2016 Book AGirlSEducation

Palgrave Studies
in Gender and Education
A Girl’s
Education
Schooling and the
Formation of Gender,
Identities and Future Visions
Judith Gill, Katharine Esson
and Rosalina Yuen
Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education
Series Editor
Yvette Taylor
School of Education,
University of Strathclyde
Glasgow, United Kingdom
This series aims to provide a comprehensive space for an increasingly diverse
and complex area of interdisciplinary social science research: Gender and
Education. As the field of women and gender studies is rapidly developing
and becoming ‘internationalised’ as with traditional social science disci-
plines of e.g. sociology, educational studies, social geography etc. there
is greater need for a dynamic, global series that plots emerging defini-
tions and debates, and monitors critical complexities of gender and educa-
tion. This series will have an explicitly feminist approach and orientation,
attending to key theoretical and methodological debates, and ensuring
a continued conversation and relevance within the inter-disciplinary and
long-standing ‘Gender and Education’ field. The series will be better able
to combine renewed and revitalized feminist research methods and theo-
ries with emergent and salient public and policy issues. These include pre,
compulsory, and post-compulsory education, ‘early years’ and ‘life long’
education; educational (dis)engagements of pupils, students and staff;
trajectories and intersectional inequalities incl. race, class, sexuality, age,
disability; policy and practice across educational landscapes; diversity and
difference, including institutional (schools, colleges, universities), loca-
tional and embodied (in ‘teacher’-‘learner’ positions); varied global activ-
ism in and beyond the classroom and the ‘public university’; educational
technologies and transitions and the (ir)relevance of (in)formal educa-
tional settings; emergent educational mainstreams and margins. In oper-
ating a critical approach to ‘gender and education’, the series recognizes
the importance of probing beyond the boundaries of specific territorial-
legislative domains in order to develop a more international, intersectional
focus. In addressing varied conceptual and methodological questions, the
Series combines an intersectional focus on competing - and sometimes col-
liding - strands of educational provisioning, equality and ‘diversity’, as well
as providing insightful reflections of the continuing critical shift of gender
and feminism within (and beyond) the academy. Proposals: If you have a
proposal for the series you would like to discuss please contact: Andrew
James, Senior Commissioning Editor, Education: a.james@palgrave.com
Yvette Taylor, Professor in Social and Policy Studies: taylory@lsbu.ac.uk
More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14626
Judith Gill • Katharine Esson • Rosalina Yuen
A Girl’s Education
Schooling and the Formation of Gender, Identities
and Future Visions
Judith Gill Rosalina Yuen
School of Education Ros Yuen Psychology
University of South Australia Beulah Park, South Australia,
Mawson Lakes, South Australia, Australia
Australia
Katharine Esson
NSW Department of Industry
Darlinghurst, New South Wales,
Australia
Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education

ISBN 978-1-137-52486-7 ISBN 978-1-137-52487-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52487-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016943496
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

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To the girls and women of the future that they may live
fulfilling lives that are less constrained
by gender restrictions and more celebrated
in recognition of the values of friendship,
cooperation, and loyalty.
Series Editor’s Preface
This Series aims to provide a comprehensive space for an increasingly

diverse and complex area of interdisciplinary social science research: gen-
der and education. Because the field of women and gender studies is
developing rapidly and becoming ‘internationalised’ – as are traditional
social science disciplines such as sociology, educational studies, social
geography, and so on – there is a greater need for this dynamic, global
Series that plots emerging definitions and debates and monitors critical
complexities of gender and education. This Series has an explicitly feminist
approach and orientation and attends to key theoretical and methodologi-
cal debates, ensuring a continued conversation and relevance within the
well-established, inter-disciplinary field of gender and education.
The Series combines renewed and revitalised feminist research meth-
ods and theories with emergent and salient public policy issues. These
include pre-compulsory and post-compulsory education; ‘early years’ and
‘lifelong’ education; educational (dis)engagements of pupils, students
and staff; trajectories and intersectional inequalities including race, class,
sexuality, age and disability; policy and practice across educational land-
scapes; diversity and difference, including institutional (schools, colleges,
universities), locational and embodied (in ‘teacher’–‘learner’ positions);
varied global activism in and beyond the classroom and the ‘public univer-
sity’; educational technologies and transitions and the (ir)relevance of (in)
formal educational settings; and emergent educational mainstreams and
margins. In using a critical approach to gender and education, the Series
recognises the importance of probing beyond the boundaries of specific
territorial-legislative domains in order to develop a more international,
vii
viii Series Editor’s Preface
intersectional focus. In addressing varied conceptual and methodological

questions, the Series combines an intersectional focus on competing – and
sometimes colliding – strands of educational provisioning and equality and
‘diversity’, and provides insightful reflections on the continuing critical
shift of gender and feminism within (and beyond) the academy.
Yvette Taylor
University of Strathclyde, UK
Preface: Reclaiming the Space for Girls
Toward the end of the twentieth century, girls’ education received a great
deal of attention across the English-speaking world. While to some degree
this focus was associated with feminist energy derived from what became
known as the ‘second wave’ women’s movement, there were also pro-
found changes in the general understanding of the ways in which school-
ing prepared young people for working lives. Women’s infiltration of the
labor force across the English-speaking world is widely recognized as the
most profound social change of the late twentieth century. In the UK, the
numbers of women in paid work rose from 59% in 1980 to 70% in 2008
when the numbers of women at work became much closer to those of
men. By 2008, 14.3 million women were in the UK workforce alongside
16.9 million men. Comparable figures from the USA show that women’s
presence in the labor force increased dramatically, from 30.3 million in
1970 to 72.7 million during 2006–2010. In percentage terms women
made up 37.9% of the labor force in 1970 compared to 47.2% between
2006 and 2010 (US Census Bureau, 2012). While the numerous impli-
cations of this change for the ways in which lives are lived, domestically
and professionally, are still being worked out in many lives, what is clear
is that there is no possibility of a return to the traditional division of labor
between men and women which placed men in the public world of work
and women in the private world of the home.
The relatively sudden and rapid increase in the numbers of women in
paid work quickly led to increased demands on schooling to better prepare
girls for working lives. Whereas prior to 1975 parents were less likely to
support daughters in education beyond the compulsory years than their
ix
x Preface: Reclaiming the Space for Girls
sons, the idea that girls were on the way to becoming wage earners meant
that their education began to be seen as an investment. Coincidentally
educational research uncovered the myriad ways in which schooling had
typically constrained girls’ interests and capabilities to areas traditionally
associated with home management and child rearing while at the same
time providing opportunities for boys to make choices between a wider
range of learning experiences leading to professional careers. Furthermore,
for the years up until 1975 in Australia and the UK, boys were much more
likely to complete schooling than were girls. Consequently, a significantly
higher proportion of young men entered university and followed through
to the professions. In the USA, where the tradition of secondary school-
ing was less strongly connected to university entrance, the situation of
girls’ school experience as different from their male peers was not fully
registered much before the 1990s when the Sadkers’ work (1994) roundly
denounced American schools as failing girls in multiple ways. Across the
globe, the idea of essential gender difference had been firmly embedded
in educational arrangements and treatments, so much so that these dif-
ferences had continued for many decades earlier without attracting much
notice.
In England and Australia, the 1970s and 1980s comprised a watershed
for widespread educational change with respect to gender. While the ini-
tial studies had been based on large-scale surveys showing quantifiable
gender differences in schooling outcomes, researchers gradually turned
to investigations of life in schools in the effort to track the production
of these divisions. Thus girls were seen not just as comprising a category
distinguished by lack of achievement and school completion, but as pro-
duced as girls within this category by the ways in which schooling was
organized. Investigations of schooling practice revealed pedagogical ten-
dencies contributing to gender differences in learning capacities and self-
understanding. By the early 1990s, schooling processes attracted numbers
of micro studies of life in schools and classrooms. As Johnson (1993, 10)
noted:
…we need to recognize how the interpellation [calling into being] of sexed
subjects … does not occur in institutions like educational ones in a unitary
way. The construction of gender goes on busily in the daily life of schools
through a range of different processes. We need to study how such practices
formulate and determine the terms of sexual difference in this setting and
the range of ways in which this is done.
Preface: Reclaiming the Space for Girls xi
Hence the rationale for this book in which we will attempt to show
some of the ways in which gender construction occurs and how it has been
understood by researchers and readers.
Following dramatic demonstrations of the ways in which girls were
significantly less well served by schooling when compared to boys, con-
siderable amounts of time, research energy, and funding were devoted to
investigating ways to improve girls’ education—popularly understood to
mean to make girls’ education more like that of boys. Educational policies
and practices were challenged to demonstrate they were gender inclusive.
Gender differences in outcomes were subject to close scrutiny and height-
ened accountability with demands that gender be included as a category in
all tables, listings, and audits describing schooling outcomes. As a result of
research demonstrating girls being regarded as less important than boys,
the very term ‘girl’ was challenged as being derogatory and educators
were urged to adopt the term ‘young woman’ in any writing or reporting
of female educational experience.
More recently, the term ‘girl’ has experienced something of a revival,
albeit not always in a positive direction, as shall be explained in the follow-
ing chapter! In this work, we have deliberately adopted the term ‘girl’ as
we want to signal the importance of the place of girl in educational writ-
ing and research. Whereas in previous times the idea of girl and woman
was clearly defined in terms of expectations and behaviors and the role of
girls was to live up to and within that clearly defined position, nowadays it
seems that the space created for girls in widespread popular culture con-
tinues to be ambiguous and ill-defined, varying across contexts. We do
not propose to produce a tight clear definition of the expectations placed
on girls but rather to explore the ways in which adolescent girls interpret
their place in terms of current conceptions and possibilities and the ways
in which they envisage potential futures.
Of course, the old adage about boys needing to be boys is still around—
one local elite boys’ school proudly displays on its school fences and
advertising material ‘we know boys!’—with the implication that theirs is a
specialist knowledge uniquely appropriate to the task of boys’ education.
Coincidentally a non-government girls’ school in the near neighborhood
announces on its wall poster and media advertising materials ‘Our suc-
cess is in the woman she becomes!’ Obviously the subtext for both estab-
lishments is built around a concept of difference, but while the boys are
apparently to be given the right to be boys (whatever that means), the girls
are to be charged with the requirement to become something else—no
xii Preface: Reclaiming the Space for Girls
longer girls but women. It’s hard to avoid the idea that boys as boys are to
be accepted and welcomed, whereas girls have to work on themselves to
adapt and adopt the requirements for adult womanhood if they are to be
accepted and celebrated.
This book will focus on adolescent girls as subjects at a time popularly
associated with their active involvement, responsibilities, and freedoms in
the context of late modernity. Rather than define girls as preoccupied with
Havighurst’s developmental tasks in which one’s identity was supposedly
permanently settled at adolescence (Havighurst 1948) as part of a mascu-
linized version of youth coming-of-age, we see girls as certainly engaging
with a search for selfhood, but a self that is fluid and multiple and one
which endures through several iterations as they seek to define themselves
in a manner fitting with the mood of the times in order to achieve their own
sense of individual self or subjectivity. In doing this they are engaging with
the dominant discourses of late modernity which include a heavy emphasis
on individualization (Beck 1992; Beck and Beck Gernsheim 2009; Rose
1990) to be enacted through choice (Baker 2008) and taking responsibility
for oneself (what Budgeon calls responsibilization (Budgeon 2001, 11)).
It is important to stress the temporality of the effects of these discourses at
this particular time within the girls’ lives which lends them an urgency but
also a level of determination, rightly seen by the girls as both challenging
and frightening. Coincidentally the term girl makes important claims on
the topic as a move to freeze the frame, to concentrate on this moment in
an effort to capture the ways in which girls’ vulnerability allows the analysis
to entertain with the larger forces of the time. Consequently, we insist on
the girlhood of our subjects in all its elusive changeability, its contrariness,
and its potentiality in their headlong rush to become adult women.
Judith Gill
School of Education, University of South Australia,
Mawson Lakes, SA, Australia
Katharine Esson
NSW Department of Industry, Darlinghurst,
NSW, Australia
Rosalina Yuen
Ros Yuen Psychology, Beulah Park,
SA, Australia
Preface: Reclaiming the Space for Girls xiii
References
Baker, J. (2008). The ideology of choice. Overstating progress and hiding injustice
in the lives of young women. Women’s Studies International Forum, 31, 53–64.
Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. London: Sage.
Beck, U., & Beck Gernsheim, E. (2009). Losing the traditional: Individualization
and precarious freedoms. London: Sage.
Budgeon, S. (2001). Emergent feminist(?) identities: Young women and the prac-
tice of micropolitics. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 8(1), 7–28. doi:10.
1177/13505068010080010211.
Havighurst, R. J. (1948). Developmental tasks and education. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Johnson, L. (1993). The modern girl: Girlhood and growing up. Sydney: Allen &
Unwin.
Rose, N. (1990). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self. London:
Routledge.
Sadker, M., & Sadker, D. (1994). Failing at fairness: How America’s schools cheat
girls. New York: Macmillan.
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank all the girls who willingly spoke with us in the studies
outlined in this book. Your contributions have been terrifically important,
exciting, and challenging for us in putting this work together.
Quite simply, without you, it would not have been possible.
xv
Contents
1 Who Are Girls in Current Times and Is There a Problem?1
2 How We Know What We Know:

Knowledge and Evidence27
3 See How Far We’ve Come! Girls’ Education in Recent

History. And Where Does This Leave Girls Now?61
4 The Balancing Act95
5 Girls at School: The Formation of Learning Identities125
6 Post-school Pathways and Girls’ Imagined Futures155
7 Girls at School: A More Complex Picture183
Index205
xvii
About the Authors
Judith Gill is a former secondary schoolteacher who has worked in teacher

education in South Australian universities for the past 30 years. She has
recently retired from the University of South Australia where she is cur-
rently an adjunct associate professor. Her main research interest is in gen-
der and its associations with achievement and working lives. Her doctoral
study looked at the ways in which schooling practice led to the construc-
tion of gender in students, both boys and girls. She has been a frequent
consultant to schools in relation to gender context, the topic of her 2004
book Beyond the Great Divide: Single sex or coeducation (UNSW Press,
2004). Most recently, she has researched the issue of minority girls and
women in STEM fields generally and in particular engineering.
Kathy Esson has worked widely in the fields of education and health. She
currently works with the NSW Skills Board on policy and research in rela-
tion to vocational education and training. Her doctoral research examined
gendered subjectivity in Australian adolescent girls. She has also been
involved in a review of public education in NSW, done work on tobacco
for WHO, taught psychology, and been a university student counselor,
working primarily with young women. Kathy has qualifications in psychol-
ogy, counseling, and education. She received the Elaine Dignan Award
from the Australian Psychological Society for her research and policy work
with girls and women.
Rosalina Yuen is a psychologist in private practice. She is a former social
worker who has worked extensively in child protection and forensic mental
health. Her interest in gender and education originated from her clinical
xix
xx About the Authors
work with marginalized girls and young women. Her doctoral study exam-
ined the ways senior schoolgirls experienced the ‘successful girl’ story as
they move from school to post-school destinations, the ways in which their
biographies are intensely planned and differentially shaped by available
resources. In her private practice, she counsels many girls and young
women in issues relating to schooling, university studies, relationships,
sexuality, career choices, parenting, and combining work and family. She
provides counseling to schools, university student services, and employee
programs.
Abbreviations
OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development

available at www.oecd.org/
OFSTED Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills
available at www.gov.uk/government/organisations/ofsted
PISA Programme for International Student Assessment, a subset of
the OECD
PLP Professional Learning Plan required of all students in year 10 in
some Australian states to chart their future studies in senior school
SES Socioeconomic status—calculable in terms of government indexes
in Australia, but the term used more broadly refers to social
differences in economic background
UK United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
USA United States of America
xxi
List of Figures
Fig. 5.1 Responses in percentages to My parents encourage

me to do well at school 133
Fig. 5.2 Responses in percentages to Overall I enjoy school 133
Fig. 5.3 Responses in percentage to I am doing as well as
other people my age134
Fig. 5.4 Responses in percentages to I am doing pretty well134
Fig. 5.5 Responses in percentages to A university degree is so
complicated I don’t know where to start135
Fig. 6.1 Responses in percentages to Thinking about the future,
how important is it for you to be doing a job in which you
are your own boss164
how important is it for you to participate in decision making165
learn new skills all the time167
earn a lot of money169
have contact with a lot of people170
Fig. 6.6 Responses in percentages to the question Men have
careers, women have jobs172
Fig. 6.7 Responses in percentages to the question All in all it
is better for the family if the husband provides most of the
income and the wife takes care of home and the family172
xxiii
xxiv List of Figures
Fig. 6.8 Responses in percentages to the question Men and

women should contribute equally to the family income173
Fig. 6.9 Responses in percentages to the question A woman’s
relationship with her partner is better if she doesn’t place
too much importance on her job173
Fig. 6.10 Responses in percentages to the question If someone’s
career should suffer for the good of the family, it should
be the wife’s and not the husband’s174
Fig. 6.11 Responses in percentages to the question A man should
be prepared to relocate if his wife gets a better job offer in
another city174
Fig. 6.12 Responses in percentages to It is difficult for women to
have successful careers and raise a family at the same time176
Fig. 6.13 Responses in percentages to It is difficult for men to have
successful careers and raise a family at the same time176
CHAPTER 1
Who Are Girls in Current Times and Is

There a Problem?
A Whistling Woman and a Crowing Hen

Is neither good for God nor Men. (Anon: Folkloric rhyme)
INTRODUCTION
In this book, we look at the ways current girls and young women are
responding to the unprecedented transformation of women’s lives from
the traditional roles of earlier times to the still largely uncharted waters of
the twenty-first century. We begin with a sketch of the situation.
Not so long ago across the developed world, a general understanding
of the accepted role of girls was so commonplace that it drew little atten-
tion from the general population. Generations of folklore such as in the
example above, nursery rhymes, fairy tales, religious and moral stories, and
even popular songs combined to preach a message of girls as fundamen-
tally different from boys and to warn of the dire situations anticipated for
those who did not conform.
Traditionally, girls were understood to be primarily good, obedient,
docile children, helpful to their mothers from whom they learned their
domestic role. To be pretty was seen as an advantage (so long as it was not
too sexy) but above all girls were destined to wait until they were chosen
by a prospective husband. In English-speaking societies, the consistent
message was of heterosexual coupling—not surprising because until recent
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

