11 Education Feminism, Gender Equality

and School Reform in Late Twentieth

Century England

Madeleine Arnot

INTRODUCTION
The aim of this chapter is to discover what we have learnt about gender inequalities
in society from the ways in which such inequalities have been addressed by policy
makers, teachers and one of the major social movements of the twentieth century,
education feminism (Stone 1994). Historical analysis of the gender reform
movement exposes the complex interface between economic and political structures,
macro and micro educational structures and processes and cultural movements, and
the nuanced engagements between social class, ethnicity and gender inequalities.
We learn how gender inequalities operate differently in different contexts and spaces
and therefore remove the possibility of generalisations and simplistic policy
approaches. We see how the search for measures of gender equality in education
reflects differences of perspective, purposes and assessments. Some commentators
argue that we have witnessed a ‘gender revolution’; some even go so far as
representing women as ‘post-modernity winners’. Few would disagree that there
have been some discursive and material shifts in gender relations. The challenge
here is to capture the continuity and the changes, the swings and roundabouts in the
ways in which patriarchal, social class and racially hierarchised societies respond
and adapt to the demands of female citizenry (Arnot and Dillabough 2000). This
chapter can only briefly capture these moments of political transformation and the
frustrations at the immobility of such power relations.
The particularities of the English education system in the second half of the
twentieth century provide a valuable context in which we can see the conditions for
equality reform through a state which was initially largely decentralised and, later,
strongly centralised. This shifting structure shaped the rise of the education feminist
reform movement in England and Wales in the l970s and 80s whose main target was
to change girls’ education. Part of the women’s movement of the time, education
feminism was developed by primary and secondary school teachers and by
academics. They were engaged in what could be called ‘counter-hegemonic’ work
developing an alternative version of femininity to the version embedded in the
patriarchal authoritarianism and Victorian moral and family values of the nineteenth
century (Arnot et al. 1999).
The so-called ‘modernising’ of gender relations arguably is one of the major
leitmotifs of twentieth century England. Some of the effects of this transformation
R. Teese, S. Lamb and M. Duru-Bellat (eds.), International Studies in Educational Inequality,
Theory and Policy Volume 2: Inequality in Education Systems, 207–226.
© 2007 Springer.
208 MADELEINE ARNOT

can be seen in the ‘closing of the gender gaps’ in curriculum choice and academic
performance. Yet the greater female educational achievement, the greater the gap
between women’s qualifications and their employment; the higher the level of
female achievement, the more we witness a moral panic over male achievement
levels. Further, the stronger the success of professional middle-class women, the
greater the social class gap becomes.
The progress of education feminism and the story of its adaptability to shifting
political discourses and educational structures can be told through the analysis of
three very different periods. The first inception phase of feminist activism was the
era associated with social democratic consensus around notions of equality of
opportunity; the second phase encouraged New Right forms of managerialism and
marketisation of education; the third phase involved New Labour in two
contradictory gender agendas that marginalised feminist praxis1. Each phase is
explored in turn.

FEMINIST VOLUNTARISM AND THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC ERA

(1960s AND 70s)
The first phase of activity around gender inequalities was closely associated with the
consumer boom of the l960s and the ensuing civil rights movements. The
undemocratic English educational system, in which the principle of social class
differentiation had been used to shape a new tripartite system of secondary schools
(grammar, technical, secondary modern), was focused predominantly on the need to
provide boys with appropriate vocations. Post-war expansion of education had
relatively little impact on working-class girls whose educational outcomes remained
similar to, in gender-segregated form, those of working-class boys. The pattern in
the post-war period established that middle-class boys were twenty-one times more
likely to go to university than working-class girls (c.f. Arnot 2000). With few
pretences of neutrality, these patterns of educational provision based on privilege as
well as sex, made alliances possible between a range of activists concerned about
social justice in education more widely (e.g. socialist, feminist, anti-racist).
The particular structure of the English and Welsh educational system (at the time
centrally administered but locally controlled), and the commitment to a social
democratic consensus around the value of equality of opportunity, deeply affected
the ways in which the gender reform movement developed in the UK. In this case,
the partnership between schools, local and central government meant that the
strategy of reform also relied heavily upon gaining consent rather than using
coercion. This strategy (described as the ‘tea party principle’) drew upon
rational/legal arguments for gender interventions. Change would occur through
awareness raising and professional teacher development programmes. The strategy
was to raise awareness of sex discrimination (a new concept) whilst gaining public
action on behalf of women and minority ethnic groups.
By the end of the l960s, there was statistical evidence of the high levels of sex
discrimination in employment, social policy and education. The contradictions of

1 See Arnot, 2000 and 2006 for a detailed analysis of the gendercurriculum reform movement.
 EDUCATION FEMINISM 209

women’s raised expectations and the exposed realities of sex discrimination in

employment and sexual oppression in the family forced the Labour Government to
act. However, the Equal Pay Act in 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act in l975,
only partially addressed those concerns. Two regulatory bodies, the Equal
Opportunities Commission (EOC) and the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE),
were designed by the legislation to be proactive regarding consultation on national
policy issues, conducting formal investigations into possible discrimination,
responding to complaints under the law, and promoting greater opportunities
through educational activities. Both pieces of legislation represented major shifts in
the understanding and interpretation of equal opportunities away from social class
towards gender, race and ethnicity.
In the event, anti-discrimination legislation was employed only partially
successfully in relation to gender and race inequalities in education. The effect,
however, was to create a climate of social change in which gender inequalities in
education could be tackled. The models of school reform were essentially liberal in
focus drawing attention not to structural inequalities but rather to the attitudinal
obstacles to access and performance and particularly to the role of conventional sex
role stereotyping. This was the first time in English history that the concept of ‘sex
discrimination’ was used. The legislation, however, had left single-sex school
provision intact providing it was fair in terms of number of places available, and
textbook content was excluded from the provisions of the legislation. The Equal
Opportunities Commission (EOC) encouraged schools and local authorities to
review their curricular provision, content and careers advice and to develop
strategies which aimed at fulfilling boys’ and girls’ full potential.

