forging respectful and friendly relationships with his teachers, loving sport and then loving acting even more, learning to look up to older boys and look out for younger ones while building lasting friendships. The ‘Paulines’ I encountered hanging out in my kitchen were likeable, well-grounded young men who knew how to speak to adults in a natural way, neither gauche nor ingratiating. They teased each other mercilessly but were essentially kind and I saw that there was room for gentleness in this version of masculinity. The large school site, the generous rolling pitches (unusual to have so much green space in a London school) where rugby and cricket are passionately played and which lead down to the river, underline an expansive and confident sense of identity. Did I feel that my son was missing out because there were no girls in the school? No. True, he had a sister at home with all the independence of mind a mother could wish, but there was no sense to me – or to him – of something missing. He was busy, stimulated, committed: growing up in a healthy environment that was thoroughly positive and right for him.