J. Gill et al., A Girl’s Education,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52487-4_1
2 J. GILL ET AL.
times, homosexuality was considered to be morally deviant and, in many

places, legally outlawed. The overarching message, namely that boys were
understood to have been born to be the actors and leaders and girls the
followers, was reinforced by a multitude of cultural artifacts. Boys looked
for adventure while girls looked, watched, and waited for their turn to be
chosen.
In recent times, girls have shed the quiet image of being on the side-
lines and have emerged as first-class students, top performers in school
testing and examinations, credited with being reliable in school-related
tasks such as homework, neat writing, excellent bookwork, along with
being well behaved in class. Teachers routinely anticipate that girls will
excel in reading and writing and their diligent work habits ensure that
they achieve highly in end-of-school examinations. They are model pupils
whose achievements are expected to lead into high-profile positions and
professions in any walk of life they choose.
Of course, the versions of ‘being girl’ presented above are themselves
stereotypes—ways of seeing the world that reflect some aspects of main-
stream thinking but which are not without exception. There have always
been girls who did not conform to the good girl image and who chose not
to be bound by the many limitations of those earlier eras. Nowadays, too,
there are girls who resist the idea that you can do anything regardless of
social imperatives. Some girls today hold to attitudes and values not very
different from those of their grandmothers. Others aim for a fast trendy
image, engage in ‘slut walks’ (protest marches against rape), and talk of
wild experiences. Sexuality is ‘out there’, a part of the package, but expe-
rienced and lived in wildly divergent ways. In fact, it is harder than ever
to generalize about girls in the present moment. Are they really players in
a ‘female future’ or are they still preoccupied with what have traditionally
been girl’s issues such as boyfriends, current fashion, looks, and style?
In the course of this book, we suggest that currently girls are faced with
the difficult task of balancing features associated with traditional girlhood
which are still seen as desirable with the challenges of contemporary life.
Today’s adolescents are confronted with the need to sort out what matters
for each individual from the range of potentially conflicting expectations
held by significant others including parents, siblings, friends, teachers, and
of course the girls themselves. Today’s girls must try to work out, from
the range of new possibilities for themselves as grown women, the way
forward to living a productive and fulfilling life. The familiar trite phrase
‘having it all’ doesn’t begin to get to grips with the compromises and
WHO ARE GIRLS IN CURRENT TIMES AND IS THERE A PROBLEM? 3
concessions that form a constant dynamic in girls’ current plans and future
visions. Hence the impetus for this book which will attempt to shed light
on the processes involved.
We begin by analyzing the changes that have occurred in girls’ behavior
and education in recent times.
A TIME FOR CHANGE
By the early twenty-first century, the old certainties about the position of
girls have all but disappeared. No longer are there the strict rules of behav-
ior that govern female decorum; gone too is the rigid division between
public and private worlds which located most girls and women firmly in
the home. Up until the mid-twentieth century, most girls across Western
societies were seen as destined first and foremost to be wives and moth-
ers and so their schooling was centrally involved with the development
of domestic arts. Even those few who managed to secure enough edu-
cation to demonstrate academic ability were discouraged from showing
their intellectual capacities. In many places, they were barred from access-
ing higher education, or else only allowed in as audit students, not really
able to get a degree. Sadly, this discrimination was practiced fiercely in
even long established universities—at Cambridge, the highly prestigious
British University, young women were not entitled to graduate with a
degree until 1949. Those few who did pursue learning were labeled ‘blue-
stockings’ and became objects of social derision rather than being taken
seriously.
Women’s involvement in paid work during two world wars began an
irreversible trend that saw increasing numbers of women in employment
outside the home. By the late twentieth century, the trend had become
an almost universal expectation among women in the developed West that
they would spend a significant amount of their adult years in the work-
force. Furthermore, this development was to have important implications
for the way education was conducted. Questions continue to be raised
about issues of curriculum, school gender context (such as debates around
coeducation or single sex schooling), career counseling, and work experi-
ence. The overarching question to be addressed here is how best to orga-
nize education for girls in the current era?
The global economy is frequently seen as the main driver of the change
in the workforce, with particular reference to its gender composition.
With increasingly large numbers of people moving around the world, the
4 J. GILL ET AL.
differences between nations as well as national boundaries themselves are

becoming contested. As nations struggle to position themselves within the
changed and changing globalized world, education is increasingly seen
as an important basis for national development in the new knowledge
economy (Lauder et al. 2012; Bradley et al. 2008). At an individual level,
educational achievement is now seen as essential for all citizens, a percep-
tion which has led to the development of girls’ education in ways much
closer to that of boys. In the Western world, middle-class girls appear
more advantaged by the changes in gender norms than their less privileged
peers, but the changed gender relations to employment operate to more
or less similar degrees across class lines—at least in terms of an expecta-
tion to be engaged in paid work. Certainly, the effects of the shortage of
available male labor during World War II (WWII) had meant that more
women from across the social levels entered paid work, thereby demon-
strating that women were capable in areas previously quarantined for men.
With the breakdown of traditional gender barriers in education, middle-
class girls and boys experience an education that is much more similar than
earlier times. The question remains as to whether they are recognized as
similar in their capacities and post-school aspirations.
Of concern for this book is the degree to which cultural change in gen-
der relations was to lag behind the pragmatic change driven by economic
conditions. By the late twentieth century, changed household conditions
and lifestyle choices led to expectations that women would contribute to
the family income. No longer was the responsibility to lie with the man
as the sole breadwinner (Broomhill and Sharp 2004). However, despite
having a paying job, women continue to be responsible for much of the
domestic labor in the home, a situation that reinforces earlier household
traditions. Current research continues to reveal many women working a
‘double shift’ combining home and work. Time-use surveys reveal a con-
tinuing discrimination in terms of hours spent and the types of jobs in
the home that are popularly seen as women’s work as distinct from men’s
work (Richardson et al. 2014).
Without the traditional rules relating to gender-appropriate behavior,
young people could be seen to be at a loss to fit into the rapidly changing
and increasingly complex adult world. Answers to the question of uncer-
tain female futures such as ‘What shall I be?’ posed in popular song in the
1960s have grown beyond imagination in recent decades. First, there are
the good results that girls are consistently reported as gaining in school
examinations. However, judging by the amount of writing in the media
and the popular press from parents, teachers, school administrators, and
girls themselves, there is a high degree of current confusion about girls. In
the words of a young participant in recent work on girls:
It’s pretty hard being a girl nowadays. You can’t be too smart, too dumb,
too pretty, too ugly, too friendly, too coy, too aggressive, too defenceless,
too individual, too programmed …. It’s like you have to be everything
and nothing all at once, without knowing which you need more of. (Nora,
senior school student cited in Deak 2002, 9)
It seems as though the significant social changes with respect to gender

have left all those concerned with the rearing and teaching of girls and
young women, not to mention the girls themselves, with an ill-defined
project—what sort of lives are envisaged for women of the future? And
how best to prepare girls for it? This confusion is reflected in the recent
statement from a well-respected principal of a girls’ school who com-
mented ‘There is a social and cultural normalizing of the belief that raising
girls is an almost impossible task’ (Miller 2015a). Meanwhile we find that
a general concern about girls pervades some of the attitudes still set in
an earlier era when protection of young femininity was paramount. For
example, in a recent post:
A school in the US recently sent a teenage girl home as her rather demure
outfit happened to show her collarbone (this was deemed a distraction to
others). Girls at a London school were told they could no longer have ‘best
friends’ (such behaviour was labelled as exclusivist). Here in Australia girls
at an Islamic school were banned from running (in a misguided and sexist
attempt to protect their virginity), while a Year 11 student from a Victorian
school was sent home from her English exam because she was wearing the
wrong socks. (Miller 2015b)
These examples of the policing of young women in terms of dress

and decorum seem very similar to rules from the last century or possibly
earlier. A more current understanding of girls in the present moment is
clearly needed.
Consequently, the aim of this book is to provide a well-theorized and
nuanced body of knowledge about girls in current times and to situate this
knowledge within the frame of schooling processes and girls’ experience.
Our main source of empirical evidence is derived from two intensive stud-
ies of girls in the senior years of girls’ schools in two different Australian
6 J. GILL ET AL.
cities. These studies were consciously designed to investigate the ways

in which mainstream girls are faring in an educational climate that has
embraced the idea that girls ‘can do anything’ they choose and are by and
large freed from the limitations and discriminations relating to the ‘gender
order’ of earlier eras (Connell 1987, 1995).
In pursuing key themes of identity and choice, we argue that while
the situation of current schoolgirls may be different from that of earlier
generations, it is in fact not without constraints. As will be shown, new
forms of a gender order are powerfully present in their minds and in their
lives, even as they vigorously deny the position of victim and insist on their
rightful stance as persons with agency and the power to choose. Alongside
the changed social relations, as Fausto Sterling points out, there remain
a good many ‘unwitting assumptions’ that are constantly conveying gen-
der messages both overtly and implicitly (Fausto Sterling 2000, 118). As
developed in the next chapter, these incidences comprise examples of, in
Fine’s words, gender ‘gone underground’ (Fine 2011, 66). In the chap-
ters that follow, we tease out some of the ways in which new forms of
gender relations, developing understandings of self in a neoliberal com-
petitive climate and the possibilities for choice within schooling combine
to present tipping points for the current generation of girls.
WHO ARE GIRLS?

As this book addresses particular issues around girls’ education, we begin
by identifying as clearly as possible the subjects of our study. The literal
dictionary definition of girl as female child as identified by biological geni-
talia is of little use in the present discussion. As noted in the Foreword,
the term girl has attracted a range of uses, some of which are pejorative,
particularly if used to describe male behavior. These uses include throw-
away lines such as acting ‘like a girl’ or ‘throwing like a girl’, being ‘girly’
all used to identify non-acceptable ways of being for boys and men. In this
sense, girl as a term becomes a marker of opposition telling males how
not to be, which serves to reinforce gender boundaries on behavior. On
the other hand, girl can also be used in a friendly inclusive way to relate
to older women friends as in ‘one of the girls’ or ‘girls’ night out’. On
these occasions, the term girl refers to being part of a group, sharing a
connected consciousness. There are also romantic connotations such as
having a ‘girlfriend’, being ‘my girl’ with possessive inflections—as well
as derogatory ones ‘the girl who served us’ referring to the ‘girl’ as one
doing menial chores not warranting a name. In this book, we opt for the
middle ground with a more traditional use without any of these connota-
tions. Hence our focus is on adolescent girls, young females in secondary
school, that is, at a time when young people have progressed beyond the
elementary school years and are in the process of achieving physical matu-
rity and making decisions about themselves and their possibilities that will
likely affect their post-school lives.
For our purposes, the answer to the question who are girls? depends
importantly on the context. A quick glance at development studies reveals
enormous differences in the fates of girls and boys in the third-world
countries. For example, in 2012, in Northern Ghana, 65% of girls over
age 15 were found to have received no formal education, as a result of
living in extreme poverty in a culture whose limited resources determine
that males are more likely to benefit from education than females (Camfed
Ghana 2012). In India, girl children are more likely to be abandoned by
parents in the desperate need to maximize a son’s potential for assisting
them to survive into old age (Times of India 2011). In Pakistan, in 2006,
60% of children not in school were girls; in Cambodia’s hill provinces,
girls were five times more likely than boys to be absent from school; and
in Nigeria, only 12% of poor Hausa girls went to school (Unterhalter
and North 2011). Of the world’s 130 million out-of-school youth, 70%
are girls (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2012). Widespread recognition of the
need for action on girls’ education in the developing world has been regis-
tered across many parts of the developed world. In 2015, Michelle Obama
launched the White House’s Let Girls Learn initiative, writing:
Right now, 62 million girls worldwide are not in school. They’re receiving
no formal education at all—no reading, no writing, no math—none of the
basic skills they need to provide for themselves and their families, and con-
tribute fully to their countries. (Shapiro, Forbes Magazine, Nov 7, 2015)
This initiative is impressive in its broad sweep of potential outcomes for

girls’ education, far beyond the more usual goals of literacy and number.
Some researchers involved with girls’ education in the developing world
have commented that many projects are frequently grounded in fairly tra-
ditional notions of girls and women. Thus, the rationale for educational
interventions is presented in terms of women’s child-rearing and house-
hold managing roles rather than the potential for educated women to
access public positions and contribute to decision making. Such concerns
8 J. GILL ET AL.
do not counteract the evident value of developing basic education systems

that are gender inclusive.
The recognition of girls’ educational needs in the developing world
should not be taken to indicate that the situation of girls’ education in the
developed world is without issues. Already we know that young women
aged 10–18 experience nearly ten times the rate of date violence as do
young men. Close to 70% of victims of internet intimidation are girls and
girls are twice as likely as boys to suffer mental health problems such as
depression and anxiety about body image. These problems are much more
prevalent among girls (Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2012). So the question
for this book does not reduce to girls per se, but rather where are the girls?
And what aspects of their contexts are likely to facilitate or to hinder their
educational experience and personal development?
The girls whose school experiences are the focus for this book live in
English-speaking Western contexts, although not all of them are born
there and nor do they all come from English-speaking backgrounds.
Globalization has produced increased movement of families around the
world meaning that settler societies such as Australia, New Zealand, and
Canada, and perhaps to a lesser extent the UK and the USA, comprise
significant numbers of people from non-English-speaking backgrounds.
Schools in these countries cater to all comers and classrooms inevitably
comprise students from different language groups, cultures, and social
contexts. There are numerous implications for teachers and school organi-
zation proceeding from the complex mix of students in most classrooms.
Despite the often repeated educators’ commitment to the recognition
of individual differences, schools with their age-banded organizations
do provoke a certain amount of mutual recognition and shared identity.
Many aspects of schooling continue to be organized around gender, even
if less so than was the case 50 years ago when girls and boys were for-
bidden from interaction in school grounds and classrooms. We are most
interested in the ways in which schooling practices position students as
gendered individuals and the degree to which this positioning aligns with
learning potential.
In this book, we use the collective term girls to refer to young women
of secondary school age, 12 years and older, who identify as girls and who
see themselves as sharing to varying degrees interests, issues, and responsi-
bilities with others of the same sex. They vary along all the lines typical of
Western youth—economic, social and academic capacity, strength of self-
image, sexuality, ethnicity and cultural background, religion, awareness of
future possibilities, and so on. In our investigation of the ways in which

they see the world, we hope to demonstrate the dimensions of their expe-
rience that work to both constrain and facilitate their development into
the clear, confident, and self-aware adults they hope to become.
IS EDUCATION THE PROBLEM?
For many years, educational institutions at all levels had been organized
around gender division, so much so that significant aspects of a ‘gen-
der order’ were simply produced and maintained by school experience
(Connell 1987, 1995). Following much feminist activism in teaching cir-
cles, teachers today are generally aware of the limitations of applying gen-
der typing too literally. In fact, the success of the gender equity campaigns
has resonated throughout schooling in English-speaking countries such
that sexist language and behavior is now widely recognized as impermissi-
ble, at least in terms of the labeling. However, as noted earlier, researchers
have demonstrated the continuing existence of unwitting sexist assump-
tions and implicit gender discrimination, features which are much more
difficult to overcome. This point will be developed in Chap. 3.
By 2015, to a casual observer, it may appear that the issue of girls miss-
ing out in educational experience compared to boys has been well and
truly remediated. For example, following end-of-school examinations, the
press and social media trumpet the success of girl students—often in tones
of breathless amazement—especially if they are successful in the ‘hard’ sci-
ence subjects. Girl achievers are regularly feted in press releases, especially
if they are in non-traditional fields such as mathematics, science, and engi-
neering. While such success stories are more typical of middle-class girls
than of girls from poor backgrounds whose educational achievements are
often of a lower order, it is important to recognize that the traditional atti-
tude to girls as being less academically oriented than boys would appear
to have been thoroughly discredited. We hear that a higher proportion
of female school leavers are heading to university; certainly more of them
complete their undergraduate degrees than do comparable proportions
of their male peers. Just two years ago, the US figures showed that for
the first time a higher proportion of master’s graduates were women—
it seems that female dominance in success in doctoral level study is just
around the corner. Given middle class girls and women are ahead in many
available measures of educational success why is there still concern about
their schooling experience?
10 J. GILL ET AL.
In this book, we will argue that these school ‘successes’ are hard won,
that they are generally limited to middle-class girls and are not necessar-
ily indicative of continuing achievement in the world beyond school. The
hierarchized world of professional careers continues to be male dominated
across the Western world. Studies of professional women repeatedly sup-
port the notion of a glass ceiling which works to prevent most women
from gaining the top ranks in their chosen fields (Weyer 2007). For cur-
rent purposes, however, it is important to register the good results of
middle-class girls as evidence of female intellectual capacity, persistence,
and determination. At the same time, these achievements often come at
the cost of personal struggles with other demands placed on girls, which
will be identified in the course of this book.
AIM AND KEY LINES OF ENQUIRY

The overarching aim of the book is to establish the ways in which girls in
current times have learned to understand themselves and have been rec-
ognized as having particular needs and potentials. We also investigate the
ways in which a range of institutions—family, school, friendship groups,
associations, sporting teams, and popular culture—have been involved
with particular features of girls’ lives. Many of these institutions have fol-
lowed the goal of producing competent engaged lively female students,
daughters, sisters, and friends with a strong sense of their own abilities,
desires, rights, and responsibilities as participating citizens within their
groups, classrooms, families, and the wider world.
In some cases, however, particular issues have been raised by teachers,
family members, friends, and relations in ways that present girls as the
problem—why is it that girls behave this way? Why can’t they be like their
brothers, mothers, and so on? At times, it seems as though a troubling
image of something not quite right with girls is also involved. This work
does not propose to answer all the questions raised about girls—we do
not start from a position of girls as problem!—but it does seek to promote
a greater understanding of the ways in which girls are impacted upon by
their social contexts, economic conditions, and cultural backgrounds.
Our key lines of enquiry are developed through our empirical work
which has focused on central ideas of identity/subjectivity—sometimes
described as the internal dimension of self-awareness and the external
dimension of recognizing oneself as the product of other’s reactions. In
other words, we see our girl subjects as produced by a combination of
factors, some of which come from their particular genetic makeup and
family context but others are the result of social interaction, the environ-
ment in which they are raised and within which they emerge as actors in
their life worlds. In particular, while we see the school as centrally involved
with its core project of developing academic skills, it is also a site where
girls learn particular ways of being girls that are socially accepted. To bor-
row a phrase from Wenger (1998), schools are in their operations essen-
tially ‘communities of practice’ where, people learn from one another the
accepted social rules, especially those applying to gender. Indeed, we argue
that the learning that occurs in girls’ informal groups is shared, purposive,
and mutually engaging as they strive to develop their self-understandings
and identities as girls in the particular place and time of their schooling.
From this situated learning perspective, we proceed to an investigation of
the ways in which curriculum processes and assessment structures inter-
act with girls’ development of self-knowledge and awareness about them-
selves and the world around them.
GIRLS AS A FOCUS OF PUBLIC CONCERN