The growth of ‘education feminism‘

Central government initiatives such as these distanced themselves from the swell of
political thinking associated with the women’s movement and the increasingly
articulate and more radical professional voice of teachers. Education feminism as a
political reform movement was grounded in the politics of the teaching profession. It
was partly an expression of female teachers’ own frustration with their education
and with their employment. In England and Wales, few women were able to rise to
the top of the profession (where men dominated and still continue to dominate
headships, the inspectorate, university education departments and administrative/
policy-making positions) and women received scant support from the male-led
teacher union movement which appeared to be largely uninterested in the problems
women faced as employees.
Backed by the municipal socialism of a number of inner city Labour-controlled
local authorities, feminist teacher initiatives received official recognition and small-
scale funding (e.g. through in-service budgets, the provision of specialist advisors,
and the seeding of action research projects). Although in some notable instances
pressure was put on head teachers to deliver action plans on gender equality (and
even compulsory attendance at in-service courses), for the most part, teacher-led
change relied upon voluntary efforts. In-service courses were designed around the
concept of teacher-researcher with the aim of involving as wide a range of teachers
210 MADELEINE ARNOT

as possible from the various sectors of education. These involved a rejection of top-
down management approach to change, preferring instead:
A bottom-up model [which] is harder to support and likely to produce
divergence between institutions, but is the model philosophically most
acceptable to the nature of the initiative. as it forces acknowledgement of the
fact that much of the innovative work, both in defining the problems in
providing an education for gender equality, and developing practice to bring it
about, has been and is actually being done by teachers within their schools.
(Taylor 1985:126)
Contact and communication networks (prevalent in the women’s movement)
during the l970s and early l980s thus played a key role in spreading ideas across
diverse social communities, schools and phases of education. In a number of local
authorities, equal opportunities advisors (and sometimes, local inspectors) were used
to promote gender networks through courses, projects and materials; in schools,
special responsibility posts for equal opportunities and the development of school
policies reflected LEA policy at the school level. The Women’s National
Commission’s (1984) survey of LEAs found that the majority had briefed schools on
the Sex Discrimination Act, and a large minority (about a third) had set up working
parties, or encouraged schools to ‘take countering action’. Interestingly, only 12 per
cent had used or created special responsibility posts for gender.
Critical to the development of school projects was the sharing of information and
strategies. In the UK context of a devolved curriculum, the existence of teachers’
professional organisations and networks was vital for generating and sustaining
innovation. In the UK in the 1980s teacher unions also played a key, if belated, role
in supporting teachers’ interests in gender equality. In 1978 a group of women in the
National Union of Teachers (NUT) grouped together to respond to what they saw as
the low priority given to women’s rights issues in the union, the ghettoisation of
women in the lowest paid and poorest funded areas of education and the general
domination of the union and its policy-making by men (Women in the NUT 1980).
Such union activism highlighted male-dominated union hierarchies and the low
status of women’s issues on the union agenda.
Women teachers mobilised as ‘insider reformers’ alongside academic feminists.
Not surprisingly, the academic debates within the women’s movement deeply
affected the thinking of teachers and shaped their interpretations on how schools
could be made friendlier to girls. ‘Girl friendly’ schooling however was not
uncontested. As a concept, it represented the tensions between, on the one hand,
‘liberal educational feminism‘ which worked with a politics of access and concerns
about curriculum reform and student performance (outcomes), and on the other,
‘critical educational feminisms’ which attempted to ally feminism to other more
radical egalitarian movements which challenged patriarchal, class and racial systems
of control.
Liberal educational feminists focused on achieving for the category ‘girl’
equality of access and equality of treatment. They believed that only through the
provision of equal educational experiences for both sexes could a genuinely equal
society be developed. Their main aim was to achieve open curricular access and
equal experience and participation for boys and girls. Female failure (or
 EDUCATION FEMINISM 211

underachievement) at school, in higher education and in the workplace in

comparison was seen to be the result of conventional sex role socialisation. The
measures they proposed to assess inequality were, for example:
• different attainment patterns in certain subject areas (especially maths,
science and technology);
• sex stereotyping in optional subject areas and in careers advice, bias in
examination and test construction and marking;
• sex differences in role models (especially school staffing patterns);
• a lack of self-esteem and confidence amongst girls which reduced their
expectations and narrowed their horizons; and
• a lack of gender awareness (gender blindness) amongst parents, teachers
and society generally about the failure to develop women’s potential.
Such concerns dovetailed well with the individualism underlying social
democratic approaches and with economic concerns about the lack of skilled
‘manpower’ especially in the scientific and technological professions.
The co-educational school in the state system was the particular focus of gender
reform in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 1970s, most comprehensive schools were co-
educational (often with male head teachers), even though there had been no policy
debate on the consequences of mixed as opposed to single-sex schools. The concern
expressed by mainly women teachers about the possible negative effects on girls’
education of mixed-sex schooling in the l920s and thereafter, had been ignored. For
the majority of girls and boys, large co-educational secondary schools with an
undifferentiated comprehensive pupil intake became the most common form of
schooling. However, new evidence revealed that such schools channelled boys and
girls into different subject areas and that girls speedily lost any educational
advantage gained at primary school. Debates about the respective merits of single-
sex and mixed-sex secondary schooling were taken up by feminists in the UK in the
l980s. These debates ran headlong into discussions about the elite social class basis
of single sex education.
The political stance of liberal feminist educationalists was both pragmatic and
radical. It was most effective when exploiting and working with mainstream
educational concerns and challenging formal, legalistic inequalities. Connell (1990)
described liberalism as ‘a radical politics of access’. It placed great emphasis on do-
able reforms in mounting a substantial number of small-scale initiatives in
individual classrooms and schools aimed at persuading girls to opt for previously
male-dominated subjects such as science, maths, technology and boys’ crafts. It
challenged sex-stereotypical assumptions in textbooks, curriculum and pedagogies.
Because of the devolved nature of the English educational system at the time,
‘teacher researcher’ and ‘action research’ projects were feasible and attractive.
Girls’ lack of confidence in certain subjects (‘learned-helplessness’) offered an
amenable target of reform particularly in maths and science. In mathematics, for
example, despite girls’ relatively good performance in the early years, girls’ success
was often attributed to the mediocre characteristics of diligence and obedience. At
secondary school levels, boys were frequently entered for examinations despite poor
results in their preliminary assessments or ‘mocks’, and girls, excluded, despite good
performance. The gendered definition of mathematical achievement was found to
212 MADELEINE ARNOT