Of course, we are not alone in seeking to identify the range of pressures
placed on girls in contemporary society. First, the much touted story of
girls’ academic success can easily become an anticipation placed on all girls.
At another level, there is a different story. Along with papers in academic
journals, the popular press is replete with articles about girls’ issues, reports
of problems, along with the relentless focus on young women as vulner-
able, insecure, needing protection, or as ‘bad girls’ in need of reform—a
frequent trope in film and television media. While the popular mass media
capitalizes on the girls-as-problem issue, there are numerous organizations
both formal and informal which seek to counteract the problem-centered
story. For example, The Butterfly Project, a loosely formed global organi-
zation with similar elements across the USA, the UK, and Australia, seeks
to work toward a more positive image of girls and in particular to prevent
instances of self-harm such as eating disorders in young women. In its vari-
ous guises, the Project presents different visions of girls and their potential
than dominant ones in popular culture. It tries to establish initiatives at
the local level from the principle that effective reforms are best found and
addressed working from the ground up. Consequently, the groups have
identified a broad range of issues affecting girls in particular contexts and
then targeted the ones most pertinent in their neighborhood.
12 J. GILL ET AL.
For example, one group from the north of England is focusing on self-
harm, having registered that cutting has been an all too familiar strategy
through which some girls there have achieved some sort of respite from
impossible situations. In North America, another group focuses on issues
for young women of African background and has worked to generate a
very different orientation to the body and beauty schedules than that of
popular teen magazines. An Australian group has focused on issues of
body and self-presentation in ways that challenge the conventional idea
of beautiful but impossibly thin young women who decorate the fash-
ion industry’s catwalks all over the world. The point here is the wide-
spread recognition that all is not right for girls across the English-speaking
world—and most probably beyond.
Studies of girlhood have pointed to the lack of scripts that might pro-
vide models or guidance to girls and young women in media, literature,
and popular texts. Much popular media appears to continue to support the
good girl/bad girl distinction identified 40 years ago by Anne Summers
in her book Damned Whores and God’s Police which presented a mascu-
line construction of women in terms of a binary between immorality and
goodness which is all too often reflected in girls’ notions of themselves.
Recent commentators have agreed:
this ‘good girl versus bad girl’ paradigm has persisted … as a staple of …
female identity. (Amico 2012)
Others have noted the way in which the ‘good girl’ image works to
constrain girls within a narrow framework of limited agency:
…the hegemony of good girl femininity linked to passivity and squelched

desire has not been entirely overthrown. (Gonick 2003, 75)
Certainly, similar representations of young women and girls in the

teenage romance genre continue to dominate teen fiction, oblivious to
their classed, sexualized, and raced origins. Educators lament the narrow
representation in this material but register its enduring appeal and use-
fulness in producing girls as committed and skilled readers. How then
are girls to learn ways of behaving that are different from those domi-
nant teenage images? In addressing this concern the pertinent question
arises:
What do girls have apart from the scripts of ‘neo-liberalism, individualism,

heterosexual union, and class compliance’ all of which serve to uphold and
perpetuate the values and customs of middle-class existence? (Brown 2012)
In other words, how is it possible for girls to choose other ways of

being, especially ones that run counter to the established scripts? In chart-
ing the course of girls’ choice making, we proposes to offer some answers
and to alert readers to the range of issues that impact in girls’ developing
sense of themselves as active agents in future choices.
BEYOND THE ROMANTIC DREAM: NEW POSITIONS

FOR GIRLS AND WOMEN IN MEDIAREPRESENTATIONS?
A short overview of media representations of girls demonstrates some
recent challenges to the very narrow brief that appears to have kept girls’
imagination within a tight straitjacket framed by the traditional ‘good
girl/bad girl’ story.
While the traditional plotlines of good girls in romantic involvements
with men dominate most of the literature and visual arts relating to young
women, there are some interesting recent developments which trouble
this trite stereotypical narrative. First, in current writing about girls, we
have seen some that has attracted a good deal of public attention and liter-
ary recognition.
In the UK, British press identity Caitlin Moran’s well-received work
How to build a Girl (2015) has generated a good deal of writing—
and admiration—for the idiosyncratic way of dealing with the problems
encountered in this fictional quasi-autobiographical account of grow-
ing up girl. The book, a No.1 best seller in the London Sunday Times,
is generally described as enjoyable and full of hard-won insights about
young women, bodies, sexuality, and societal expectations. In the USA,
Lena Dunham, TV star and scriptwriter, has produced a best-selling
book Not that kind of girl (2014) to further explicate her focus on the
interests and affairs of girls. Both works come from recognized media
identities and both are purported to be semi-autobiographical accounts
of themselves growing up. They adopt an amused and amusing tone
to recount their misadventures as young women coming to grips with
sexual experience. There is a good deal of bravado and triumphalism in
these texts.
14 J. GILL ET AL.
A rather different approach comes from literary writer, Eimear McBride,

who produced the prizewinning novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thing
(2014) which tracks through the mind of a girl as she experiences life as a
daughter of a single mother and sister to a disabled brother. This is a bleak
story with little relief; the central character is sexually abused by a relative
and her life is a continual struggle against poverty and dreariness. But
its unique contribution is its engagement with the girl’s interior life, her
thinking as she lives through difficult situations. In this, she is presented
not as a hero but rather as a thinking, feeling individual trying to work out
a place for herself in the world.
These recent works raise questions about expectations of a girl as a
daughter, sister, household helper, career seeker, and the impact of these
locations on her sense of self. While such quasi-autobiographical explora-
tions of coming-of-age have long been the field of male writers, these
books have presented central female characters as searching for a self as a
secure location providing comfort and privacy shielded from the conflict-
ing pressures of the present-day world.
There is a similar story regarding film. An early Australian film, My
Brilliant Career, a fictional account of the coming-of-age of a young
woman author, Miles Franklin, who after initial success had, like so many
women writers before her, adopted a masculine sounding name in order
to get published. She has since become a local hero in terms of women’s
writing with a prominent local literary award named after her. The film
made from her book was an early contribution to films with female lead
characters. Others have followed, slowly at first and perhaps rather doc-
trinaire, but gradually becoming more adventurous. Two highly regarded
recent films, both based on recollections of girlhood from the mid-
twentieth century, the British production An Education (2009) and the
American The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), present their female leads
as sexually adventurous and have been applauded for their ‘honesty’ and
‘integrity’—so it seems that the twenty-first-century media is prepared to
depict young women as sexually active, a position validated by each being
derived from autobiographical accounts in best-selling novels—‘based on
a true story’.
Overall, however, female lead characters continue to be very poorly
represented in film. A recent study showed that women accounted for
less than a third of all speaking roles in last year’s 100 top-grossing films,
and just 15% of those films had women in leading roles (Buckley 2014).
Girls are even less likely to appear as leading characters, which makes these
recent prizewinning productions even more outstanding.
Not all the film representations of young women present the central
character in attractive terms. The blockbuster American movie from 2003,
Mean Girls, with Lindsay Lohan achieved very broad circulation with its
portrayal of female nastiness among a group of high school students.
Notably, its broadest take up was among teenage girls themselves, many
of whom purported to recognize the forms of meanness displayed in the
story line and main characters as familiar in terms of their own school
experience. Some writers have raised the worrying concern that displays
of girl-to-girl violence as seen in this film are one form of internalized
misogyny which can then contribute to a normalized context of intra-girl
violence, unique to girls.
On a different note, the recent move in Sweden to classify films as not
meeting appropriate gender-inclusive standards if they fail to show suffi-
cient time devoted to female characters engaged in conversation that does
not involve talking about males in their lives (in USA, the Bechdel test)
is a novel effort to address the traditional underrepresentation of women
on screen.
And yet when change comes, it can be swift and all encompassing. For
instance, in a recent review in The New Yorker Alexei Okeowo writes:
In the new film ‘Girlhood’, the French director Céline Sciamma’s third fea-
ture film, which comes out today in limited release, I can count on one hand
the number of scenes with men. (New Yorker, Jan 30, 2015)
This film followed fast on the heels of the widely acclaimed Boyhood,
an American film nominated for several Oscars in the tradition of male
coming-of-age stories—the ‘boy canon’ as described by some reviewers.
But the French one focused on girls’ coming-of-age and thus broke new
ground, and did so in ways that were refreshingly inclusive, if somewhat
confronting.
Perhaps the sharpest evidence of deliberate gender repositioning
comes from the enormously popular series Hunger Games. Following
the outstanding success of the trilogy by American author Suzanne
Collins, the stories were made into blockbuster movies that have
attracted millions of young people to set box office records around the
world.
16 J. GILL ET AL.
The Hunger Games: A Fable with Female Leadership? In the plot-

line, the female lead Katniss Everdeen presents a striking picture of
an active young woman. She is a leader in her community, strong,
brave, and daring and she is a fighter, prepared to engage in the
endless warfare that is a feature of her world and to defend her com-
munity against outside invaders. While she is very good looking and
is presented in heteronormative terms with romantic interests—as
‘interested in or attracted to’ at least two of the young men in the
story—she professes to be entirely unaware of her looks and when
told to ‘look pretty’ by one of the advisers, she says she doesn’t
know how to do this. The image she represents is almost precisely
the antithesis of the traditional girl heroine. Nor does she fit with the
traditional hunter-gatherer gender divide, for Katniss is definitely the
hunter which leaves the males to do the gathering.
At the same time, she is single-minded in pursuing her goals—in this
case, to eliminate the others in a fight to defend her community. She is
an excellent fighter and kills without compunction. One of her victims
is one of the boys with whom she had been romantically connected.
The divergence from traditional girls’ roles could not be more stark.
Reflection. At one level, Katniss embodies the quasi-feminist hero
in standing up for herself and her goals against all odds. But is this
capacity to single-mindedly pursue a direction with little care for
others involved really desirable for girls … or indeed for anyone?
Popular media in the form of TV series has tended to feature slightly

older girls and young women such as Sex and the City and Friends among
others. Even more explicitly in terms of its orientation to young women, the
recent US-based TV series Girls once again depicts young women (all in their
twenties) as preoccupied with their effect on and power over young men.
The show was listed as the highest-rated fictional series debut of 2012. One
Time reviewer praised the show highly, calling it ‘raw, audacious, nuanced
and richly, often excruciatingly funny’ (Poniewozik 2012). Another reviewer
called Girls ‘one of the most original, spot-on, no-missed-steps series in
recent memory’ and said the series conveys ‘real female friendships, the angst
of emerging adulthood, nuanced relationships, sexuality, self-esteem, body
image, intimacy in a tech-savvy world’ (Goodman cited in Molinari 2014).
This list of key themes would appear to be more relevant to adolescents
than to its 20-something actors, but the name Girls appears to dominate the
interpretation. The strong market response indicates the appeal of this work
and its potential to create more discussion of the girl problem.
While these representations of young women may not be successful in
their effort to ‘capture the voice of a generation’ (as identified by Hannah,
the lead character in the opening episode of Girls (Wright 2015)), there
can be no doubt that they are enormously popular with the current gen-
eration of adolescent girls. Their very popularity attests to the lack of avail-
able guidance for the current generation in terms of how to behave, how
to think about the world and their position in it. They certainly present
a picture of sexually aware and active youth and as such appear to serve
a real need in the young female audience in terms of engagement and
recognition. At the same time, critics challenge the way in which girls are
represented as being all too often without dignity, or depth—such features
being ‘largely absent in portrayals of young urban women’ (Wright 2015,
20). In other words, the treatment of the lead characters is still all-too-
often based on romantic involvement and sexual behavior presented in a
comedic tone that disallows depth and undermines dignity.
What we discover from this brief excursion into current media is that there
are very few representations of the world of girls and their concerns which
might function as a guide for their behavior, attitudes, and understand-
ing. As we have argued, the use of the name Girls in the current American
television series comprises a particularly ironic demonstration of the lack of
cultural scripts available to the current generation of teenagers. Girlhood
as presented in the media becomes a site for recollection and amusement
rather than an accurate reflection of issues for girls in present times.
SEXUALITY
Questions of sexuality are very evident in many of the media representa-
tions, and also in the teen magazines, heterosexuality is dominant and
early heterosexual intercourse is normalized as a badge of achievement
for the girl involved, much as it used to be for the coming-of-age young
man. Popular media credits the rise of the pop bands, often citing the
Beatles in the 1960s as provoking early acknowledgement of young girls’
sexual response to popular idols. Certainly, the strength of that response in
the huge crowds that attended performances across the English-speaking
world and beyond both shocked and surprised many commentators. The
point for this work is not the seismic tide that followed the pop stars
18 J. GILL ET AL.
but the amazement of local analysts at the evidence of girls seizing the
moment to express their feelings in decidedly sexual ways. Hitherto, the
idea of girls as active sexual beings was shrouded in the picture of them
as needing protection and shelter from the wickedness of men. The issue
of sexuality functions like a depth sounder to demonstrate the degree of
sociocultural change which, although widespread, is rarely as sharply con-
fronting in the development of social understanding as was the shocked
recognition of adolescent girls’ sexuality. In 2015, the proliferation of boy
bands regularly produces crowds of adolescent girls screaming in orgasmic
intensity at their performances, leaving no doubt about young girls’ capac-
ity to experience themselves as sexual beings.
The more widespread acceptance of youthful sexuality is not without
new problems however. British policy researchers Moore and Prescott
have written of youth sexuality as an absent presence in youth policy gen-
erally. In their analysis, young people are positioned in policy as asexual
or pre-sexual children, while those who have sexual knowledge are prob-
lematized within a depiction of youth sexuality as dangerous (Moore and
Prescott 2013). Other researchers have focused on the enduring double
standard operating around young people and sexual activity:
Despite years of political and educational campaigns to try and create sexual
equality, school age young women who are too sexually knowledgeable run
the risk of condemnation from peers and others in the schoolyard while sex-
ually active heterosexual young men are admired. (Carmody and Ovenden
2013, 794)
The increasing incidence of reports of sexual violence comprises

another area of concern. An Australian large-scale study of girls between
16 and 18 years of age has been repeated every five years since 1998.
By 2008, it found that 38% of young women had experienced unwanted
sex (Mitchell et al. 2014). Such studies urge more educational efforts to
encourage young people to engage in ethical negotiations relating to their
sexual activities and early indications of such work being undertaken are
very encouraging. However, as with all education initiatives, these devel-
opments require appropriate training, funding, and teacher commitment,
none of which is readily available in many schools.
Meanwhile, issues of sexuality permeate the popular media, arts, and
literature around the topic of girls. Apart from curriculum space given to
sexual reproduction issues, for most part educational concerns have failed to
address questions of sexuality. As this area presents perhaps the most dramatic
escalation of change in terms of the impact of worldviews on the development

of sexual maturity, its omission from standard education demonstrates the
systemic failure of educational institutions to keep pace with social change.
Recent times have also seen many press reports about the ways in which
the current generation of young people are using the internet to gain some
understanding of sexual intercourse. Prominent educator Melinda Tankard
Reist has declared that internet pornography is the most widespread and
commonly accessed agent of sexuality education (Tankard Reist and Bray
2011). A flurry of reports detail teenage girls being pressured to engage in
violent sexual acts with boyfriends as a consequence of knowledge gained
from the internet. Of course, the objectification of women’s bodies is not
new but these new ways of promoting female bodies as the sites of male
gratification have taken up a role in youth education. The consequences
of widely available explicit video material have led to a further degradation
of young women, many of whom lack the experience and understanding
of means to combat their exploitation.
The domination of heteronormative notions of sexuality has also been
raised as an area of concern. Girls who understand their sexual orientation
as lying outside the dominant heterosexual norm struggle to find accep-
tance. All too often they report feelings of exclusion and they experience
their position as a particularly disturbing category of ‘other’. One of our
young informants described her search for answers in the following way:
It was never easy at school or home growing up not knowing about the pos-
sibility of difference. I never knew about the idea of another sexuality and
my school never taught anything but the classic, man and woman. We used
to have a suggestion box where we would put our questions about growing
up, I marked mine with a small blue dot on the back and the question read,
‘I don’t like boys the way others do, am I normal?’ When it was pulled from
the box I was so excited to get an answer. The teacher stopped, read the
question and crumpled the paper before putting it in the bin and picked the
next. This was when I was in Year 6. From that point on I always believed
there was something wrong with me. I refused to ask an adult about it in
case it would get me in trouble because if it was bad enough to not answer
it in class then why bother an adult.
When I was in year 7 I started having feelings for a girl in my class, I
tried to find things about what may be wrong with me online, the internet
had no answers only more confusion, I didn’t know if I was broken and no
one at school was able to help me. Even now that I’ve accepted my sexual-
ity girls at school still haven’t really accepted me for who I am, I don’t hold
anything against them for not—it just makes me wonder about what the
20 J. GILL ET AL.
world outside of school will be like. They try to prepare us but after 6 years
of thinking you’re broken or damaged it’s never easy and whilst I may be
out of it now I have brought it to the school principal’s attention about the
turmoil and confusion I went through all these years ago because my teacher
wouldn’t just answer my question. (Nessa, year 12, 2014)
This complex situation calls for a more developed recognition and

acceptance of young girls as diverse sexual beings accompanied by an edu-
cation which allows for their development of self-awareness around ques-
tions of sexuality.
Most school curriculum is limited to addressing questions of biological
facts relating to human reproduction within ‘sex education’ classes. While
there may be an increased readiness to refer to sexual issues, it is often
dealt with as an amusing aside as evidenced by the following example:
The Battle of the Sexes: Twenty-First-Century Style Two Australian

single sex schools recently staged an annual event to mark the begin-
ning of a new school year. It was called the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ and
took the form of a trivia quiz. Each school formed a team of their
newly elected school leaders, 12 on each side, and participated in
a quiz, the aim of which was to demonstrate which team, girls or
boys, was superior. The event was held in the girls’ school with an
audience of some 300+ girls from senior high school. The students
from each team had made up the questions and each side had tried
to devise questions that the others would not be able to answer.
The boys’ school presented questions to the girls’ school leaders
based on topics that were more likely to be familiar to boys—sport-
ing heroes, match scores, football finals, and so on. The girls tried
hard and some of them, especially those with brothers, performed
very well. The questions from the girls’ school were similarly in line
with girls’ interests—questions about current dress styles, fashions,
famous labels, TV stars, boy bands, and so on. Here too the boys
tried hard and some were able to offer close approximations of cor-
rect answers. The one question which left the boys floundering, to
the vast amusement of the 300 strong girl audience, was:
Can you name three brands of items of female sanitary wear?
Despite such items being regularly featured on TV commercials,
the boys could not begin to come up with an answer. In the general
hilarity, the quiz disintegrated into what was seen as a washout for
the boys and triumph for the girls.
Reflection
While it is good to see a much more relaxed approach to issues of
menstruation and this would surely be welcomed as a positive move,
does this scenario position girls more surely as tied to their physical
bodies while the boys are free to ‘not know’ about this aspect of
young lives?
Meanwhile, writers in the popular psychology/self-help genre have also

been busy producing texts such as Girls will be girls: Raising confident
and courageous daughters by Joann Deak 2002, an American psycholo-
gist and counselor and Twenty First Century Girls by Sue Palmer 2015, a
UK-based journalist with experience in writing books focused on youth
problems such as Toxic Childhood and 21st Century Boys. These works
can be described as ‘How to’ manuals aimed at parents, teachers, youth
workers and all include lists of principles and direct advice about the ways
in which problems might be managed. All this attention is indicative of
widespread concern about girls’ issues. In doing so, it raises innumerable
questions about girls in our times—is the world obsessed with the raising
of girls? Are we seeing an epidemic of girl problems?
OUR FOCUS
Such a problem orientation is definitely not the focus of this book. Rather
than adding to the growing pile of crisis management literature, this book
aims to present girls and young women in the context of their twenty-
first-century Western worlds. From the outset, we need to reiterate that
girls themselves are not the problem here, but rather our concern is with
the lack of nuanced understanding of girls as social agents rather than just
as young and female persons. We contend that standard social science
approaches have not engaged with girls’ worlds in ways that show how
they see their position and the ways in which they operate as participants
in their sociocultural settings.
Hence, our focus is on the ways in which widespread social change
has impacted on the life worlds of girls and women, bringing about a
radical redefinition of the meanings of girlhood and consequently the
22 J. GILL ET AL.
expectations of education and likely futures. From this work, we aim to

contribute to a greater understanding of the position of girls and young
women in their cultural contexts. In our view, this understanding is essen-
tial for developing the quality of educational environment necessary for
optimal development and learning.
In writing this book, we are determined to avoid presenting our girl
subjects in ways that reduce them to collections of personality traits sub-
ject to the vagaries of hormonal changes and aspects of physical devel-
opment. This is not to imply that such features may not be important
to individual girls at particular times, but we contend that this sort of
reductionism downplays the effects of the environment and local culture,
thus limiting girls to be understood as composite elements of individual
psychology and physiology. Our position is that the wider culture plays a
significant role in the ways in which girlhood is taken up and understood
and so we attend to the girls’ immediate contexts, and to social changes in
values across place and time. Based on evidence drawn from studies from
the USA, England, Canada, and Australia (and elsewhere) we argue that
girls’ identities and achievements—personal and public—are mediated in
very significant ways by the wider culture in which they live. For example,
the current stress on individualization is seen as a dominant theme partic-
ularly, but not exclusively, in the context of a post-GFC (Global Financial
Crisis) neoliberal world. As we will demonstrate, this stress can provoke
particular issues for girls because of the ways they have been traditionally
understood as other-oriented carers and compassionate citizens.
It is important to register that, along with our refusal of the idea of
girls as the problem, we have deliberately chosen to focus on mainstream
girls in our studies. This focus is not to deny the many deeply grounded
and persistent disadvantages faced by some girls in terms of race, class,
disability, and ethnicity among other issues. However, our effort is to try
to capture the situation of girls who are not positioned in ways that would
be registered as potentially difficult in order to advance our conviction
that the social world carries important and at times conflicting messages
for all girls, including those who may appear by all standard measures as
advantaged or even privileged.
Consequently, we show the girls as essentially social agents engaging in
interaction with their peers, teachers, family members, and the wider com-
munities in which they live. Our interest lies with the ways in which the girl
subjects deal with their everyday worlds and we look closely at their spoken
language in order to capture the ways in which they ‘speak themselves
into being’ and develop increased self-recognition and understanding.
Our analysis of the ways in which current themes and cultural messages are
played out in girls’ lives comprises the main argument of the work.
OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK
As the book is based on extensive research, we begin by outlining the main
theoretical lines through which the data gathering and analysis is organized.
Chapter 2 presents the theories we use in our analysis of the girls’ situa-
tions in order to better describe the ways in which the girls are affected
by contextual issues. We include theory from sociology and psychology to
demonstrate the infiltration of psychologized understanding such as issues
of development, personality, ability, and readiness to construct an image of
current young women. The argument then proceeds in Chap. 3 to an over-
view of developments in terms of girls’ education across the past 40 years so
as to demonstrate the breadth of reform initiatives adopted by teachers and
education systems to better accommodate girls for these ‘new times’. From
Chap. 4, the focus turns to girls in the current scene and discusses issues of
gender identity and self-formation as produced by their lived experiences.
Peer interactions feature prominently as the girls accommodate their think-
ing and develop their self-concepts through everyday conversations. Chapter
5 situates the girls in school and examines the ways in which schooling pro-
cesses and curriculum practices produce particular understandings in the
girls and the ways they position themselves around schooled knowledge. A
focus here is on choice making as the girls are confronted with the reality
of senior school which demands that each student proceed with a narrower
range of subjects in order to maximize her score leading into post-school
education. In Chap. 6, the emphasis turns on the issue of preparedness for
life beyond school and the ways in which choices are made and unmade in
terms of girls’ individual aspirations and sense of self. Finally, in Chap. 7, the
authors combine the material from the earlier chapters in order to produce a
synthesized but not determinate account of the pressures on contemporary
girls and the ways in which schooling can be best constructed to assist and
enable their full participation in life beyond school.
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CHAPTER 2
How We Know What We Know:

Knowledge and Evidence
Late afternoon toward the end of another warm Australian summer,

one of us took a break from writing her thesis and was relaxing on the
front veranda with a cool beer when she was visited by a three-year-old
neighbor. The little girl looked at the writer solemnly for a few moments
and then said:
‘Mummies don’t drink beer … only daddies drink beer.’
‘Oh Stephanie’, the thesis writer responded, ‘my goodness who told you that?’
The child beamed and said: ‘Nobody told me … I just knowed.’
This chapter deals with the ways in which we learn about gender and its
operations as well as how gender has been researched in the mundane
world of daily living. In the studies described in later chapters, we set out
to look at the ways in which girls learn the scripts of being girl, why they
adhere to these roles as much as they do, how they feel about the positions
of girl and woman, and what they see as the advantages and disadvantages
associated with gender labels. But first of all here we look at the ways in
which theorists have explained how this happens.
As a starting point, we aim to problematize ‘just knowing’ as we are
committed to uncovering the ways in which these sorts of certainties
(I just knowed!) about a gender order are produced and maintained.
Ordinary conversations are crucial in their potential to reinforce shared
understandings of truths without necessarily elaborating the details of

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52487-4_2
28 J. GILL ET AL.
their associated rationale. Thus individuals are drawn to take on board

without question the ‘rules’ they have heard repeatedly or observed from
constant practice. Young children operate with a finely honed curios-
ity in order to work out the world around them—as Cordelia Fine has
observed, they are highly diligent ‘gender detectives’ (Fine 2011, 212).
In this vein, researchers Martin and Ruble (2004, 67) describe young
children as appearing ‘to seize on any element that may indicate a gen-
der norm so that they may categorize it as male or female’. Other child
research specialists have described young children’s behavior in terms of
actively seeking and ‘chewing’ on information about gender, not just pas-
sively absorbing the messages from the environment (Castelli et al. 2008).
Rather than account for the child’s developing awareness of gender as the
passive result of ‘socialization’, these theorists insist that the child is active
in the process, not simply the receiver of information but also working
with it to generate rules. Such rules and classifications can take on a moral
importance. In the case of the three-year-old neighbor who had observed
adults behaving in gender-distinct ways around drinking beer, she felt she
had always known that this was the way it was supposed to be. In her
deeply felt sense of ‘what is right’, her comment shows how gender rules
become absorbed into a moral order which defines gender-distinct ways
of behaving and feeling.
For many children, the capacity to distinguish colors often comes in
the second year of life. Not so long after, they learn to associate par-
ticular colors with other coded features of their life worlds, such as the
association of pink with girls. This association takes on the status of a
rule through which their early understanding of the world is organized.
In particular, the young appear alert to the idea that gender operates as
a significant dividing structure which is built along the classification of
things as either male or female appropriate, that is, masculine or feminine.
From a cursory analysis of advertising material, it seems that many little
girls across the English-speaking world see pink as highly desirable—it is
often chosen as their ‘favorite’ color. Manufacturers are of course aware
of this and so design many girls’ items in pink. The fact that pink was
once the preferred color for boys in previous centuries indicates just how
random and arbitrary some of these gender associations are. But before
getting to the key ideas about gender, we begin with the ways in which
prominent theorists have sought to understand the Western world in the
current moment.
HOW WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW: KNOWLEDGE AND EVIDENCE 29
THE WAYS OF THE WORLD

In the closing decades of the twentieth century, major social theorists were
writing about a fundamental change in worldview. The claim was that these
are new times, increasingly distant from the determinations of history,
to be characterized by widely shared ideas in the developed West which
would impact on the ways in which lives were lived and the social forma-
tion was maintained. The backstory to these changes is beyond the scope
of this book, save for a recognition that, along with significant changes in
the gendered workforce structure, the Western developed world was expe-
riencing varying degrees of stability and growth in the aftermath of the
great depression and the two world wars that had deeply marked people’s
lives and possibilities in the first half of the twentieth century. By 1990,
debates around the death of history had given way to specifications about
the new and fluid times when the old certainties had been laid to rest and
social change was commonplace, continual, and ongoing.
Rather than living a life organized by established patterns and expec-
tations, the idea of personal choice has become dominant. For example,
Giddens (1991, 14) argues that in the post-traditionalist world in which
the old rules no longer apply, the question ‘how should I live?’ has to be
answered in terms of day-to-day decisions and choices. Now, the theorists
postulate, it is no longer enough to live a life dictated by the habits and
expectations of previous generations. Above all, it is up to the individual
to decide how she/he chooses to behave.
The notion of identity, once proposed as a one-off achievement for
adolescents, has become a much more complex idea than can be elic-
ited by the simple question ‘Who am I?’. As noted in the introduction,
the changes relating to women’s roles have made the question of identity
or finding oneself particularly problematic for many girls who no longer
understand themselves as destined to be ‘just like mum’. Hence questions
such as ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What will I be?’ take on particular urgency in the
new and rapidly changing environment. While some psychotherapists urge
the understanding that adolescents may try on different roles and pass
through several ‘stages’ in their endeavor to find their ‘true’ selves, others
have suggested the idea of a one true self is in fact misplaced. In a text
that could well be addressing adolescent challenges, Amartya Sen (2006)
writes of members of the current generation as inhabiting multiple iden-
tities, competing affiliations, choices, and responsibilities. He continues:
30 J. GILL ET AL.
We do belong to many different groups, in one way or another, and each

of these collectivities can give a person a potentially important identity …
the importance of a particular identity will depend on social context. (Sen
2006, 24–25)
Certainly, the girls in our studies understand themselves as daughters,

sisters, family members, students, friends, sporting team members, teenag-
ers, and so on. For some, cultural background, gender, and ethnicity may
be dominant; for others, it may be extended family, religion, or sexuality
that is most important. In general, however, the different identities are in
no particular order; each will depend on the specifics of time and context
and its actor is required to make transitions that are more or less smooth in
order to achieve best fit between the developing sense of self and contex-
tual expectations. The widely recognized ‘turbulence’ of adolescence can
be seen as provoked by individuals struggling to maintain some common-
ality connected to a sense of self within the range of potential identities.
In a related line of thought, other theorists write about individuals
adopting hybrid identities, presented as ‘multiple differentiated aspects
as students, consumers, voters, citizens’, which they integrate to form a
multifaceted sense of self as they no longer are able to be contained within
pre-determined social categories (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002, 23, 2,
163). Given the decline of significance associated with traditional struc-
tural social divisions of race, class, and gender, Adkins (2003) writes of
the increased possibilities for ‘self-fashioning’ and reflexivity (Is this how
I really want to be?).
The ways in which this orientation fits with the current political domi-
nation of neoliberal philosophy—a system characterized by popular slo-
gans such as consumer choice, user pays, market forces will decide—has
also been repeatedly noted by social theorists (Bulbeck 2012; Wyn 2009).
They see the social philosophy of neoliberalism aligned with a do-it-
yourself biography in which individuals are self-disciplined authors respon-
sible for their own lives, especially in terms of crafting an ‘entrepreneurial
self’ (Kelly 2006). For not only is each person destined to be a hybridized
self, a compound of multiple dimensions and connections, but they must
also be individual success stories, winners who can demonstrate that her/
his unique take on the world will be seen as the best way to be—in this
sense individualization and competition travel together.
For Giddens (1991), it becomes a matter of people having ‘choice
biographies’ in which individuals are regarded as free to make themselves
up as never before. Aided by developments in social media, the range of

possibilities on show to young people appears endless, as does the poten-
tial for following particular style leaders, for communicating around the
world, and for making ongoing pictorial records of every move. However
exciting and in some sense liberating as this may be, it is not necessarily
always seen as a positive development. We are now, according to these
theorists, condemned to choice, compelled to choose for ourselves without
the aid of social institutions of family, church, school, and work, because
there is no other way.
For some young people, this situation can open the door to intense lev-
els of psychological uncertainty and distress and some parents and teachers
look back with nostalgia to a time when social structures determined the
possibilities of being, thinking, and acting. Just what this cultural shift
means for young people caught up in the process of identity making is
yet to be properly understood. Should people involved, such as parents
and teachers of adolescents, attempt to assist in the complicated tasks of
self-discovery and, if so, how best to do it? Just how these changes affect
gender and the educational implications for girls is an ongoing theme of
this book.
THEORIZING GENDER
In these new times when individuals are challenged to develop a unique
sense of self amid the constant busyness of self-fashioning, the idea of gen-
der as fixed by biology at birth is seen as quaintly unacceptable. In many
respects, developments within gender theory mirror the same sorts of
radical changes as those outlined above. Nowadays, gender is seen as less
linked to biological sex (although fundamental differences are not denied)
but genders are understood as fashioned in terms of an individual sense
of self, taste, and style. From this standpoint, the idea of multiple forms
of masculinity and femininity is readily acknowledged. In particular, at a
theoretical level, gender is not seen as linked to a binary divide between
masculine and feminine but rather in terms of a range of different ways of
being masculine and feminine relating to time and place as well as indi-
vidual choice (Connell 1995). At the same time, it is important to register
that much of what happens in terms of gender in families, households,
schools, and workplaces is still consistent with the process of institutional-
izing gender difference in one or other of two distinct ways. Given our
32 J. GILL ET AL.
particular interest in what this means for girls, we begin by looking briefly
at the early years of life.
In our investigation, we adopt Raewyn Connell’s recent formulation
which proposes that gender is fundamentally understood as constructed
in social interactions (Connell 2011) and of course this coding can operate
quite dramatically in the early years—as seen in the example at the head of
this chapter. Early learning researcher Raphaela Best (1983) remarked in
her examination of the ways in which social groups impact on the gender
development of kindergarteners:
When you go to any kindergarten you will observe the fierceness and tenac-
ity of any group of 4 year olds who act as though they have invented the
gender code and are prepared to defend it at all costs.
Clothing and choice of toys often provide gender markers in the world
of young children, many of whom seem to relish the idea of concrete sym-
bols of gender division in their search to fit pieces into the jigsaw puzzle
of the world around them, that is, its social structure. Early childhood
research in the UK has noted that peers’ responses to children playing
in gender-inappropriate ways tend to be loud, blunt, and critical. One
preschool study described a small boy who spent time ‘furtively’ dress-
ing and undressing a doll under the table, all the while looking over his
shoulder to make sure he was not seen by other boys. Apparently, the same
child happily played with dolls at home when there was no possibility of
peer observation (Paechter 2007). It is tempting to suggest that there are
always elements of secrecy related to a gender code, a secret knowledge
that is also demonstrably important.
Certainly, the idea that gender distinctions are policed by very young
children has initiated much subsequent research about the ways in which
small children appear to adopt a moral stance regarding gender division,
insisting that the traditional gender difference is the way it is and ought to
be into the future. Such an observation raises the question of the degree to
which gender constraints are imposed on young learners or whether they
‘do it to themselves’. Fine (2011) writes of the experiences of parents who
resolve to raise their children in a gender neutral environment and become
discouraged when their children appear to have worked out gender norms
despite this careful design—an outcome that often leads to the perception
‘it has to be biology!’.
Fine (2011) tells the story of a little boy, son of American gender the-
orist Sandra Bem, who had been carefully raised in ways that avoided
sexist assumptions of difference. One day, the four-year-old boy chose
to wear a barrette (hair clip) in his hair to preschool, whereupon he
was told by another male child that he must be a girl. Having failed
to convince his peer that he was a boy, he obligingly pulled down his
pants to make the point. The other boy was not impressed, saying
‘That’s nothing! Everyone’s got a penis but only girls wear barrettes!’.
The example of the boy with the barrette is instructive in that it shows
how gender awareness is developed in terms of symbols and follows a sym-
bolic order which is then maintained and vigorously defended, sometimes at
the expense of actual facts. Descriptions of dress and style in the adult world
are often overladen with comments on the degree to which the clothing
invokes the ‘correct’ moral order regarding gender. Fine devotes a large sec-
tion of her book to showing the ‘normal’ world as heavily laden with gender
messages which are sometimes clearly articulated as in ‘Big boys don’t cry!’
and at other times can be powerfully taught through implicit associations of
language and symbolism. Many people find this hard to register as gender
messages have been so thoroughly embedded in the ordinary way of seeing
the world and of functioning within it. The following examples of exercises
for undergraduate student teachers are revealing in that they show just how
much of our normal daily interactions carry gender-laden messages.
Buying a Present A standard exercise over many years with under-

graduate student teachers was to ask them to go to a toy store or toy
department and tell the salesperson ‘I need to buy a present for my
cousin’. In 100% of cases, the stock response of the salesperson was
an immediate ‘Boy or girl?’. Following the student’s nomination of
gender, s/he would be shown to very different sections of the store
with very different arrays of toys, accompanied by a salesperson full
of authoritative advice about what boys like (guns and wheels) or
how girls go for dolls and homemaking toys.
Alternatively, students were asked to buy a welcome-baby card and
then to compare the ways in which the infants were drawn and the texts
that accompanied the pictures. Once again, in almost all cases, there
were clear gender distinctions built in to the pictures and the words.
34 J. GILL ET AL.
Ultimately, however gender theories are interpreted, ‘getting it right’

regarding gender roles takes on a clear priority in the world of preschool.
In this way, the preschool, by providing a space in which issues around
gender provoke physical and social division, provides what is often the first
example of the child’s encounter with the ways in which gender becomes
institutionalized. It may be that young children without preschool experi-
ence could be less bound by gender strictures, although they would be
subject to television and other media, but without careful research, this
question remains unaddressed.
The task of researching gender necessarily involves a complex sifting
and sorting of data. In the case studies following, some evidence is drawn
directly from the daily life of schools. In the early years of most coeduca-
tional schooling, the separation of males and females becomes reinforced
in a multiplicity of ways: seating patterns, teacher commentary, expecta-
tions, and so on. Teachers frequently use gender difference as a control
mechanism whereby the class is rendered more biddable and docile than if
it were left to same sex friendship groups. For example, the common prac-
tice of organizing the class into pairs of boy/girl seating partners or walk-
ing lines is credited with producing more attentive and malleable students.
Teachers and students concur that the boys are more likely to be noisy and
disruptive and so the mixed-sex pairing produces better behavior, while
the students themselves keep a careful distance from one another and may
even refuse the teacher’s instruction to hold their partners’ hand—‘we
don’t want to get boy germs’ confides one small girl. There is little quali-
fication of gender-typical behaviors at this stage—just being identified as
male or female is enough to elicit gender-distinct responses and expecta-
tions from teachers, parents, and the students themselves.
As children grow through school, they become less rigid about the rules of
gender and begin to play with the norms and ideas. By upper primary years,
they have generally become much more relaxed and laugh at the ‘childish’
memory of themselves as fiercely oppositional (Gill 2004). But the underly-
ing notion of differently valued oppositional stances does not disappear.
Gender Just Happens: But It Is Played Out in Oppositions! In one

study, the researcher asked upper primary level (elementary school)
children for help with a book she was writing about a school. She told
them she was stuck for a name for one of the central characters who
was always in trouble, scruffy, and irresponsible, and for another who
was just the opposite—recognized as a good student, reliable with
homework, good grades, well liked, and so on. In the first case, 98%
of the 120 respondents gave a boy’s name for the problem student,
whereas for the good student, more than 90% of the girls gave a
girl’s name and a similarly high proportion of the boys gave a boy’s
name. When talking with the children afterwards, they said ‘Oh I
didn’t think about whether it would be a girl or a boy, I just gave
the way it happens!’. Such comments are particularly interesting in
that they show gender operating below the level of consciousness, so
deeply have the ‘rules’ been internalized that the consistent response
describes ‘just the way it is’. It certainly seems that school can become
an arena for gender differences to be played out (Gill 1992a).
EXPLANATIONS OF GENDER
In the early days of the social sciences, gender difference was not so much
explained as simply expected and accepted. Being classified as male or
female at birth on the basis of physical genitalia constituted the basis of
immediate and ongoing distinction, usually named at the time ‘sex dif-
ferences’. In brief, biological sex determined gender classification and
opened the door for sociocultural forces to operate in ways that generally
augmented and confirmed the distinction.
By the late twentieth century, social scientists were challenged by dem-
onstrations of the weaknesses of the categorization of gender in terms of
biological sex, thereby ushering in a whole new and much more nuanced
and complex classification system. While the broad distinctions of the earlier
system still apply, there is now much more flexibility in the ways in which
sex and sexuality are understood, along with much more attention to cul-
tural factors in the acting out of roles once closely defined in terms of one or
other sex. At the same time, social scientists have argued that gender contin-
ues to operate as a structuring force across different cultures and societies.
In their classic summary, cultural psychologists Best and Williams write:
The relatively minor biological differences between the sexes can be ampli-
fied or diminished by cultural practices and socialization, making gender
differences in roles and behaviors generally modest, but in some cases cul-
turally important. (Best and Williams 2010, 212)
36 J. GILL ET AL.
In the current investigation of girls in English-speaking countries in

the early twenty-first century, we acknowledge the point about the minor
impact of biological differences and concentrate on the influence of social-
ization and cultural practices, including, but not limited to, schooling.
So the central question is not whether one is a boy or a girl, but in what
sociocultural context the boy or girl is living, as the latter may well pro-
voke a wider range of difference than individual physiology. The researcher
must then focus not just on sex difference but also on contextual differ-
ence which includes place, time, and particular cultural ramifications. In
this way, the study of gender and its theorization becomes a much more
complex picture.
BOURDIEU’S THEORIZATION APPLIED TO GENDER