privilege male success as ‘gifted’ and ‘elegant’, in contrast to female achievement

defined as ‘routine’ and ‘rule following’ (Walkerdine and Walden, 1998).
More radical feminist perspectives (included here are radical, Marxist, socialist,
lesbian, black feminisms, etc.) suggested that these approaches were too superficial
and distracting. They offered instead more trenchant ideas about the role of
education, for example, in asserting the ethnocentric, male-centred nature of school
knowledge and the white male domination of educational organisations and
management within capitalist societies. Radical feminists considered whether there
might be a role for single-sex schooling in the creation of an autonomous female
learning culture, drawing attention to contentious gender issues in schooling such as
the extent of sex harassment and violence in schools, normative heterosexuality in
sex education, and the negative experiences of gay and lesbian students. Teachers
were asked to think critically about how ‘male’ identified organisational
characteristics of hierarchy, competition and managerialism affected women in the
professions who identified more with practices of valuing personal experience, co-
operation and democracy.
The goal of reducing the impact of sexism on girls involved extensive work with
teachers in raising their awareness of the effects, for example, of detrimental sexist
language, and male teachers’ bonding mainly with boys through humour and shared
male references (such as to football). It also included addressing the dominance of
boys in terms of classroom discussions, control over playground space and sporting
fixtures in schools, the reward system, etc. Although it was never clear whether
there was a connection between participation in school life and girls’ educational
success, this powerful political critique encouraged school policies on gender
language, sexual harassment, mixed-sex sport, and anti-sexist education. The aim
throughout was to challenge naturalistic assumptions about sexual and gender
difference and about the dependence of girls upon men and the subordinate role
assigned to them as homemakers and carers.
The relationship between the family, schooling and the economy was
investigated by socialist and black feminists. They saw education and schooling as
an arena in which wider patterns of social power and subordination are reproduced
and sustained. Whilst liberal and radical feminism appeared to leave intact powerful
social inequities of social class, race and ethnicity, socialist and black feminism
arguably offered an agenda too critical for state schooling to take on board. Socialist
feminism highlighted the processes of cultural and social reproduction of gender and
social class relations, such as working class girls’ domestically oriented education
and their subordination through domestic and low status badly paid work and
through the cult of femininity and romance (c.f. Arnot 2000). Black feminism, on
the other hand, explored the construction of the ‘black girl’, her positioning within
colonial models of education, the construction of ‘other’, and the failure of
education to engage with difference in ways other than through racism,
marginalisation and exclusion (c.f. Mirza 1992). As Dillabough (2001) notes, in
these critical traditions, the notion of a gender binary of male and female were
replaced by an understanding that there were multiple femininities and
masculinities, that identities were the result of collective experiences and
 EDUCATION FEMINISM 213

interactions – fluid social constructions which were more produced than reproduced
in the educational process.
By the l980s, the development of poststructuralist and postmodern social theory
rocked feminist education scholarship. Taken to its logical conclusion, feminist
theory itself could be understood as a discourse about, rather than a set of
explanations for, social life. Even more disconcerting was the view that education
feminism itself represented a discursive tool which masked other inequalities and
left them intact. In response, education feminism took a poststructuralist turn,
focusing far more critically on the categorisations of gender, gender dualism, gender
identity work, culture, language and subjectivities. Such analyses, although detailed,
sophisticated and illuminating, played little part in the reconstruction of schooling in
the l990s. Such feminism research largely lost its audience in the teaching
profession. This was partly as a result of the reduction of teachers’ classroom
autonomy and partly as a result of its distancing from the more do-able school
reforms.
In retrospect, the pattern of reform of gender inequalities in this first phase was
patchy. Teacher initiatives tended to be small-scale, highly localised and short-lived
with consequent problems of under-financing and resourcing. They generally
involved teachers at the lower end of the school hierarchy and were more focused on
the secondary rather than the primary sector because gender differences in subject
choice and examination results provided more tangible evidence of gender
inequality. Evidence of the continuing pattern of stereotypical subject choices of
girls and boys pointed to the resilience of traditional local school cultures and the
need to use stronger strategies to reduce the effects of gender differentiation. By the
l990s, the more critical feminisms were at odds about what was required by way of
gender equality interventions in schools. On the one hand, more radical
interventions were needed; on the other hand, the concept of equality was now even
more contentious. In the event, the neo-liberal policies of Mrs Thatcher’s
government took over and fundamentally reshaped educational provision, sweeping
aside the girl-friendly agenda whilst marginalising or discarding the more radical
traditions of English teacher praxis and egalitarianism.