While many social scientists operate within particular disciplines such as
psychology, wherein the individual psyche is paramount, or sociology in
which the working of society comprises the main focus, French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu stands out in terms of his refusal of separation between the
two. In Bourdieu’s view, the person and her/his sociocultural context are
inevitably intertwined and it is important to consider both in any account of
social phenomena. The cultural mechanism that Bourdieu used to describe
this interaction between individual and culture he named the ‘habitus’
which comprises the habits, attitudes, and skills learnt from one’s environ-
ment which are themselves derivative of ethnicity, race, class, and gender.
These features constitute an array of thoughts, practices, and under-
standings shared by a particular group and taken on board uncritically
by the individual group member, usually in the early years. Most impor-
tantly, the habitus is an interactive mechanism whereby it both shapes and
is shaped by the surrounding context. The habitus offers an explanation
of how attitudes learned from experience of the social context become
embedded in an individual’s psyche and then become dominant in terms
of how s/he sees the world and develops a sense of membership and
belonging. Importantly, habitus carries a moral dimension in relating to
social practices, not simply in terms of ‘how it’s done here’ but ‘what feels
right and proper to me’. Thus, the three-year-old’s observation at the start
of this chapter was not simply her saying ‘you’re breaking the rules’ but
rather more potently ‘you ought not to be doing that’.
While Bourdieu’s work was originally concerned with the reproduc-
tion of class differences (as seen in his book Distinction (1984) with a
focus on, e.g. taste, polite behavior, language usage, accent, and proper
speech), his later writing incorporated gender along with the concept of
class as a structuring and dividing mechanism whereby social organization
is enacted and reproduced.
In terms of their earliest encounters in the home with carers, young
people learn to assign particular values to certain things, roles, positions
which invariably include a gender dimension. Traditionally, domestic labor
in the home was seen primarily as women’s work and paid work in the
public arena was associated with men. While these associations have been
eroded considerably in recent decades they live on, not simply in house-
hold functioning but also in the accepted ways of relating to males and
females. For example, the girl entering preschool is complimented on her
‘pretty dress’ which makes a valued connection between being a girl and
pretty clothing, whereas the boy may be similarly complimented for his
size or strength, features which become internalized as appropriate values
for boys. While these attitudes and values have often tended to be seen
as a product of social conditioning involving passive acquisition, through
the lens of Bourdieu’s habitus they can be seen as examples of individual
agency which constructs frameworks for understanding on the basis of
lived experience.
Bourdieu’s theory is further elaborated in terms of field (specific con-
text) and capitals (social, cultural, economic, etc.) through which the hab-
itus is reinforced and develops its strength Bourdieu (1977, 1992). For
current purposes, Bourdieu’s notion of habitus offers a useful explanation
of the way in which young children learn gender-appropriate associations
without explicit teaching. The explanation afforded by the idea of habitus
shows gender acquisition much more actively than had socialization the-
ory, which presents the image of the individual being subjected to a form
of passive conditioning or behavior modification. Habitus, on the other
hand, presents the individual as an active participant in the process. With
habitus, we have a modus operandi for Fine’s ‘gender detectives’ in which
the individual does the work of observation, interpretation, and reflection
to develop a gendered worldview that fits with the surrounding context.
The idea of habitus also enables one to see the potential for individuals to
pick up and reproduce implicit gender messages which shape attitudes and
values and thus become part of the person’s worldview.
Gender awareness operates at the conscious level and also at the sub-
conscious level. In Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus, the individual’s self-
understandings become so much part of the taken-for-granted person that
38 J. GILL ET AL.
s/he may be unaware of its partiality. The fact that such associations are
taken on board uncritically and often without conscious thought is a key
point in understanding the way that gender is reproduced. Only when
confronted with other ways of seeing does the individual come to realize
the potentiality of difference and, at the same time, the degree to which
s/he is invested in the original way of thinking.
The old saying that ‘you can take the boy out of the country but
you can’t take the country out of the boy’ describes one long-recog-
nized way in which early learning can influence embedded attitudes,
responses, and feelings in later life. The power of early experience
in terms of speech effects such as tonality and language use, bodily
deportment, taste in foods, and expectations forms part of the taken-
for-granted elements in personal formation. And often such taken-
for-granted schema take the form of having been ‘always known’, as
part of how the world has always been, is, and ought to be in the
future. Of course, this is not to say that these features are perma-
nently ingrained and will withstand other ways of being informed
such as through school learning and professional education. The
‘ensemble of dispositions’ that Bourdieu called the habitus can and
does adapt to changed contexts.
Narratives of individuals transcending their origins (in terms of class, gen-

der, and race) describe the process of going beyond the initial limits of a
particular habitus and learning new ways from different groups of which s/
he has become a part. While some theorists mistakenly reject the idea of the
habitus as overly determinist, it can be seen to provide one way of under-
standing not just how individuals are drawn to develop a sense of belonging,
of fitting into particular situations, but also how individuals might change and
adapt to new situations. As such, the habitus is a dynamic mechanism that
operates between individual and environment with each dimension acting
on the other—the environment is shaped by the individual at the same time
as the individual is affected by her/his environment. Of course, this process
is not always smoothly achieved and depends on the individual’s capacity for
adaptation as well as the malleability of the new context to accept variations.
One example of this adaptation is the case of girls entering schools which
had previously operated as single-sex institutions for boys. In this case, there
is a necessary adjustment on the part of the institution and its people as well
as by the newcomers if a successful transition is to happen (Mael 1998; Lee
and Marks 1992; Pallotta-Chiarolli 1990; Walford 1983). For an institu-
tion to adjust to the change from single-sex schooling to coeducation will
involve students, parents, and teachers as well as resource (re)allocation,
space (re)definition, architecture, advertising, school ethos, and so on. This
example will receive further elaboration in the following chapter.
In this work, we take from Bourdieu the idea that gender is constructed
as a dimension of the habitus in the early years and then subject to con-
tinual ongoing modification and reconstruction in terms of social context
and individual sense of self. This position is consistent with the theory of
gender as essentially being produced in social interaction (Connell 2011)
and the implication that a gendered subjectivity is not simply an outcome
of one’s self-consciousness but rather requires input from others to pro-
voke identification and become more articulated.
THE CONNECTED SELF

The social dimension of gender construction is particularly important in an
analysis of adolescents as it positions the peer group as singularly important
in the young person’s take up of gender, as well as being a constant element
in the adolescent’s developing understanding of self. Connections have fre-
quently been recognized as especially important in the sociocultural devel-
opment of girls in that they provide a key contextual mechanism in which
to develop self-understanding and the sense of belonging. Being connected
has been theorized as a central feature of girls’ schooling experience.
Concepts to do with the importance of relationships in the social world
of girls and women form a strong thread in the theorization of female psy-
chosocial development. Relationships provide one central means of devel-
oping self-understanding and a sense of belonging. Alice Baker Miller, an
early American theorist, developed a relational theory of self and noted the
particular importance for women of feeling oneself as being part of a social
group. In her words:
…women’s sense of self becomes very much organized around being able
to make and then to maintain affiliations and relationships. Eventually, for
many women the threat of and/or disruption of connections is perceived
not as just a loss of a relationship but as something closer to a total loss of
self. (Baker Miller 1976, 83)
40 J. GILL ET AL.
Such an orientation aligns very closely with Carol Gilligan’s thesis

that typical socialization produces girls as crucially involved with others
as they build a sense of self in ‘connection’, which is seen as central to
well-being (Gilligan et al. 1990). Care and connection have been theo-
rized by Gilligan implying: ‘a view of self and other as interdependent
and of relationships as networks created and sustained by attention and
response’ (Gilligan 1988, 8).
Certainly, the idea of group membership as singularly important to girls
in high school is reflected in many of the media presentations of girls alluded
to in the previous chapter. For example, from popular culture, when the
leading character from the film Mean Girls was asked why she didn’t leave
the group in which she was being badly treated, she quickly responded:
Cady: I’d rather be part of the group and have them being mean to me than be
outside the group and not exist at all!
In Gilligan’s work, this sort of close connection is seen as more typical

of female friendship groups than those of males whose friends comprise
more fluid easygoing relationships.
In a lengthy study of student behavior in high school, girls were contin-
ually seen outside lesson times in tight little groups of four or five, engaged
in intense conversations and highly personalized exchanges, whereas boys
were more often in loosely organized groups playing football or other
team games across a widely dispersed field with little time for close conver-
sations (Gill 1992a, b). Not surprisingly then, the girls got to know one
another very well within their friendship groups, while the boys were rec-
ognized by a larger group of peers, especially if they were sporting cham-
pions, but their relationships were significantly less intense than those of
the girls. However, the boys tended to become public figures, more often
mentioned in assemblies and newsletters around the school, while the
girls operated within a much narrower profile. The point here is that their
out-of-class behavior was also profoundly gendered, determining how
they behaved and what they learned. The girls learned a great deal about
interpersonal relationships while the boys learned about physical skills and
excellence, along with, for some, the status of being a public figure.
The theme of connectedness and social membership has continued to
appear in connection with theories of girls’ social behavior, almost to the
degree of becoming a taken-for-granted feature. In current media repre-
sentations of girls, the idea of the group to which they belong is dominant,
almost to the extent of overshadowing any individual girl (as seen, e.g. in
the recent French film La Bande des Filles).
It would seem that gender also continues to hold a dominant position
in many of our social institutions, both formal and informal. These insti-
tutions, such as schools, provide arenas within which members come to
recognize themselves as sharing common interests and come to identify
to varying degrees with the place and people. A positive identification is
often described as feeling secure, understanding what is expected, and
being understood in turn, usually achieved when the newcomer feels part
of the place and s/he can identify with at least some of the social groups
found there.
The idea of gender being produced in social interactions alerts us to
its presence in what we say and also how we speak. Gender informs a
basic sense of self along with a sense of ‘rightness’ or social fit and can be
thus a source of comfort, recognition, and building acceptance. From the
foregoing examples, it can be seen that gender issues can be spoken into
being—such as the four-year-old wars in the kindergarten or the endless
conversations among adolescent girls making wardrobe decisions about
what is currently ‘hot’. But gender also is embodied and takes shape in
terms of bodily comportment—how we move, sit, and stand (Bourdieu
called this body hexis). Dress is a key conveyor of gendered messages,
possibly less so than in earlier times, but remains a central preoccupation
with many young women. It is much more than a matter of ‘how do I
look?’ but also the idea of dress as symbolic is an important component
of choice as clothes carry messages about the wearer’s position in terms of
taste and style.
The idea of gender being produced in concert with observations of
speaking style, taste, dress, and general behavior aligns with theory from
Bourdieu and Connell in generating an ongoing picture of the construc-
tion of gender in social interaction. For current purposes, the question
to be examined relates to the degree to which schooling or other forms
of institutionalized education impact on the ways in which girls develop
gender-linked ways of thinking and behaving and the degree to which
gendered understandings impact on their important relationships and
their learning. At one level, the school offers a social arena within which
friendships are formed and the social groups take shape often organized
around similarities of age, gender, interests, backgrounds, and so on.
Given girls’ proclivity for understanding themselves as part of a particular
42 J. GILL ET AL.
group, school experience can potentially form an important part of devel-

oping social skills, empathy, and self-understanding, along with gender
formation.
THE INDIVIDUAL IN NEW TIMES

The discussion now turns to the ways in which thinking has changed
regarding institutionalized education, that is, schooling and the place of
individuals within it.
In this section, we return briefly to the major ideas currently shaping
society in order to highlight the position of schooling within these new
times. From a social science perspective, it is useful to look at the ways
in which particular periods have been associated with certain mainstream
ways of thinking and seeing the world. Currently, the dominance of neo-
liberal discourse is routinely noted across the English-speaking world,
along with the necessary acknowledgement of globalization and the
new knowledge economy driving investment in education and research
(Lauder et al. 2012; Bradley et al. 2008). The feature of neoliberalism
most frequently noted with regard to gender is its central commenda-
tion to individualization (Giddens 1991; Beck 1992) and the idea of each
person’s responsibility to make her/his own path through the business of
identity making and life choices.
In Beck’s view, individualization is an ambiguous concept, not to be
confused with the individual stance of progressive educational practices.
For Beck, contemporary individualization means dependence on market
forces in all dimensions of life. The individualized subject is, in this view,
constantly involved in strategic calculations about the opportunity costs
of behavioral choices. Beck argues that, paradoxically, being freed from
traditional associations and prohibitions will result in the individual being
integrated into society more intensely and with heightened complexity:
The individual is indeed removed from traditional commitments and sup-

port relationships, but exchanges them for the constraints of existence in
the labour market and as a consumer, with the standardisations and con-
trols they contain. The place of traditional ties and social forms (social class
and family) is taken by secondary agencies and institutions, which stamp the
biography of the individual and make that person dependent upon fashions,
social policy, economic cycles and markets, contrary to the image of indi-
vidual control which establishes itself in consciousness. (Beck 1992, 131)
This idea has particular implications for the ways in which young people
behave. Since the late twentieth century, the idea of the individualized
individual has been enjoying a new ascendancy. No longer satisfied with
being identified with a group, class, ethnicity, or any collective, it is now
imperative that the person displays a sense of self as different from oth-
ers, whether that be in achievement, personal tastes, appearance, or some
other way. Second, and closely related to the neoliberal ascendancy, is the
question of choice, described in terms of individual agency such that each
has the capacity to choose and is held responsible for the consequences
of choices. These requirements sit alongside notions of girls constructing
themselves in part through a sense of interpersonal connection.
Dobson has noted the problem for girls in constructing a personhood
that is an adequate response to all these demands. As she writes:
Young women must navigate their way around or through these cultural
conditions in the process of constructing a ‘legible feminine subjectivity’.
(Dobson 2014)
This perception is captured perfectly by one of our informants in more

down-to-earth terms:
Well with girls here [girls’ day school] … it seems really important to have
a particular feature or claim to fame … you could be good at sport or at a
particular class like art or music … but more important is to be the sort of
person others want to be around. This could be by having a great personal-
ity or … even more certainly by being very pretty—that’s when other girls
want to associate with you as they feel that they will look nicer themselves by
being around a pretty girl. Yeah … in this school you have to be really pretty
or really funny and then everybody will hang around with you … I’m talk-
ing about other girls, not stuff to attract boys, just other girls will respond
to someone being really pretty … and if you haven’t got that you have to be
really funny. (Zena, Senior high school 2014)
Importantly, the current stress on individual identity work is signifi-

cantly different from the individual in humanist philosophy and literature
whose task was intense self-exploration with a focus on the ideal of a shared
common humanity. In this thinking, the current individual is beset with
an elevated sense of self-responsibility which requires her to choose how
to stand out from the crowd, to become a marketable entity. At the same
44 J. GILL ET AL.
time, the scripts for girls continue to carry the requirement to be part of
a group, to attract friendship, and to be personally and sexually desirable.
Both of these neoliberal themes—individualization and choice—have
been subject to critique by feminist scholars (Baker 2008, 2010; Harris
2010). From the outset, it appears that neither theme fits well with the
ways in which girls’ social impulses have been theorized and indeed dis-
played. Clearly, the neoliberal construct of individualization would appear
to be at odds with earlier theorizations of young women’s tendency to
care and connection (Gilligan et al. 1990). The felt need to ‘be your own
person’ can downgrade commitment to belong to a more widely shared
perspective and thus can be at odds with the socialized female receptive-
ness to outside opinion.
Before developing our analysis in terms of the ways to best under-
stand what it means to be a girl in current times, it is important to take
a moment to look in more detail at how psychology has produced a
body of knowledge about what it originally called ‘sex differences’ that
have, to varying degrees, shaped popular understandings of parents and
teachers and thus affected the ways in which young people are raised and
taught.
PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH: COGNITIVE ABILITIES

Popular ideas about gender have been derived from psychological studies
with an emphasis on sex differences. In its early days, psychology itself
was not exempt from gender discrimination. Early studies often recruited
only males as subjects as women were thought to behave less rationally
and thus the results would be compromised! This inherent bias continued
in varying degrees up to the 1970s when Kohlberg (1981a, b) completed
his famous work on moral development, initially without any female sub-
jects as they were regarded as less able to undertake abstract thought.
Fortunately, the work of Carol Gilligan, a onetime student of Kohlberg,
was able to demonstrate the presumptions in Kohlberg’s research and
to develop her own theory of the different ways in which boys and girls
approach problems—differences she saw as produced by different social-
ization practices. Hence, Gilligan (1982, 1988) developed the idea of an
‘ethic of care’ as characteristic of girls’ responses to moral questions as
distinct from the ‘ethic of justice’ based on abstract principles more typical
of boys’ responses.
At the same time, it is important to register that psychological testing is

premised on the individual as a unit. Thus, the traits found to exist in indi-
vidual boys and girls are then summed to indicate differences between the
groups. This technique can serve to mask differences within the groups, at
the same time as reporting—and possibly over emphasizing—differences
between them which result from the method. Issues of context were ini-
tially only rarely involved in psychological testing, the assumption being
that the results were to be explained in terms of the innate individual psy-
chological makeup of participants. This presumption was especially true
when considering cognitive development.
A large body of psychological research into cognition had been gar-
nered throughout the twentieth century and was gathered together in a
major study by Maccoby and Jacklin in 1976 which examined ‘sex differ-
ences’ across a large number of studies. For teachers and schooling, it is
useful to look at particular areas, notably mathematics and language learn-
ing, as these areas comprise some of the most enduring gender narratives
about children’s learning. For example, teachers are frequently heard to
comment that boys are good in mathematics, girls in English, a claim that
has been roundly rejected as baseless by recent investigations in psychol-
ogy and neuroscience (Fine 2011; Rogers 2002; Fausto-Sterling 1985,
2000). While the authors of the earlier major report were very wary of
making claims of universality and stability, they gave strong support to the
picture of there being much more difference of ability shown within boys
and within girls than between the sex-defined groups (Maccoby and Jacklin
1976). However, because these areas continue to be represented in com-
mon expectations and assumptions of sex-related cognitive difference, we
look briefly at them here.
Mathematics Ability
The expectation that boys will perform at higher levels in mathematics
continues to be regularly found in schools and classrooms. However, the
rigorous examination by Maccoby and Jacklin showed that while there was
some variation in the elementary school years in favor of boys, an enduring
difference occurred post puberty in the level of abstract geometrical rea-
soning where boys excelled. However, since this finding, much research
has demonstrated that boys typically take more math classes than do girls
and so the difference may well be explained by males having more experi-
ence in this area than females.
46 J. GILL ET AL.
The more general debate about the perception of male superiority in

mathematics has gradually eroded in ways that appear to parallel women’s
involvement in paid work (Rogers 2002). In the past decade, the differ-
ence in favor of males in mathematics achievement has all but disappeared
as demonstrated in research by Janet Hyde et al. (2008).
Despite this sound refutation, the perception of male aptitude in math-
ematics and math-related fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Mathematics [STEM]) continues, while the lower expectations of girls in
these areas appears to have been acknowledged and reiterated by the girls
themselves who consistently enroll in these subjects in the lower propor-
tions than boys as soon as they have the choice.
Language
Girls generally show a higher level of language development than boys—
typically they speak at an earlier age, initiate conversations more, are seen
to have larger vocabulary, and often are seen to be ‘ready’ for school at an
earlier age than boys.
However, Maccoby and Jacklin (1976) found this early advantage dis-
appears by middle elementary school, at which stage boys and girls have
similar scores on language tests.
In her review of the literature on gender and language, Fine concludes:
Several researchers have recently argued that gender differences in language

skills are actually more or less non-existent. (Fine 2011, 138)
Both of these core learning areas were shown to be unstable as indica-

tors of sex differences in cognitive ability. Sometimes girls as a group were
ahead, at other times it was boys who appeared the more able group of
learners, leading to the conclusion that boys and girls were more similar
than different in cognitive ability.
Later research was directed at why girls do not enroll in mathematics
courses to the same degree as males and why, when their reading levels are
so similar, males and females appear to prefer very different sorts of read-
ing material. Areas such as these involve degrees of choice and it appears
that the choices made by young learners are likely to replicate the gender
differences in achievement once regarded as inevitable raising questions
about school curricula and student choices.
FROM SEX TO GENDER: THE ROLE OF AFFECT

It is important to recognize the shift from using the term ‘sex differ-
ences’ which is the one used in the early psychological studies to the term
‘gender’ more frequently used in the ones listed below. As noted earlier,
to name the difference between male and female scores in relation to sex
implies it is produced by innate physiology and thus offering only limited
potential for change. But to ascribe the difference to ‘gender’ indicates
that it is likely to be a socially produced difference related to the particular
context of the learner.
In the present context, a more important difference concerns the ways
psychological research has pinpointed the differences between boys and
girls in terms of affective variables—how students approach schoolwork
and understand themselves as learners. In other words, the way students
feel about themselves and the work they are undertaking may be more
implicated in learning outcomes than matters of ability and capacity.
The main lines of research include the following:
Differences in Self-confidence
As early as the fifth grade, boys were shown to have a more positive attitude
to themselves and their ability than girls (Smith 1975). While it might be
possible to dismiss this finding as indicative of the higher degree of sexism
in Western society some 40 years ago, subsequent studies have continued
to reveal the consistent gender difference in levels of self-confidence, par-
ticularly in relation to academic success. The most recent OECD report
noted its continued existence and added that in some studies the gender
differences in confidence in learning appeared as early as the first grade of
primary school (OECD 2015).
Research has subsequently suggested that in societies in which gender
differences are very observable and thus seen as culturally appropriate,
those differences become internalized by members within that society (a
process that could be accounted for by Bourdieu’s theory of habitus).
Thus, if males in a particular society are presented as loud and confident as
a gender stereotype, the girls will subscribe to an image of being less loud
and less confident as a consequence. In other words, the measurable dif-
ferences in self-confidence that we see could be read more as a reflection of
the society rather than as indicators of different capacities in boys and girls.
48 J. GILL ET AL.
Differences in Attribution
Carol Dweck (1980; 1999) investigated the ways in which students explained
academic outcomes and found significant differences between males and
females on this dimension. Her findings briefly are as follows:
Boys are more likely than girls to take responsibility for success (I did
it! I’m good at this!) and to explain away failure (It was a trick question! I
hadn’t been taught well!). Girls, on the other hand, were shown to explain
away success (I was lucky! I just happened to remember) and take respon-
sibility for failure (Yes I can’t do this work! I think it’s all too hard for
me). Such differences indicate that for boys, an internal ‘locus of control’
(derived from Rotter 1954) applies more to success than failure, where
boys attribute success to internal factors and failure to external ones. For
girls, success tends to reflect a more external locus of control, with failure
more likely to be seen as coming from within.
Differences in favor of males in terms of self-concept, confidence in
academic ability continue to be found as the student passes through senior
school and into higher education. Males are more likely to overrate their
capacity to attain a high score or to put themselves in a high position in
class whereas girls are more likely to underestimate their ability, ascribe
themselves a lower grade, and to underrate themselves in terms of their
position in class (Gill 2004).
More recently, Dweck’s work (2012) has shown that whatever you
believe about intellectual ability has an effect on behavior, persistence, and
performance. Thus, if girls believe they are ‘no good at mathematics’—an
all too commonly encountered position in young girls—then it is likely
that they will perform poorly in the subject, give up easily, and opt out
of it as soon as possible. The challenge for teachers then is to build con-
fidence and positive outcomes for girls in mathematics to overcome this
culturally induced self-sabotage.
The recent widely reported analysis of gender equality in the OECD
studies of student achievement levels suggested that highly able girls
‘choke’ on the pressure they experience from friends, family, and them-
selves, a situation which renders them unable to perform at their best.
Given girls’ keen desire to succeed in school and to please others, their fear
of negative evaluations, and their lower self confidence in mathematics and
science, it is hardly surprising high-achieving girls choke under often self-
imposed pressure. (OECD 2015)
This report seems to blame the girls for being girls—wanting to ‘please
others’ and having ‘lower self confidence’ and putting pressure on them-
selves. And so the authors of the report, in their final analysis, use the verb
‘choke’ to describe an outcome that is ‘hardly surprising’—indeed almost
expected. The girls’ shortcomings have been identified as all their own
fault! This conclusion does not impress us as being written from a stand-
point of gender equity or gender impartiality.
Not surprisingly then, the conclusion is somewhat ambivalent:
…gender disparities in performance do not stem from innate differences

in aptitude, but rather from students’ attitudes towards learning and their
behaviour in school, from how they choose to spend their leisure time, and
from the confidence they have—or do not have—in their own abilities as
students. (OECD 2015, 3)
Gender differences in self-confidence become even more important in

terms of a potential effect on student motivation. If one is confident that
s/he has the ability to get a good result, the idea of striving for success
is clearly more achievable. But for those—mainly girls—who see success
as an unlikely outcome or as a result of actions beyond their capacity, the
theory suggests that it would be more likely for them to opt out of tasks
they expect to be hard and challenging. In addition, it seems that success
itself provokes gender differences in those who do succeed.
In line with this, psychological research revealed consistent male/female
differences in the capacity to hold to an image of a successful self. The
theory of ‘fear of success’ originated in the USA in the early 1970s from a
study which revealed girls as inclined to hide their academic success for fear
of being alienated from the ideal of desirable femininity. Boys, on the other
hand, relished their success which appeared to afford them an enhanced
masculinity. Despite the many changes in the ways in which school suc-
cess is being regarded, this discrepancy between males and females con-
tinues. For boys, success appears as an unadulterated good, the reward for
personal ability and effort, whereas for girls, success, especially academic
success, can carry negative connotations. This phenomenon, named by
American psychologist Matina Horner Fear of Success (Horner, 1972),
achieved a large degree of recognition at the time. There were many rep-
lications of the original study and the results tended to confirm the theory
(see text box). The topic aroused feminist concern about its being inter-
preted as once again making women the problem—a question of female
50 J. GILL ET AL.
psychology—rather than seeing the issue as one provoked by the sociocul-

tural context. From Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, it is possible to read the
situation as one in which girls and women have taken on the traditional
sociocultural association between intellectual power and masculinity and
consequently seek to avoid success as unfeminine and hence unacceptable.
Fear of Success Matina Horner’s original study was based on stu-

dents writing a short essay about a fictional John or Susan who had
come top of the class in their first-year undergraduate study. Males
wrote about John and females wrote about Susan. The overwhelm-
ing response indicated that whereas John went on to lead a very
fulfilling and brilliant career with a beautiful wife and children, Susan
was much less fortunate and she usually was unable to repeat her
achievement. A follow-up study with 120 Australian senior high
school students (Gill 1980) showed a similar result with John going
on to study medicine and pursuing a highly successful career, having
a beautiful wife, and fabulous home. The Susans were once again
less fortunate—one was killed in a road accident as she ran to tell
a friend of her good news, another was discovered to have cheated
and was publicly shamed and stood down. Most frequently and most
disturbingly, like the US study, the Susans were frequently identified
as being social disasters, no friends male or female, certainly no men-
tion of romantic partners, and destined for lonely unfulfilled lives.
The inference from this work is that academic success is a con-
stant positive for males but can carry negative overtones for females.
Insofar as schoolgirls are aware of this potential negativity, their moti-
vation for academic achievement may well at times be compromised.
Hence, despite the increasing recognition of girls as top students, the

idea that their success comes at a price is an increasingly reiterated theme
in educational research. Questions about female academic success con-
tinue to be raised, as seen in the OECD report mentioned above, and in
studies of the difficulties of successful women in male dominated profes-
sions which identify outcomes that suggest the ongoing complex negotia-
tions required for girls and women achievers (Mills et al. 2014).
For example, Renold and Allan in an English study of elementary school
describe a bright girl who ‘deprecated her achievements whenever she was
praised and systematically denied her flair for academic work’ (Renold and
Allan 2007, 463). These writers describe the girls as struggling with the ‘pre-
carious balance’ between achieving academically and acceptable femininity.
In a Canadian study, Pomerantz and Raby (2011, 555) write of bright girls
holding ‘academic achievements close to their chest as a secret to be guarded’
in a paper identifying the complexity of girls’ engagements with narratives of
academic success. In their analysis of the range of contradictory discourses
around girls’ performance of academic identities, the need to mask ability for
fear of contaminating the idealized acceptable femininity is a familiar theme.
While this syndrome of female underestimation of ability and hiding
success compared with male overestimation of ability and lauding their
success was initially demonstrated in the 1970s, studies continue to reveal
the same feature in studies of professional women right up to the present
time (Sandberg 2013; Heilman and Okimoto 2007). As summarized by
Sheryl Sandberg in her best-selling book about women and leadership:
I believe this bias (against women’s success) is at the very core of why women
are held back. It is also at the very core of why women hold themselves back.
For men, professional success comes with positive reinforcement every step
of the way. For women, even when they’re recognized for their achieve-
ments, they’re often regarded unfavorably. (Sandberg 2013, 40)
Given that this syndrome—of males being celebrated for success and
females being downgraded—appears as early as elementary school, the
challenge is surely for teachers to create an environment in which success
is recognized and celebrated without the gender-related overtones.
In the latter group of studies mentioned above, some contextual aspects
are included, indicative of environmental effects on individual participants.
As we have argued earlier, in any consideration of gender, the context has
been shown to have a significant effect on the way young people behave.
A moment’s reflection on the society of 50 years ago will immediately
bring to mind a world of much more pronounced gender differences than
that of current times. Hence our insistence on the need to consider the
individual and the environment in any analyses of the ways in which young
women today participate in their worlds. While it may not be surprising
that some 30 years ago girls were seen to want to present themselves in
ways in keeping with the feminine ideal of the times, it is of concern that in
the present time many girls continue to feel themselves unacceptable and
out of place if they are identified as being unusually clever and successful.
52 J. GILL ET AL.
One explanation for this phenomenon is that the girls are responding
(both consciously and subconsciously) to contextual cues that continu-
ally reinforce the idea of male superiority and leadership as gender-based
entitlements and that this image becomes grounded in the habitus of girls
and women. Hence, in striving for an acceptable form of femininity, they
avoid positioning themselves as success stories, especially in terms of pub-
lic roles when they could be seen as in competition with men.
Moreover, some recent research suggests that high achievement at
school may not translate into a smooth path into success in later life. In
Dweck’s most recent work, she has described the ways in which students
who have achieved ‘perfect’ scores at school struggle in post-school lives.
Other researchers have noted that even girls who are highly successful at
school can find themselves in difficult situations in the workplace where
the route to the top is further complicated by masculinist culture.
Having noted that the context is fundamentally important in the ways
in which young people grow into an awareness of themselves and the
related gender implications, the discussion now turns to the question of
the research approaches that are best suited to investigate the ways in
which girls’ attitudes and behaviors are inflected with gender awareness.
RESEARCHING GENDER
One New Zealand Bourdieu scholar, Roy Nash, summed up his carefully
enunciated research standpoint as ‘realist sociology’ in which he saw the
task for social scientists as ‘to investigate the nature of society and to con-
struct explanatory narratives that describe the mechanisms through which
it is maintained and through which it is open to transformation’ (Nash
2006, 169). Hence, one way of conducting research on gender is to look
at the ways in which the social world is structured around gender division
and then analyze the means by which these differences are maintained
and how they might be changed. From this position, we begin by looking
at different research approaches and their mechanisms for gathering evi-
dence of gender division relating to educational structures and processes.
Quantitative Approaches
There can be no doubt that large-scale studies, carried out using surveys,
statistics, and meta-analyses have proved very useful in identifying differences
between males and females across a number of behavioral dimensions such
as enrolment patterns, subject choices, and achievement outcomes. This

approach is known as quantitative research. The use of large-scale surveys
and statistical data has been very useful in the initial identification of gender
differences in educational outcomes and provides the capacity for continual
monitoring of schooling effects. For example, Australian research analyses
of school retention initially showed dramatic gender differences which were
quite quickly reversed during the 1970s. Statistical analyses of subject enrol-
ments in the UK also produced marked variations by gender, some of which
have been countered by systematic encouragement of girls in the mathemat-
ics and science-related subjects. However, in the STEM areas girls continue
to enroll in smaller numbers than their male peers—a focus of continuing
gender equity campaigns in educational treatments (Mills et al. 2010).
Quantitative research is generally less useful in explaining how the par-
ticular differences come about and develop. And yet, in order to have an
impact on the development of gender limitations such as fear of success or
mathematics anxiety, for example, it is crucially important to understand
how such responses come about. Given that the physiological explana-
tion located simply in biological sex is no longer acceptable, a different
research approach, one that focuses on lived experience, is required.
For the researcher who wants to go beyond the limitations of survey
techniques and discover how gender issues impact on daily lives, there are
immediate problems. As noted above, gender can operate in ways that
lie beneath the consciousness of the actors or speakers—so much has a
gender consciousness been subsumed into normalized ways of living and
being. In tracing the history of research into girls and education, historian
Lesley Johnson (1993) proposed the idea that up until the mid-twentieth
century, schoolgirls were relatively unaware of gender. In her account,
gender distinction may well have formed part of the unwritten curriculum
but was so much taken for granted that girls themselves had no cause
to reflect on this as a feature of their existence, much less as a reason to
feel any sense of disadvantage. At the time, education for most girls was
profoundly gendered in its preoccupation with domestic arts, courses in
motherhood and baby care, and clerical skills. Some 20 years later, the
proliferation of writing and research about the situation of girls in educa-
tion had produced a widespread awareness of sexism in schooling treat-
ments. Can we expect that the current generation of girls are more aware
of gender and its prescriptions and proscriptions, or is it still the case that,
as in earlier times, the negative effects of gender limitations operate below
the level of consciousness of girl learners?
54 J. GILL ET AL.
Qualitative Approaches to Research

It seems likely that gender issues exist in concert with other sociocultural
dimensions to produce differently ordered gender awareness at different
times within the same culture. From this perspective, when researching
gender, it is important to encourage participants to speak freely about
their own feelings and their worldviews to capture the impact of their
current situation. There is a need for research into the ways in which cur-
rent girls position themselves with regard to gender in their life worlds.
Qualitative research approaches are more likely to produce this deeper
understanding (Somekh and Lewin 2005; Cohen et al. 2011).
Given that the focus in the studies described in later chapters is to reveal
young people’s thinking about particular topics, a qualitative approach
involving interviews and observations is likely to be a fruitful line of
enquiry. Qualitative research is understood as a
systematic mode of inquiry into complex social structures, interactions,

or processes by employing observational, interpretive, and naturalistic
approaches. Most qualitative researchers believe that social reality is embed-
ded within and cannot be abstracted from their social settings, and that the
best way to understand such reality is to engage in ‘sense-making’ rather
than hypothesis testing that is typical of traditional scientific research.
(Bhattacherjee 2012, 197)
In qualitative research, the researcher designs a data-gathering approach

which usually involves conversations between researcher and participants
who feel comfortable and relaxed about talking about their own life
worlds. There are immediate ethical issues that must be addressed. First,
the interviews and discussions are understood by the participants in terms
of the aims of the research and there is no compulsion on anyone to par-
ticipate. The informants must be aware of why they have been chosen to
participate and assured that, while they are not required to be ‘typical’ of
any group, their opinions will be respected.
Nor is there any sense of public exposure or reporting back—the
researcher must guarantee confidentiality and anonymity in any account
of the study, either oral or written. The participants must be free at any
time to discontinue their involvement with the study without fear of repri-
sal. Establishing empathy and rapport with the participants is a necessary
central feature in the production of data that can be analyzed thematically.
Member checking and reflexivity are features of ensuring validity and reli-
ability to the analytic conclusions.
The ideal atmosphere of the interviews is one of power sharing—usu-
ally achieved by using semi-structured questions so that the participant
can raise issues or comments and thus have some say in the direction of
the data gathering, but still maintaining the general line of the discus-
sion. In an ideal design, the researcher will provide all participants with
a record of their discussion and ask for any clarification of the positions
taken. Observations in the form of field notes provide a data set that is
richly contextual and often key to data analysis.
Finally, interview design is also a matter requiring careful thought.
Running pilot interviews with similar groups is one way of check-
ing that the questions and concepts to be used are easily understood
by participants. Extreme care must be taken so that the researcher does
not lead the volunteer participant into giving what is perceived as the
desired response. This situation is frequently encountered when working
with children whose school experience often appears to include answer-
ing questions to which there is an already given or ‘right’ answer. The
researcher needs to have a number of probes by which initial responses
can be elaborated in terms that provide a more complete account of the
topic under scrutiny.
THIS BOOK: MIXED METHODS