EDUCATION FEMINISM, MANAGERIALISM AND NEW RIGHT

GOVERNMENT AGENDAS (1980s TO 1997)
It is one of the great paradoxes of late twentieth century that many of the gender
projects in schools described above were developed during the first phase of a
Conservative government elected to power in 1979. This was a government that
announced that the ‘age of egalitarianism’ is over. Yet, in the UK, the first half of
the l980s was the key period of educational feminist activity — an extraordinary
historical coincidence when both the government and feminism were both
encouraging greater autonomy and independence (Arnot et al. 1999). From the point
of view of gender inequality, the contradictions contained within the educational
agenda of the Conservative administrations between 1979 and 1997 were highly
significant. New policy approaches were identified which were to change the shape
214 MADELEINE ARNOT

of gender patterns in education, closing some gender gaps in curricular choice and
performance, whilst opening up others.
In our book ‘Closing the Gender Gap’, Miriam David, Gaby Weiner and I
describe the deep dissatisfaction of the new Right in the early l980s with prevailing
standards of education. As Prime Minister heading up a unique coalition of
parliamentarians with neo-liberal, neo-conservative and new vocationalist
ideologies, Mrs Thatcher personally oversaw a complete overhaul of the English and
Welsh educational system. The raising of standards and the modernising of the UK
entrepreneurial culture constituted a new political agenda, in which both boys and
girls were encouraged to aspire to the world of work (rather than family or
community), and abandon their outmoded identities and aspirations. They were to
engage with the technologically oriented global culture and the new individualistic
spirit of the age. In this context, schools would exist to produce a modern workforce
that was not classed, sexed or racially classified. Thus the future educated worker
would be mobile, flexible and qualified, well able to seize the opportunities made
available to him or her. Yet paradoxically, Thatcherism also involved reinstating a
version of traditional family values. Schools would educate a future generation in
morality: respectful of authority, discipline and tradition. Education for parenthood,
sex and moral education were all cornerstones of this programme to ‘remoralise’ the
nation.
New Right reforms of the economy and of education created spiralling
differences between young men and women’s experiences (Arnot 2000). The
collapse of the manufacturing industry, the instability of many middle-class
occupations (particularly for skilled and technical workers) and the reform of
schooling had differentiated gender consequences. As Britain moved from
industrialisation to post-industrialisation, class relations in work and education
changed. Complex economic, industrial and regional shifts in employment
opportunities, particularly the growth of both public and private service sectors,
impacted upon women’s position. Traditionally the preserve of women workers,
opportunities for service-sector work expanded even if on a casual, temporary, part-
time and/or low-paid basis whereas opportunities for male employment, particularly
for skilled or semi-skilled manual occupations, diminished. In this period, the
composition of the labour force in the UK also altered dramatically, shifting from a
majority of jobs within construction, mining and manufacturing industries to the
service industries. These kinds of shifts had a particular impact on working-class
families, with high rates of male and female unemployment and an increase in
female and child poverty.
The Education Reform Act (ERA) of 1988 had dismantled the partnership
between central and local government, with schools now controlled by their
governing bodies and parents. The ERA (l988) became the cornerstone for
educational policy for the next decade, emphasising educational standards and
quality, consumer freedom of choice and institutional autonomy. Of great
significance for gender was the creation of a National Curriculum, covering 10
subjects to be taught to children between 5 and 16 years old, national testing (SATs)
and the publication of performance league tables of schools’ results for 16 and 18
year-olds (later widened to include 11 year-olds). The National Curriculum
 EDUCATION FEMINISM 215

encouraged a substantial growth in female take up of traditional ‘male’ subjects such

as science and technical crafts. The pattern of subject choices which had been
shaped by domestic educational ideologies was finally broken, ironically by
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government (Arnot et al. 1999). The model of a
core or common curriculum was something that feminists had argued for since the
l970s. The National Curriculum ignored key gender concerns in the content of
subjects, and failed to set up adequate monitoring procedures to ensure that gender
differences would not emerge within subjects, nor did it provide adequate training
for teachers, governors and head teachers on equality issues. Beneath the veneer of
the equitable overt curriculum was a ‘hidden’ curriculum which stressed competition
and individualism above collectivist egalitarian principles.
By the end of 18 years of Conservative Party rule, examination results had made
the educational achievements of girls and boys publicly visible and schools could be
held accountable for gender inequalities. However, although equal opportunities had
been listed as a cross-curriculum theme by policy-makers in l988, it was viewed as
too sensitive a subject to merit development. There was no official commitment to
monitoring sex bias in schools or in education more widely. At the same time, the
marketisation of British society had had its own impact on social inequality. The gap
between the rich and the poor widened, as Britain became what Hutton called a
‘30:30:40’ society (Hutton l995: 14 quoted in Arnot et al. 1999).
As educational policy in the late l980s and 1990s became more centralised and
managerialism took over, the balance of feminist activity shifted away from school-
based and teacher-focused interventions towards central government agencies (such
as the QCA and OFSTED). The ‘ad hoc’ and ‘alternative’ character of many of the
earlier feminist initiatives generated by committed individuals and groups at local
level were now represented as politically contentious, and the outcomes
unpredictable and non-finite.
The new organisational practices also appeared to cut across feminist-identified
styles of working which had tended to be more ‘open, democratic, friendly, and
collaborative, and less confrontational and competitive’ (Marshall, 1985). Also, with
a focus on such practices as target setting, service delivery, efficiency and ‘quality’,
the kind of managers such managerial cultures required were less likely to be
women or men sympathetic to feminist issues. In the context of these new
managerial regimes of ‘line management’, clearly defined job descriptions,
boundaried responsibility, and spheres of competence and expertise, educational
feminism itself had to change. Indeed, the new managerialism was viewed as
representing a male performance-oriented culture (Ball 1990; Maguire & Weiner
1994).
Feminism, always ‘a theory in the making’ (Hooks, 1984) again showed itself
adept at meeting the need to change. Significantly, feminists were appointed to
inspector and advisor posts in LEAs and received training in new managerial
techniques. Criticisms of previous feminist work for weaknesses in planning, and
failure to distinguish between long- and short-term goals were addressed. Gender
policy-making was now broken down into smaller, more manageable parts with
appropriate performance indicators. There was a shift in the language of gender
around performance and away from social justice. And there was a growing interest
216 MADELEINE ARNOT

in targeting specific groups of girls who were now considered in the new language
to be ‘underachieving’ rather than oppressed.
In this new performance culture, young men were characterised as
disadvantaged, masculinity was understood to be in crisis and boys were being ‘lost’
by the increased competition from women and by an allegedly feminised school
system. Girls’ raised examination performance in school leaving exams at 16
(GCSE) had produced a reversal of previously male-dominated examination
patterns. However, the lack of job opportunities for young unskilled males also
offered little incentive for them to work harder at schools. Traditional male working-
class jobs requiring physical strength had all but disappeared. Whole communities
were devastated as mines, steelworks, ship-building yards, docks and other heavy
industries were closed altogether or subject to massive downsizing and
rationalisation. It was apparent to many young men that however hard they worked
at school, the jobs just were not there.
Paradoxically, educational feminism had done much to prepare girls for the
demands of a technological world, and the necessity of studying science and
mathematics (although, paradoxically less so, for technology). However, boys were
less well prepared for any attempt by government to broaden their curriculum
(historically heavily focused upon the craft subjects, mathematics and science).
There were few attempts, at this point, to encourage boys to engage more positively,
for example, in the creative or performing arts or humanities. By the time the new
Labour government under Tony Blair came into power, gender inequalities were
again strongly on the political agenda, although this time in the name of boys.

NEW LABOUR, THE AMBIGUITIES OF GENDER AND OPPOSITIONAL

EDUCATION FEMINISM
The concept of gender equality in education was problematic for a New Labour
government which sought to distance itself from the ‘old left’ modernist politics of
the l970s and 1980s. The transformation of social democracy in Europe, the need to
respond to increasing globalisation and the desire to sustain neo-liberal agendas
around choice and excellence were not conducive to strong egalitarianism. Whilst
New Labour did not completely abandon social democracy, particularly in relation
to its interventionism in the labour market, it failed to address the concerns of
education feminists regarding the continuing problems facing women in society.
Although the educational statistics revealed only very small gender gaps (except in
literacy for boys), gender power relations had not been effectively challenged either
in the family, the work place or political life. Economic, political and social capital
still appeared by the turn of the new century to be the privilege of men, especially
those within ever more powerful elite groups.
The late 1990s and early twenty-first century witnessed the substantial closing of
the gender performance gap at 16 and 18. Far more boys and girls achieved
examination passes at school, although girls had improved their results even more
than boys. There was now a 10 per cent gap in the achievement of girls and boys at
GCSE. These national aggregates suggest that boys have lost their advantage in
terms of school leaving credentials and are now struggling to keep up to girls’
 EDUCATION FEMINISM 217

success rate. A similar redistribution of educational credentials at 18 is also evident

as girls match, if not better, boys’ performance. The proportion of girls and boys
achieving the top grades at 18 (A levels) differed only by 0.1 in l995. Girls now had
equivalent access to higher education. A wide range of statistical patterns suggested
that girls were now successful at science and mathematics from a very early age
through to 16. However, the loss of girls after this age in these subjects militates
against their continuing into scientific and technological careers. The evidence
suggests that science, maths and technology are becoming even more masculine
subjects at 18 than before (Arnot et al. 1999).
Another problematic aspect of these national statistical data is the boy/girl
categorisation. In the l970s this categorisation had been challenged by socialist and
black feminists as failing to take account of the interface between different social
inequalities and their complex combined effects. The failure of government to
monitor the educational performances of different groups of girls and boys, masks
the enduring if not increasing gaps between middle- and working-class children, and
between children from different ethnic minority groups (Gillborn and Mirza 2000).
Key to egalitarian traditions would be the task of sorting out which girls and which
boys succeed and which fail within contemporary performative school cultures (e.g.
Teese et al. 1995).
Preliminary evidence from Australia suggests that boys outperform girls in
gaining the highest grades, particularly in the sciences (Teese 2000: 103-118; Teese
and Polesel 2003: 220-221). Without a breakdown of the top grades (B and C grades
at 16 years, and A and B grades at 18), it is unclear whether gender is really now
irrelevant to school outcomes. Not only are there very large class gaps amongst girls
themselves but the pattern of relative advantage over boys for the socially most
advantaged girls is far from clear. Statistics of subject achievement, although rarely
available, suggest that social class differences exist in, for example, chemistry
enrolment and achievement (Teese, Lamb, Helme & Houghton 2006 forthcoming).
These patterns have shown that while white girls from higher SES families now take
chemistry more frequently than boys from the same backgrounds, it is boys who
outperform girls when it comes to the highest grades of achievement. In other
words, even middle-class girls from professional backgrounds do not translate their
higher levels of participation into equally high levels of competitive success. From
this follows less access to university courses leading to medicine, other clinical
sciences, and even non-science courses which require high aggregate marks.
The failure to use more discriminating measures of relative achievement (such as
high grades) or to use a range of measures, including both enrolment rates and high
grades (as in physics) permits the view that boys are underachieving and thus turns
resources away from improving girls’ education (Teese et al. 1995).
Neo-liberal reforms of both the Thatcher years and New Labour appear to have
increased the social class and ethnic gap in relation to average educational
achievement (Gillborn and Mirza 2000). Social class and ethnic inequalities in
educational achievement at 16 appear to have been aggravated rather than reduced
by such reforms.
218 MADELEINE ARNOT