The material that makes up this book will include both sorts of data—
some findings are drawn from large-scale surveys and statistical analysis
of trends in subject enrolments, school participation, and so on. Other
data is drawn from observations and interviews in which participants
take part in semi-structured conversations about various aspects of gen-
der in their lives. The conversations are recorded, transcribed, and then
subjected to intensive thematic analysis wherein gender themes can be
identified.
At this point, it is useful to recall the ways in which we are theorizing
gender formation—as present and maintained in everyday social interac-
tions and arrangements. Hence, researching gender as performed by the
current generation of girls requires close attention to speech forms as well
as content. Gender is discursively constructed in everyday interactions.
We are interested in what the girls say but also the ways in which they
56 J. GILL ET AL.
describe themselves, the terms used, the conveyed sense of confidence

or uncertainty, and so on. Speaking with girls about their everyday lives
provides a rich source of gender awareness as it involves an exploration of
attitudes, feelings, and ways of accounting for their worldviews.
We chose to speak to our young informants about the ordinary every-
day aspects of their daily lives as well as to ask about the larger concepts
as we believe that this approach best honors the sense that they are the
originators of their own stories. Thus, the voices of the girls give a recog-
nizable authenticity to these accounts of gendered thinking.
All three authors are experienced in analyzing texts in terms of gender
awareness. Each of us completed doctoral studies which used qualitative
data gathered through observations and interviews, as well as some sur-
vey and test-produced numerical data. We have continued to apply our
well-developed analytical techniques in subsequent studies. Following ten
years experience in teaching schools in the USA and Australia, the lead
author has been engaged in teacher education for the past 25 years which
has meant constant exposure to the daily life of schools both inside and
outside the classroom, some of which provides illustrative examples in this
text.
Along with qualitative authenticity, we recognize the importance and
usefulness of large-scale survey data which lends generalizability to the
stories of girls and education. As we have indicated in the early years of
feminist work in education, large-scale studies were particularly useful in
alerting the wider public to what was happening—or not happening—to
girls in schools. The ongoing monitoring of retention rates has proved
particularly useful in charting changes in girls’ uptake of education and
registering their majority status in terms of university entry, the latter
being a feature of current times.
At the same time, we remain alert to the different sorts of knowledge
derived from the different approaches. Through interviewing and obser-
vation alone we could not have gained the sense of importance of gender
in education, as we would not have been able to represent the size of the
groups under consideration and nor could we talk about the sorts of gen-
der differences that continue to appear. Perhaps more importantly, with-
out the interview material, we would not have been able to investigate the
depth of penetration of gender awareness in the girls’ understanding of
themselves and their possibilities and the complexities produced by these
concepts.
SUMMARY
In this chapter, we have sketched some key dimensions of the ways in
which current social scientists have characterized key themes within
Western society in the present. We have shown how these theories dif-
fer from previously established worldviews and have paid particular atten-
tion to the ways in which currently dominant worldviews carry gendered
implications. And we have identified our interest in understanding the
work that students do in school and out of school, to ‘become some-
body’ (Smyth and Hattam 2004). We have offered examples of school
engagement as inextricably connected to the development of gendered
student identities. From this basis, we have begun to build our case based
on the idea that there are particular issues for girls and young women as
they engage in planning future lives in worlds very different from those of
previous generations. In particular, we propose to investigate girls’ under-
standings of themselves and their futures through the lens of choice mak-
ing, as we have noted that choices are an integral part of the process of life
in senior school.
After a brief overview of the ways in which social science has theorized
gender, we have noted the development from the idea of sex differences
as presented as innate capacities associated with males and females and
insisted on the necessary attention to the social context in understand-
ing how gender is produced, supported, and maintained. Lastly, we have
introduced the question of research methods and have argued that a range
of approaches including both quantitative and qualitative research will be
used in our description and analysis of issues for girls as they approach
senior school and plan future careers.
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CHAPTER 3
See How Far We’ve Come! Girls’

Education in Recent History. And Where
Does This Leave Girls Now?
In this chapter, we provide an overview of the ways in which gender

inequity in educational treatment began to be recognized and the pro-
cesses that were put in place to reduce these differences and thus provide
a more equitable schooling experience for girls and boys. The history of
the girls in education movement began slowly in the latter half of the
twentieth century with the dawning recognition of the different sorts of
educational experience and outcomes relating to girls’ education when
compared to that of boys. Schooling, it was claimed, did not provide girls
with an adequate preparation for fulfilling their potential to become active
participants in society. The claim was based on comparisons with boys’
experience of schooling and included attention to time in school, subjects
studied, roles undertaken, and appropriate preparation for a post-school
career or further study.
Much of the research covered in this chapter originated with large-
scale surveys, quantitative approaches that detailed differences between
male and female student populations. As we argued in the previous chap-
ter, the picture of difference thus obtained does not get to grips with
how the students themselves understood their behavior nor do the studies
really engage with the reasons for the differences that have been identified.
Gender differences in schooling treatments and outcomes were exposed
but, apart from a general understanding of patriarchal differentials in
power and privilege, there was little theorization of the ongoing construc-
tion of gender inequity in schooling. More recently qualitative research

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52487-4_3
62 J. GILL ET AL.
approaches have been applied to gather data for more developed theoreti-
cal analyses which address some of these questions, but in nearly every case
this work has built on the previous statistical analyses demonstrating dif-
ferences in outcomes. Thus, the story of the girls in education movement
incorporates a narrative of the development of more sophisticated research
approaches and an increasingly nuanced depiction of girls at school.
BACKGROUND: THE MOVEMENT BEGINS

Across the English-speaking world, the setting up of compulsory school-
ing, an achievement realized before the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, was and is usually seen as a universal good. Schooling was to become
not only desirable but also accepted as the fundamental right of every
child. Soon the concept of the ‘Little Red Schoolhouse’ had become for
most Americans a familiar and cherished part of the neighborhoods it
served, as is shown by the continuation of the name to the present day all
over the USA as indicative of a warm caring progressive approach to edu-
cation. In England, primary schooling began from a tradition of church
and parish-based elementary schools which then became subsumed within
state provision. However, it is arguable that the historical link between
schooling and moral principles continues.
Australia, an early leader in making school attendance compulsory for
young children, developed a system of primary schools which are pro-
vided and maintained by the state governments under the official policy
of being ‘Secular, Compulsory and Free’ (Grundy 1972). In Australia,
as elsewhere, there are fee-charging non-government schools as well, the
majority of which are affiliated with one or other of the established reli-
gions. These non-government schools (sometimes called private and/or
independent although they are in receipt of considerable federal govern-
ment funding) are currently attended by nearly 34% of Australian stu-
dents. This is a higher proportion than non-government schools in the
UK or the USA, with the current conservative government deliberately
supporting the concept of parental ‘choice’ in schooling.
Of course, the idea of schooling as a universal good did not apply equally
across social differences. Completing schooling through the senior years
was traditionally much more common for middle-class students than for
their less-privileged peers. While class differences in educational outcomes
had always been seen as one aspect of widely ingrained social differentia-
tion, gender factors had attracted little attention. However, by the early
SEE HOW FAR WE’VE COME! GIRLS’ EDUCATION IN RECENT HISTORY ... 63
1970s, questions began to be raised about the ways in which educational

institutions also typically discriminated between students on the basis of
gender. Girls, it was argued, did not gain an educational experience that
was comparable to that of boys.
In England and Australia, girls were much more likely than boys to
leave school before completing the senior years, hence with fewer quali-
fications and opportunities to continue with education (Miller 1986). In
this system, the early leaving low SES girls and boys were destined post-
school for low-skilled jobs such as factory line workers and other types of
manual labor. Middle-class girls, most of whom had also left school before
completion, were destined for female-dominated occupations such as child
care, secretarial work, and nursing (at that stage not taught at university),
with lower status and earning power compared to their male peers who,
on completing school, headed to university where they undertook profes-
sional courses in high-prestige areas such as law, engineering, science, and
medicine. Discriminatory schooling experience was seen as directly linked
to gender differences in earning power and employment, a connection
that was to become of increasing concern in the 1980s and 1990s.
Along with the recognition of girls as typically missing out in school-
ing came the increasing entry of women into the paid workforce.
Consequently, girls no longer saw themselves as short-term paid employ-
ees for the interim period between leaving school and getting married, but
rather began to think about having extended earning power and careers in
their own right. Middle-class parents supported their daughters’ ambitions
to access professional careers previously dominated by males. Such devel-
opments brought pressure on schools to provide educational pathways for
girls that would better prepare them for life beyond school. Significant
numbers of middle-class parents demanded access for their daughters to
courses that would lead to university and professional careers. Thus began
a press for girls to study mathematics and science at senior levels, subject
areas that had previously been strongly male dominated.
Meanwhile, some activist educationists took on the role of demanding
that girls’ educational experience should not be a carbon copy version of
what was offered to boys. They called for curriculum reform designed
around girls’ interests and not just those of the boys. Consequently, they
urged research into the reasons behind the pervasive gender differences
in typical school experience and outcomes. The movement for better
education for girls rapidly gained momentum and followers in the UK
and Australia. This happened a little earlier than in the USA, where not
64 J. GILL ET AL.
until 1994 with the release of the Sadkers’ book Failing at Fairness: How
America’s schools cheat girls did the press for the focus on girls’ education
really take off.
The Sadkers’ book detailed the ways in which American girls, like their
sisters in other English-speaking countries, were routinely overlooked in
many aspects of the schooling process. They were less likely to be known
by teachers; less likely to have the chance to speak in class; more likely to
be channeled into non-academic courses and generally not regarded as
serious students (Gill 2004). Girls from wealthy backgrounds were in a
better position in terms of access to education than their working-class
sisters but they too, in their fee-paying schools, were often subjected to an
educational diet that did not include serious intellectual endeavors.
In Australia, these gendered features of schooling were carefully docu-
mented in the Interim report of the Commonwealth Schools’ Commission,
Girls School and Society (1975) which was to have a great impact on
schooling for girls. The report summarized what was known about girls’
education and provided for the first time official documentation of gender
differences in educational treatments and outcomes. In raising important
questions about the role of girls’ education in terms of their participation
in society, it strenuously urged the need for more research to investigate
the issues involved. The following decade was to become a watershed for
gender in educational research in Australia and the UK where many activ-
ist feminist educators became involved.
Research into girls’ education typically canvassed key areas of school
experience in developing a profile of schooling and gender differences in
outcomes. The Girls School and Society report had identified specific areas
of concern in which the differences between male and female experience
were most pronounced and was one of the first to demand practice-based
explanations in the effort to explain how and why the differences came
about. The discussion now turns to each of these areas—some of which
of course overlap—to describe the dawning realization of what had been
happening to girls in schools.
SCHOOL COMPLETION
In Australia, in the years before 1975, boys were significantly more likely
than girls to complete 12 years of schooling and to sit the final exami-
nation which was the requirement for proceeding to higher education
(McCalman 1993). While the situation in the UK was similar, the gender
difference in high school completion was less striking in the USA where
there was a stronger tradition (at least for middle-class students) of high
school ‘graduation’. Of course, in all countries, the gender differences in
school completion were compounded by factors of class and race, with
middle-class white boys being the group most likely to complete high
school and proceed to university.
Now, some 40 years later, the situation has changed significantly.
Nowadays, girls as a group across the English-speaking world are more
likely than boys to finish school, to have high professional aspirations and
to progress to university (OECD 2012). While the class factor remains,
with middle-class young people being advantaged, the ethnic/racial
dimension varies according to background, place, and school. Overall,
more girls complete school than do boys, girls consistently score higher
grades, and a higher proportion of girls proceed to university, especially
into female-dominated courses such as nursing and teaching. Whereas
once teachers at primary school were more likely to encourage boys and
to see boys as more likely to be high achievers, it now seems that such
perceptions have given way to a sense of boys as more likely to be seen as
at risk, a topic to be looked at below.
CURRICULUM
An early line of research focused on the content of curriculum materi-
als in schooling. Researchers consistently found that early readers showed
boys as active participants while the girls were the passive onlookers. The
ubiquitous Dick and Dora series of readers was a classic case—‘Dora Look
at Dick! See him run!’. The argument was that such materials reinforced
sex differences in behaviors and attitudes through which young learners
were positioned differently. In addition, attention was focused on the
words and pictures used in school texts with the predominance of male
actors in the mathematics series where men dominated the set puzzles,
with the mowers mowing meadows and the tilers tiling kitchens. Not only
did these texts present males as actively engaged workers while women,
if seen at all, were involved in domestic chores, but also the examples
underscored the connection between mathematics and masculine work
choices, further distancing female students from this study area. A simi-
lar situation was found in science texts leading to the unsurprising find-
ing that when researchers asked schoolchildren to ‘Draw a Scientist’ most
of them produced a drawing of a man in a white laboratory coat with
66 J. GILL ET AL.
glasses and a beard (Kelly 1985; Finson 2002, 2010). Of course, such
images are frequently encountered on television, but until this research
few people had registered the degree to which teaching materials rein-
forced the sex-related differences of the wider world. Curriculum writers
were urged to produce gender inclusive materials and the newer more
recent sets of readers are consciously less biased.
SUBJECT CHOICES
In most places, the early years of schooling comprise a common curricu-
lum of basic skills undertaken by all children. In senior school, when stu-
dents face choice between subjects, fairly consistent gender differences
were seen to arise. In the 1980s, in both the UK and Australia, studies of
subject enrollments had consistently shown a tendency for boys to enroll
in the science and mathematics areas while girls appeared to be more
attracted to the humanities (Collins 2000; Rennie et al. 2001). These
trends are still visible today (OFSTED 2014; PISA 2015) and have led to
the wide promotion of STEM courses for girls in an effort to counteract
the typical pattern in which girls choose against such subjects as soon as
choice is available.
While these differences were seen more clearly in high school enroll-
ments, they were also found in studies of children’s interests well before
the end of primary school. For example, in response to lists of possible
topics in science, one study of elementary students found that boys over-
whelmingly choose to examine the working of a battery, whereas for girls
the most popular choice was to see how a baby grows inside the mother
(Dawson 1981, 2000). Of course, such orientations precisely reflect the
cultural expectations built into much of children’s experience such as toys,
play equipment, clothing, and so on, not to mention parental expectations.
The point here is that curriculum choice comprises an area of differ-
ence around which gender stereotypical patterns emerge. Some interest-
ing work has led to the idea of critical mass (Kanter 1993; Cohoon 2001;
Ashworth and Lynne Evans 2001) being important in student subject
choice. This idea suggests that if either males or females comprise a small
proportion of a class, the likelihood of other same sex individuals not
completing the course is much higher than if there are more equal num-
bers of boys and girls from the outset. The gender rules of acceptable
behavior are reinforced by curriculum choices which allow students to
perceive a subject as appropriate or not. This situation provides another
example of the workings of the habitus whereby the minority students

sense the message built into the class composition and feel wrong-footed
and uncomfortable.
As noted in Chap. 2, the area of mathematics learning has been one
in which people originally thought boys had a greater ‘natural’ aptitude
than girls. Despite such ideas having been roundly refuted, the impres-
sion continues and young people sort themselves accordingly, with girls
being much less likely to enroll in mathematics in senior school as soon
as they have a choice. What is also known, however, is that mathematics
achievement is clearly related to the number of mathematics courses stud-
ied. Thus choice against a particular subject area can be seen as a strategy
whereby some students are confirmed as not able, a position unlikely to
change. The question arises about whether choice is a good thing and how
much choice should students have.
CLASSROOM TREATMENTS
Gender differences in classroom treatments attracted much publicity in
the early days of the girls’ education movements, largely due to the efforts
of education researcher and publicist Dale Spender (1980, 1982). Spender
conducted studies in schools and classrooms in the UK and discovered
that teachers typically interact with boys much more often than with girls.
This difference meant, according to Spender’s theory, that boys get much
more teaching and that girls miss out. Most notably when Spender herself
took on the teacher role, constantly trying to give girls as much atten-
tion as boys, she was found to have spent more than 70% of her time
with the boys. On the basis of her experience, she concluded that paying
more attention to the boys ‘feels fair’ as it’s the normal procedure inside
classrooms. Of course, this is another example of Bourdieu’s theory of the
workings of habitus in terms of the ways in which we subconsciously take
on board the normal everyday practices in our lived experience and impose
a moral order on their continuance—that’s the way things are and the way
they ought to be!
There were many replications of Spender’s study with researchers find-
ing that while boys attracted many more teacher interactions than did
girls, a good deal of the attention to boys comprised disciplinary comment
rather than actual teaching. It was also found that boys tended to initiate
more interactions by calling out, asking questions, and directly addressing
68 J. GILL ET AL.
the teacher, whereas the girls tended to quietly seek help from friends
rather than call out in front of the whole class (Gill 1992a, 2004).
The real value of this work lay in the fact that it showed some of the
ways in which gender-based cultural expectations were re-enacted in class-
room practice and became part of the taken for granted everyday class-
room behavior. One outcome of this work was to lead to the establishment
of single-sex classrooms for girls in some coeducational schools, often in
particular subject areas such as mathematics and science, as it was thought
that the girls in these classes would have a better chance of gaining a fair
share of teacher attention. Studies of such developments revealed only
mixed results. The usual picture was initially positive with both teachers
and students noting an improved atmosphere in the new configuration of
the classrooms. However, any advantage in terms of actual improvement
in student achievement was seen to be short lived and not sufficient to
encourage the continuation of the experiment (Gibb et al. 2008; Gray and
Wilson 2006; Rowe and Marsh 1996). Only in girls’ schools is the theme
of girls getting the full benefit of teacher attention continually pushed—to
the degree that some girls’ schools describe this feature as their reason for
existence. But of course this does not mean that all girls receive an equal
share of teacher attention, simply that all the recipients of teacher atten-
tion are girls. The discussion below returns to these issues in a focus on
single-sex schools as effective learning environments for girls.
ACHIEVEMENT PATTERNS AND ASSESSMENT STYLES