The ‘Boy Turn’2 in Educational Research and Policy Making

Concern about boys’ education grew out of school leaving data but also evidence of
the lack of progress of boys in closing the achievement gap in literacy and language-
related subjects. Data collected from national assessments at the age of 7
demonstrate that girls get off to a better start at reading than boys and that the lead
they establish in English is maintained at 11 and at age 14 (Arnot et al. 1998). It
appears that a sizeable gap between boys and girls in reading and English is
sustained throughout compulsory schooling. By 2000, approximately 15 per cent
more girls than boys obtained high grades in English examinations at age 16 (DfEE
2000). The fact that boys have not reduced this female ‘advantage’ in language-
related subjects is understood to be one of the principal reasons why they have lost
overall ground in compulsory schooling in comparison with girls.
Boys’ problems with literacy have triggered a whole range of different responses
from government, teachers and schools and from gender researchers (c.f. Ofsted
1993; QCA 1998). Media commentators argued that schools favoured girls by
remodelling the curriculum in line with female learning needs (c.f. Epstein et al.
1998). Similarly, boys’ disaffection was linked to the dominance of women teachers,
particularly amongst those working with the younger age groups. One answer was to
recruit more male primary teachers to make the school more ‘boy- friendly’. Yet
often pedagogic strategies confirmed masculinity rather than challenged it. Teachers
moved strategically away from more child-centred progressive modes of teaching
towards more traditional highly structured and teacher-controlled pedagogies as a
means of combating what is often seen as adolescent boys’ immaturity (Arnot and
Gubb 2001). Paradoxically this shift may have strengthened boys’ sense of
insecurity and aggravated disaffected masculinities (c.f. Arnot 2006).
The responses of educational feminists and the Labour government to male
education are complex and contradictory. Educational failure is explained by
drawing on outmoded socialisation theories rather than employing contemporary
understandings of gender identities and subjectivities. Sewell (1998), for example
highlighted the different black masculinities, whilst Frosh et al., (2002: 264) noted
that ‘British masculinities (as others) are socially constructed from within a culture
in which sexual, racial and class inequalities are still deeply imbedded, and these are
reflected in the ways in which boys make sense of themselves, in what they take to
be acceptable and what they oppose’. The outcomes for many of the most
disadvantaged boys and girls of Labour educational policies therefore may well turn
out to be more socially divisive than successfully integrative.

New Labour’s Education and Employment Policies

In contrast to its educational policies, New Labour has intervened in relation to
gender inequalities in the economy. As Patterson (2003) argues, Labour politicians
draw upon what he calls a form of weak ‘developmentalism’ to address the

2 I have borrowed this concept from Weaver-Hightower (2003).

 EDUCATION FEMINISM 219

requirements of globalisation as well as a revamped European form of social

democracy which allows for state intervention in the name of both economic
progress and redistribution. The latest PSI survey found that gender inequalities in
the labour market were larger than those of ethnicity or even class and have
particular importance therefore in the context of encouraging re-skilling,
modernisation, efficiency and competitive performance of the economy (Forbes
2002). In the l970s, shortages of skilled scientific labour were recognised as holding
back economic progress (Arnot and Miles 2005). Yet despite the Equal Pay Act
1970, the then-Labour government did not promote gender equity in its interventions
into the corporate economy. When the Labour Party took office in 1997, gender
segregation of the workforce and pay inequalities were substantial and embedded in
traditional employment practices.
The current Labour government set about encouraging the economic sector to
create more diverse, less male-centric domains, improve the rights of access to all
forms of employment, create more conducive ‘micro-cultural’ work conditions for
men and women and ensure a better work-family balance. Various ministries offer
modernising policies to encourage women into productive work, and especially into
science and engineering. The Women and Equality Unit (WEU) significantly was
moved in 2003 into the Department of Trade and Industry. DTI has taken on
responsibility for the new single equality body, the Commission for Equality and
Human Rights, which will assume the EOC’s gender issues and include matters
relating to race, disability, age and sexuality. A stream of reports give employers
incentives to modernise their gender profiles, to recruit women, and foster female
enterprise. However, the problems of female low pay, part-time work and continuing
correlations of motherhood with childcare have not been effectively tackled. Women
still outnumber men in service industry employment, whilst men outnumber women
in managerial and administrative positions. The ‘mother gap’ which disadvantages
women with children is large by international standards, and badly affects teenage
mothers and low-skilled women. The EOC (2001a) highlights the continuing ‘life
cycle of inequality’ which faces many women because of their low pay.
Despite this egalitarian rhetoric around gender equity in training and
employment after age 16, the modernisation of the economy is associated with
increasing income differentials between women of different social classes and their
families. The ambition of raising national skill levels by New Labour has been
partially thwarted by continuing patterns of gender differentiation in choices of
vocational courses and careers. The gender skills gap is embedded in young people’s
sex stereotypical choices of pre-vocational programmes and in GNVQs, NVQs,
Modern Apprenticeships and further and higher education courses (EOC 2001b).
Twenty-five years after the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, sex stereotyping is
extensive in vocational course choices with large groups of girls still choosing to
train as hairdressers and boys as car mechanics and computer specialists (EOC
2001b). Care, childcare, hairdressing and beauty therapy are predominantly female
whilst the overwhelming majority of students in construction, manufacturing,
information technology and motor industry courses are male. Yet despite such
extensive gender differentials, the Labour government has pursued a policy of
uncoupling the National Curriculum and introducing a more flexible range of
220 MADELEINE ARNOT

work-related courses for 14-16 year-olds. Increased flexibility in the school curri-
culum, as many gender experts have warned, will run counter to the desire to
de-gender the workforce and working practices in the UK economy.
Gender equality as an economic goal tends to benefit those most able to benefit,
the professional middle classes, thus increasing the economic and social divisions
between women and their families. The new social policy framework which focuses
on tackling single mothers’ and children’s poverty and discrimination in the work
place may reduce the obstacles which women face in bettering their lives. However,
as David (2000: 48) points out, the ‘ideological push for individuality, the adult
worker model combining family-work balance may also distance women from the
educational development of their children’.
In 1997, the Social Exclusion Unit which Blair said would ensure ‘social
cohesion and not social division’ offered new approaches to tackle youth crime and
truancy. However, these focused on parental (especially female) responsibilities
rather than societal structures and government economic policies:
All this points to the discursive repositioning of family and state responsibilities
but what is of real significance is the placing of gender at the heart of state
actions: the ‘out of control’ and uneducable boy is in need of reigning in; the
parent at home, oftentimes the single parent/mother, is made responsible for and
penalised for his actions; at the same time, she is culpable in the production and
sustenance of family poverty by not having a real job, and will be further
penalised by changes to tax and benefit support (Raphael Reed 1998: 64-65).
Social exclusion as a concept is masculinised, often defined as a problem for
boys in general or for a particular group of boys. Osler and Vincent (2004) found
that most of the practices dealing with school exclusion are designed with boys in
mind, even though girls represent ‘one in four of those subject to formal, permanent
disciplinary exclusion from secondary school’ in 2000/1. This meant some 1,566
girls were permanently excluded from school in that year (DfES 2002). Many more
girls are subject to fixed-term disciplinary exclusion, are unofficially excluded (for
example, when parents were asked to find alternative schooling for their daughters)
or are self-excluding by truanting. Policy makers have failed to take account of the
systemic problems of feelings of isolation, personal, family and emotional problems,
bullying, withdrawal or truancy, and the disciplinary action taken against girls: thus,
.....for many girls informal and unrecognised exclusion is as significant as
formal disciplinary exclusion. It can restrict or deny girls their right to education
and lead to more general social exclusion (Osler and Vincent 2004: p 3).
The needs of pregnant young women, young mothers and young women
involved in complex personal relations are not necessarily supported by adults. Only
recently have new ideas been developed to work with girls in addressing their
particular needs (for example, Cruddas and Haddock 2003).
In sum, Walkerdine, Lucey and Melody (2001: 2) argue that, so powerful are the
‘discourses/rhetoric of internationalism and progressivism’, that egalitarianism
associated with traditional forms of social democracy is offered little space within
the Labour manifesto:
The Blair government is fully committed to globalism and its attempts to
reduce the welfare state are quite in line with monetarist practice. By and
 EDUCATION FEMINISM 221

large it sees its job as the humane management of an inevitable global shift.
In this context, for social democrats, the end of ‘welfarist dependency’ and
words such as autonomy, grass roots organisation and social capital provide
the basis for a mode of government with some element of personal control
at a time of profound but inevitable change.
The production of girls in this context is now ‘complex and problematic’: girls and
women are being remade into the ‘modern neo-liberal subject, the subject of self-
invention and transformation who is capable of surviving within the new social,
economic and political system’ (Walkerdine et. al. 2001: 3). However, the new
concept of the autonomous, self-managing ‘new psychological subjects’ is only
applicable to middle class girls, particularly from the professional middle classes:
The terrible and central fact is this: it is social class that massively divides girls
and young women in terms of their educational attainment and life trajectories.
Indeed we suspect that the situation is even worse than it had been in the l960s
and l970s, despite the expansion of higher education. Via a hard and painful
route, a small minority of [working-class girls in their study] got to university
and then to professional careers, but most did not succeed at school and entered
the poorly paid labour market. The gains of the l960s and l970s have been
shown to be ephemeral and it is wishful thinking, to pretend that class has
disappeared either as a tool of analysis or as a concrete fact (Walkerdine et al.
2001: 4).
These authors challenge what they see as the triumphalist tone of the Labour
Party’s think tank Demos’ analysis of ‘Tomorrow’s Women’ (Wilkinson et al. l997)
which celebrated the rise in women’s participation in the labour market. They argue
that ‘women’s position in the new economy is not comfortable’ (Wilkinson et al.
l997: 216). The future, rather than being ‘rosy’ is in fact distorted by the realities of
widening social class differences.
The ‘boy turn’ in educational policy making is associated not only with an ‘end
game’ for national girls’ educational policies (Lingard 2003), but also with a re-
masculinisation of policy discourses. Raphael Reed (1998: 65) suggests that the new
policy language now uses a ‘masculinist and bellicose language imagery offering to
use ‘tough love’, ‘hit squads’, ‘a name and shame approach’, ‘zero tolerance of
failure’, ‘silencing the doubts of cynics and the corrosion of the perpetual sceptics’.
She argues that ‘improving schools and boys’ performance seems to be predicated
on the restitution of hegemonic forms of masculinity and gender oppressive
practices, (1998: 73). Not only are ‘empowering and powerful counter discourses’
unavailable but neither are broader curriculum approaches which could address the
‘fears, anxieties, displacements’ (1998: 73) and effects of this new pedagogic
context.
Paradoxically, at a time when many more women enter schools as teaching
assistants, the masculine language of ‘technical rationality’ privileges teacher
accountability over professionalism. Mahony (2003) argues that in England this has
consequences for gender reforms since teachers are made to feel powerless, teacher
training neglects equity issues and management structures in schools are not
conducive to the development of gender equality programmes. By 2000, the
publication, ‘Whatever Happened to Equal Opportunities in Schools?’ (Myers
222 MADELEINE ARNOT

2000), suggested that the activism of the l980s around gender equality and
particularly girls’ education had been lost.
Mahony argues that long before Labour came to power, feminism was seen as
part of the problem not part of the solution (Mahoney 2003: 75). Thatcherism and
the fragmentation of the women’s movement contributed to this view. The allegedly
more ‘inclusive’ policy making of Labour could have challenged this. However, in
reality, Labour’s commitment to policy continuity with the Conservative
government meant that a similar aversion to feminist egalitarianism was hidden in
the ‘softer, less aggressive and overtly threatening version of the politics of the
Third Way’. Gender became part of the redistributionist discourse in which poverty
is explained in cultural terms, in which inclusion means ‘labour market attachment’,
in which inequality is redefined as social exclusion. Even when citizenship
education is called into play to aid social inclusion, stronger egalitarian notions of
social justice and rights are marginalised and traditional gendering of public and
private spheres is reinforced (Arnot 2006b).

REFLECTIONS
The historical narrative of education feminism and the struggle to achieve gender
equality in society through education demonstrates a number of key issues. I can
only touch on a few here. It is important to note that education feminism is one of
the most vibrant social movements of the late twentieth century and that it has
successfully established the terrain of the sociology of women’s education and also
of feminist scholarship in the field of education. Most of this narrative is dependent
not upon official evaluations but on the research writing and actions of teachers,
academics and youth themselves who have been questioned endlessly about their
lives and aspirations. The lessons learnt about how best to tackle gender inequality
and gendered power relations are lessons learnt from over a hundred years of
struggle for female citizenship. The picture that I have painted is only another
chapter in that narrative.
What are the key lessons learnt? The first must relate to the power of economic
infrastructure to set the terms under which gender equality reforms operate.
Demographic factors as well as economic expansion, stagnation and restructuring all
affect the significance and acceptable limits of gender inequality in society. The
social contract between men and women is one which, although challenged, remains
arguably at the core of Western European societies, built into social policy, built into
work conditions, and built into family life. The power which this contract gives men
over women is both the target of and the brake on gender reform. The struggle by
women for access to education as a social right and of access to policy making as a
civic right has been relatively successful, especially for the professional middle-
class women. Not only is the category ‘girl’ (which provided the leitmotif of the
women’s movement) now rejected by postmodern poststructuralist theory, but also
such success creates the conditions for greater social polarisation of middle-class
and working-class women and their children.
 EDUCATION FEMINISM 223

Male power relations have been sustained within the labour market despite
educational transformations. A key lesson here is the limited power of education to
change male dominance and hierarchy in the labour market and sex segregation of
the labour force. Indeed the long shadow of work still genders the job and career
expectations of young people today, despite the fluidities and flexibilities promised
by a postmodern risk society. Sex segregation, discretionary status and unequal pay
within a gender-differentiated work force have characterised the late twentieth and
early twenty-first century. Such fields as the sciences and mathematics, and elite
institutions such as universities and professional training have been challenged by
feminist scholarship but this has led often to retrenchment.
The last fifty years have seen girls acquiring high level school qualifications and
breaking through a considerable number of glass ceilings. Some of the gender gaps
in national statistics on access, subject choice and performance have closed. But
whether women’s understanding of their agency, capabilities and power is
strengthened by this examination success is debatable. The nature of science,
mathematics and technology which girls are now more successful at is hardly one
that is built upon the principles of education feminism. The forms of knowledge and
of schooling would need to encourage positive female representation and female
agency. The female diligence and study habits which lead to examination success
are not necessarily those which create a strong sense of critical political
consciousness, nor are they necessarily valued at higher levels. The Can Do girls
suffer anxiety and a lack of confidence (Walkerdine et al. 2001). The contradiction
between women’s educational qualifications and their lower levels of access to
economic, political and social power together with the demands of family life
militate against their sustaining such success as adults.
Education feminism as a social reform movement has shown that, although
successful in redefining the political/ideological terrain for the younger generation,
it cannot of its own reshape economic structures. Access to elite forms of knowledge
within a hierarchical curriculum described once by Bourdieu and Passeron (l977) as
an aristocratic knowledge requiring an aristocratic relationship to it, does not
guarantee economic and social capital. Scholastic capital gained through their school
success is not necessarily convertible, nor is it converted into these other forms of
privilege for women. As this historical narrative has shown, national statistics mask
social structural effects which divide social classes and ethnic/racial groups. These
other social positionings and hierarchies are to be found ‘within’ gender categories.
Liberal feminism had been satisfied with gaining women access to male structures
rather than reforming or uncoupling these internal gender structures. Although girls
are often thought to be the most adaptable as learners (Arnot et al. 1998), not all
girls are equal. Indeed, there is too much of a tendency now to view all girls as
successes and all boys as failures (Arnot and Mac an Ghaill 2006). This is far from
the truth and indeed teachers’ experience.
In the last ten to fifteen years, the re-masculinisation of education policy has
failed to pursue these issues, to measure social and race inequalities within and
between genders, and to develop a viable explanation for the persistence of gender
inequalities. The success of this gender re-socialisation project, so challenged in the
l980s, begs the question about whether women have been as well served as they
224 MADELEINE ARNOT

might by such a perspective. The realities of racial and social class inequalities,
gendered violence and female marginalisation are still present in the educational
system and in society, but there is little political purchase now in focusing on such
structures.
The social thrust of New Labour education policies has already been dulled by
assumptions about schools and teachers having a bigger impact on achievement
differences than social class, so the apparent victories of girls only further weaken
the case for equity and concentrate attention on the most visibly marginalised
groups, who tend to be male and whose problems are considered to be social rather
than educational. In the end all the issues around access to hierarchical domains of
learning in the school curriculum, relative quality of instructional experience in
those domains, access to a hierarchical university system, etc., are papered over.
New Labour has attempted to shore up the inequalities which ironically are
exposed by a marketised system of education. Such inequalities cause
embarrassment by disturbing the success of that educational project. The agenda
around inclusion begs the question about the place of gender in twenty-first century
society. On what terms should women be included within a pluralist and diverse
society? Should gender remain a category at all or should it, as Ulrich Beck (1992)
argued, be abandoned in order to engage with the strictures of a new highly
individualised risk-based society? But in practice, gender identities are the means by
which individuals make sense of the world and find moments of celebration in the
face of adversity. The next phase of gender equality reform will need to address the
individualisation of gender identities associated with late modernity.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This paper was originally presented at the Colloquium on Sex Differences at School:
Changes in France and Great Britain from 1970 to 2000, October 21/22nd 2004,
University of Sorbonne, University of Paris. Thanks to Miriam David, Gaby Weiner,
Mairtin Mac an Ghaill and Phil Miles for allowing me to use joint authored work
and to Richard Teese for his excellent editorial comments.

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