Historically, males had been the high achievers in education as they were
more likely to finish school with the high-status subjects and take the
examinations for entry to university. As seen in the previous chapter, mas-
culinity and achievement are seen to complement one another in Western
culture but this complementarity cannot be relied on in terms of intel-
lectual achievement and femininity. Several studies of the ways in which
achievement is measured and published have demonstrated some nuances
in achievement patterns which reflect student attitudes rather than abili-
ties. For example, using data from students in the UK Elwood (2005) has
demonstrated that examinations have a complex role in creating and defin-
ing gender differences in performance in public examinations.
Traditionally, students undertook end-of-school examinations and
scores were published beside their names in rank order. More recently,
the idea of making student rankings a public display has come in for
considerable criticism. Educationists have argued for a more developmen-
tal approach whereby student work is routinely subjected to formative
assessment during the course and thus becomes part of the learning as well
as the evaluation.
Gender differences began to appear relating to type of assessment pro-
cedure followed (Jovanovic et al. 1994; Willingham and Cole 2013). Girls
were thought to prefer and score more highly with formative assessment
whereas most boys preferred the one off examination—however research
suggests a much more complex interaction (Elwood 2006, 2008).
Assessors were encouraged to vary the style of assessment and the way the
results were conveyed in an effort to balance these gender effects.
Gender different patterns of student response to testing appear

quite early. In primary school, many teachers adopt the time-hon-
ored example of the spelling bee wherein children are competing
with one another to ‘win’ the game by spelling all the words success-
fully. Exercises such as this in a mixed class are often greeted with
pleased cheers from the boys and looks of dismay from the girls.
Competition appeals to the boys’ sense of display and risk taking
whereas many girls find the process unnerving and seem to dread the
attention, even when they are winners. Girls seem to prefer a more
collaborative mutually reinforcing learning style, whereas boys relish
the chance to compete and ‘show who is best’. Competitive assess-
ment is one way in which typically male students’ leisure choices—
game playing, football sports—are re-enacted inside the classroom.
Girls more typically avoid the divisive nature of competition as it
suggests a potential fracturing of their important and tightly knit
social connections. (Gill, Field notes 2004)
Another aspect of gender differences relating to assessment is that in

senior schoolgirls appear to try hard across all subjects, whereas boys will
focus on those areas which they find interesting and not bother with other
ones. Clearly, an assessment regime which ranks scores across a range of sub-
jects will show girls as good general students, whereas boys will score highly
on a few chosen areas rather than across the board (Peck and Trimmer
1994). Thus, the ways in which the senior school curriculum is assessed may
70 J. GILL ET AL.
result in gender differences provoked by the style of assessment. In English

schools where the routine is for senior students to study a narrow range
of subjects, boys will be better suited, whereas in USA or Australia where
grades are based on all the areas studied, it is likely that girls will do better.
Of course, not all boys prefer examinations and not all girls enjoy learn-
ing collaboratively. The real message for educators is to choose assessment
techniques and learning styles that are varied so as to avoid privileging
one evaluation style over another and inadvertently also privileging either
gender.
RESOURCING
Within traditional non-government schools in both the UK and the USA,
there are examples of single-sex institutions, allowing for a range of com-
parisons between schools in terms of gender context. In the early 1970s,
an Australian study showed that the fees associated with boys’ schools
were substantially higher than those for girls’ schools, a finding suggesting
that parents were prepared to pay more for education for their sons than
for their daughters (Roper 1971). At that time, British studies had shown
that boys’ education was broadly considered more important as it would
prepare the boy for a career for life, whereas the girls were anticipated to
need a short-term work experience before they married and had children
(Clarricoates 1980).
By 2015, it seems that the pronounced gender differences in school
fees have largely disappeared but in other perhaps more subtle ways it
seems that boys cost more to schools than do girls. For example, economic
analyses of school costings also revealed consistent gender differences in
that subjects undertaken by boys were more expensively resourced than
those undertaken by girls. The science laboratories, the equipment needed
for courses such as woodwork, metalwork, the computer equipment are
examples of male-dominated areas needing expensive resources. Provisions
for sport frequently reflect gender differences. In Australia, the school
oval, often the largest area in the school grounds, is nearly always dedi-
cated to some form of football which often becomes an exclusively male
area. And schools that have experimented with the idea of ‘girls’ day on
the oval’ have met with a good deal of opposition, much of which comes
from the boys who point out that the oval is virtually empty as the girls
have become so used to not occupying its large space.
The Extra Curriculum

Gender different practices commonly occur in the unsupervised time
outside the classrooms in most coeducational schools. For example, the
boys will play in large freely organized groups around a game of football
while the girls congregate in small groups in particular chosen places in
the schoolyard or within the buildings. As noted in Chap. 2, in this daily
practice, the girls get to know one another very well in their long animated
discussions, but the fame of any individual is usually limited to her par-
ticular group. The boys, on the other hand, know one another across year
level and class membership in a fairly loose easy manner of acquaintance
that is quite distinct from the intense personalized knowledge of the girls.
In their extracurricular behavior, as in the classroom behavior, the boys are
public figures, known by name and perhaps renowned for sporting prow-
ess—or the lack of it. Boys traditionally are more likely to be mentioned
in school assemblies and newssheets, especially if their team has done well.
As such, boys are more likely to be selected for careers beyond school
by scouts who are looking for new candidates for their team or college.
They learn that they stand for the school in ways that few girls can. In this
manner, young people are developing social capital with gender different
potential in terms of life post-school. For boys, the public figure, team
player, active competitor will be prepared for a role in public life whereas
the girls for whom connections with close friends are most important are
less equipped for the competitive aspects of working life.
SCHOOL AS A GENDERED INSTITUTION: STAFFING

PATTERNS
In recent times, most schools have become increasingly aware of the gender
imbalance in the teaching profession. Across the English-speaking world,
teaching, most especially in the early years, is seen by and large as work for
women. The disparities between male and female teachers in terms of year
level associations, pay differentials, likelihood of promotion to senior roles,
and leadership possibilities have become more acute. The gender disparity
was initially identified by American researchers, Strober and Tyack (1980)
who asked Why do women teach and men manage? and yet this distinction
still applies to much of the current profession. Of course, there are many
reasons advanced for these developments (most notably in Australia the
fact that for many years women teachers were required to resign from the
72 J. GILL ET AL.
professional pathway on marriage) but that discussion is beyond the role of

this book. Our focus is on the ways in which the current and subsequent
generations of young people learn to understand the school as both sym-
bolic and emblematic of gendered institutional power.
While the majority of teachers are women, a considerable proportion of
school leaders and principals are men. While the incidence of male leader-
ship is more entrenched in the secondary schools where the proportion of
female teachers hovers around 65% in current times in Australia, it is still
the case at many elementary schools as well.
The presence of a significant proportion of women teachers—particularly

in the early childhood and primary levels—is a long-standing phenom-
enon that characterises the education systems of many countries: Australia,
Canada and the United Kingdom are examples of countries often referred to
as having ‘feminised’ teaching professions, denoting that women represent a
significant majority of the teaching workforce. (UNESCO 2011)
While in most countries there are more women staff in elementary

schools compared to their numbers in high schools, the proportion of
women has been increasing steadily in both school sectors. The 2011
UNESCO study found that between 1999 and 2007 women teachers in
the elementary school had increased from 81% to 85% in North America
and from 56% to 61% in the North American high schools.
Research showing the ways in which the children translate their experi-
ence of gender in school staffing to gender and power in the world beyond
school has been consistently productive.
Talking with a Group of Upper Elementary Schoolchildren About

Their Experience
Q: You’ve told me that there are more women teachers in the
lower grades and more men in the higher levels. Why do
you think that is so?
Lia: Oh that’s because women like little kids better …
Mary: Yes! because men grow beards and have loud voices … they
can be a bit scary!
Jean: Oh yes—I didn’t get a man teacher till I was in year 6 … I
was a bit scared at first but then I got used to him.
Susan: Yes you feel big when you’ve got a man teacher … it means
you’re getting in to the more important years. (Gill 2004)
In this example, the children are associating men with more important
roles and ‘naturalising’ the different positions—women like little kids bet-
ter, they are more used to them.
Crucially, they are also connecting gender with power differences which
becomes more evident in the following clip:
Q: In this school there’s a man as the leader, the school princi-

pal. Do you think a woman could do the job?
Peter: Oh NO! You’ve gotta be into sport to run a school and
women aren’t into sport.
Evan: The kids wouldn’t take any notice of her!
Jim: It has to be a man—a woman would run around getting all
the rules right but you need a man to steer the ship.
In a nearby girls’ school with a woman principal the students were

equally sure that, even in this environment, a man would be more appro-
priate as a leader:
Q: So how’s the school going—is it all going well?

Mimi: Oh it’s OK Mrs Y is OK—but she’s very pregnant you
know, and I don’t think she can do it much longer…
Tina: You know Mr X could have had that job, but he let Mrs Y
have a turn … I think he’ll do it once she has had the baby.
(Gill 2004)
These examples give some idea of the ways the children translate their
experience of school as an institution into an understanding of gendered
power relations. In the study cited here, the connection between mascu-
linity and leadership appeared to override the students’ repeated assur-
ances that ‘we’re not sexist here!’ which often prefaced their comments.
Instead of seeing the examples of positions favoring one or other sex, they
sought to naturalize what occurred, with women seen as more appropri-
ate to teach small children and another woman’s incapacity to do her job
questioned because of pregnancy.
74 J. GILL ET AL.
When such impressions are placed against a background of histori-

cal gender difference in school leadership, they emerge not simply as
explanations of how it is, but also as a moral imperative describing how
it ought to be. This is another example of habitus at work—translating
accounts of everyday practice into the situation with which students are
most comfortable, achieving a ‘rightness of fit’ with the existing gender
order. Following Bourdieu’s perspective, it is not productive to interpret
the gender differences in self-confidence and behavioral styles as produced
by the psychological makeup of females. Rather, such differences must
be understood as the product of young people being raised within a cul-
ture of long-established gender difference, internalized by participants at
a level below conscious thought. This reading helps to explain some of the
difficulties encountered in promoting change.
AND FOR GIRLS?
From this brief overview of early research on girls and education, a
convincing case was made for schooling needing to make significant
changes in order to better prepare girls for life beyond school, whether
that should mean further study or paid work. Gender differentiated
access to education had been consistently and convincingly displayed.
The reform rhetoric turned to the concept of gender equity as being a
driving force. Throughout the 1990s, school systems developed poli-
cies to ensure a higher degree of gender equity as a visible and lasting
feature of student experience (MCEETYA 1996, 1997; Ruddick 1994).
To this end, schools were charged with accounting for their equitable
functioning in terms of constantly monitoring outcomes associated with
numbers of either sex. Sexist behavior was targeted and identified as
unacceptable—sexual harassment became a topic of frequent school
discussion. Such moves provoked heightened consciousness of gender
in staff and students, one outcome of which was to be taken up by the
boys’ education concerns of the late 1990s and early 2000s, which we
come to later.
Given the specific focus of this book on girls’ education, it seems appro-
priate at this stage to turn to an analysis of the processes of single-sex
schools for girls where it might be expected that schooling is done differ-
ently. This issue has become something of a perennial topic for debate in
the questions of girls’ education.
GIRLS’ SCHOOLING FOR GIRLS

First, girls’ schooling is not a new idea, rather it is part of a tradition in
girl’s education across the English-speaking world that had its begin-
nings in the nineteenth century. At the present time, there are at least
two versions of the expressed need for girls-only schooling. At one level,
consistent with cultures where the separation of the sexes is seen as most
important in many areas but especially education, girls’ schooling offers
a space in which girls can be educated without fear of ‘contamination’
from their male peers. The extreme model in the Western world is the
convent, the safe house for young women allied with preservation of
virtue and education in the womanly arts. The other more contemporary
version of the argument for girls-only schooling has to do with the belief
that girls can best apply themselves to learning in an environment that
is free from the distractions posed by the opposite sex, where their share
of teacher attention will be fair and where teaching and learning styles
are designed specially for girls. While the first version is focused on the
girl and her need for protection, the second is more clearly focused on
her learning.
The question of whether girls’ learning is advanced in a single-sex
environment has occupied researchers, parents, teachers, and schools
in recent decades. In the current fad for using league tables for iden-
tifying successful schools on the basis of academic results, many girls’
schools, both public and private, tend to do very well (Guest 2014).
This feature has become a key marketing point for the middle-class cli-
ent community. The message is ‘Send your daughter here in order for
her to achieve her full potential and proceed to the university course
of her choice’. Such advertisements are usually replete with names of
former scholars who have gone on to achieve widespread acclaim in a
range of fields.
Such publicity is a long way from an earlier tradition in girls’ school-
ing, a subset of the girls and learning orientation, that had existed
through most of the early to mid twentieth century in the UK and
Australia certainly, but possibly less so in North America. These were
the government provided girls’ schools, some explicitly called Girls’
Technical Schools, which served working-class areas and involved sort-
ing girls at an early age into courses for domestic arts, child care, or
clerical work. In many of these schools, the girls experienced a very lim-
ited form of education and were denied entry to higher level academic
76 J. GILL ET AL.
subjects. In rare cases, girls did perform well in such schools and were
able to transfer to a more academic institution but this was not the
normal course. These schools, like the Boys’ Technical Schools, were
perhaps the clearest example of schools serving the class divided needs
of the wider society. In the 1960s, such schools gradually disappeared
in the move to coeducational comprehensive secondary schooling in
the UK and Australia. While some educationists argue that such schools
served the needs of working-class students, especially non-academic
young people, most were reluctant to make such a clear judgment at
the relatively early age of entry to secondary school. The current mid-
dle-class interest in girls’ schooling for girls has occurred in terms of
girls’ increased educational achievement primarily seen in fee-paying
well-resourced schools rather than as happened in the Girls Technical
Schools providing preparation for low-skilled employment. Clearly, sim-
ply having girls in single-sex schools does not automatically raise the
level of academic outcomes.
ARE GIRLS BETTER OFF IN GIRLS’ ONLY SCHOOLS?

The research on the question of the advantage of single-sex education is
instructive in that it investigates many of the issues that had been found
to be ignored or underemphasized in girls’ experience of coeducational
schooling.
Academic Outcomes
The question of whether students do achieve at higher levels in single-
sex schools is a recurring one. It was initially raised by British researcher
R.R. Dale whose study in the early 1970s, Mixed or Single Sex School?, was
written up in three large volumes and at the time purported to be the last
word on the subject (Dale, 1974). His conclusions however were rather
ambivalent—there was no clear consensus about which school gender
context was crucially linked to high achievement for either girls or boys.
Dale’s thinking was also inevitably linked to the conventions of the time
(1970s England) and at one stage he was driven to speculate ‘Perhaps
Nature intended man to be the leader and woman the follower ..’. Dale
came down in favor of coeducation as promoting what he termed ‘optimal
adjustment to life’ which was again more speculative than conclusive.
Reanalysis of Dale’s data purported to show that for girls, high aca-
demic achievement was connected to attendance at an all-girls school
(Harding 1981; Shaw 1981). A flurry of British studies followed, most of
which confirmed the idea of single-sex schools being associated with high
academic achievement, with girls being more likely to enroll in the pres-
tigious mathematics and science subjects (even though the girls’ schools
were less well resourced than the coeducational schools or the boys schools
in these areas), with girls occupying senior leadership roles in the school,
more prepared to take up non-traditional careers and so on (Shaw 1981;
Stanworth 1982; Delamont 1983; Deem 1984). This work was widely
reported and the British government commissioned two large-scale stud-
ies to investigate the benefits of single-sex schooling for girls (Bone 1983;
Steedman 1983).
The results of both studies supported the conclusion that in the UK,
high female achievement was not due to the school being single sex but
rather was mainly accounted for in terms of the style of school, with the
academic grammar schools, whether coeducational or single sex, being
clearly connected to high female achievement. Other relevant variables
associated with high achievement included the aspirations of girls and
their parents, their parents’ level of education, their socioeconomic status,
and student ability, as measured prior to attending the school. The interac-
tion of factors was complex but school gender context did not emerge as
a significant factor in girls’ achievement.
Some 25 years later, a comprehensive study of the outcomes of girls’
attendance at single-sex American schools (Sax 2009) produced results
showing a slight difference in favor of single-sex schools in terms of higher
female self-confidence and level of engagement with mathematics and sci-
ence, but this study was very cautious about implications that these differ-
ences were a result of the school type rather than features of the different
populations from the schools under study. The majority of American
single-sex girls’ schools are fee-paying schools and parents make a delib-
erate choice to send their daughters in the belief that these schools will
provide a better educational outcome than that available in government
coeducational schools. In Australia, as one student remarked in her expla-
nation of the choice of one of the few remaining government girls’ schools
‘Mum wanted me to come here—it’s almost a private school!’ (Gill 2004).
And so the single-sex choice is overladen with ideas about class and status,
along with parental expectations for daughters.
78 J. GILL ET AL.
Despite the highly ambivalent results, many educators, students, and

parents, especially those involved with single-sex schools, continue to assert
that this environment is necessary for girls’ academic success. However, it
seems that the numbers of single-sex schools are diminishing even within
the group of parents willing to pay school fees. Recent decades have seen
the growth of coeducational fee-paying schools in Australia and the UK
(Guest 2014). The girls in these schools are seen to achieve impressive
results, highly comparable with those of girls from top-performing single-
sex girls’ schools. Hence, it is argued that girls’ achievement is not depen-
dent on a single-sex environment but is associated with a complex set of
factors that apply whether or not the school is single sex.
Subject Choice
Early studies in the UK had shown that girls were more likely to study
science and mathematics in single-sex schools and boys to study languages
(Bone 1983). This finding suggests the ‘critical mass’ concept alluded to
above in which students—either male or female—are unlikely to continue
in a course that is numerically dominated by the opposite sex. The single-
sex school avoids having students as gender minorities in any classroom
and thus removes that disincentive. However, many coeducational schools
have modified their classes to avoid having a significant gender minority
in any class, particularly in areas known to have small numbers of female
students.
As noted above, the setting up of single-sex classes for girls in math-
ematics and science was another way educators sought to counteract the
tendency for girls to avoid these subjects. There is little consistent research
to demonstrate a lasting effect. Single-sex classrooms are short-term strat-
egies and the improvements associated with them have had a limited life
(Marsh and Rowe 1996). Moreover, the idea that girls need special treat-
ment in order to advance in these areas has the unfortunate flow on effect
in that the idea of mathematics and science as problem areas for girls can
be reinforced by these well-meaning experiments.
Girls’ Learning Can Proceed Better Without Boys Present?

Girls’ schools have traditionally operated at either end of the social scale.
While the girls’ technical schools successfully prepared girls for low-paid
jobs, they were not oriented toward academic achievement. Historically,
clever girls were clearly better off in girls’ schools with a strong academic
tradition and women role models who encouraged intellectual pursuits.
Fifty years ago, the advantage of academically oriented girls’ schools arose
precisely because they operated against the established cultural constructs
of the time, in which the intellectual engagement of girls and women was
not highly regarded. Graduates from such schools offered inspiring exam-
ples of female scholarship at a time of few possibilities for official recogni-
tion. In the mid-to-late twentieth century in the UK and Australia, many
non-government girls’ schools became known as academic establishments
and ideal learning environments for clever girls.
In the USA during the nineteenth and twentieth century, several highly
prestigious female tertiary institutions were founded for young women,
while in the UK some leading universities continued in a very male-
dominant tradition. Women were not admitted to degree programs at
some of these universities before the mid twentieth century, although they
were permitted to audit classes. However, in recent times, many of the
American single-sex tertiary establishments have become coeducational as
a result of pressures from young men and women who see the single-sex
environment as out of touch with current lifestyle preferences of young
adults. While there has been some nostalgia expressed for their earlier sta-
tus (Trilling 1977), many of these now coeducational colleges continue
to be keenly sought after in terms of their reputation for graduating high
achievers.
At high school level, there has also been considerable change toward
coeducation from schools originally established as single-sex environments
(Guest 2014). This development reflects parents’ desire for efficiency
of school transport and minimizing attendance requirements at school
events. But it also reflects a desire in the young students for a more relaxed
‘normal’ schooling style, less inflected with the strict segregation of an
earlier era. Such developments suggest that by 2015, the wider culture is
more ready to recognize and encourage female intellectual ability, at least
in the middle-class homes where parents hold high educational ambitions
for their daughters.
Currently, many coeducational schools show little evidence of gender
disparities in subject choice and high grades. More boys than girls enroll in
higher mathematics and physics at the senior levels, but the dominance of
such areas has diminished considerably, along with the increased numbers
of students completing school. Whereas once mathematics was seen as
difficult and the preserve of high achieving mostly male students, its popu-
80 J. GILL ET AL.
larity appears to have diminished and, while still restricted to academically

able students, there appears to be less gender coding in the significantly
wider subject range in senior school.
Advantages of Single-Sex Schools

In single-sex girls’ schools, there are more opportunities for girls to take
on leadership roles and to be seen in leadership positions. While all schools
have paid more attention to gender equity in student leadership positions
which are now often shared between a boy and a girl, the girls’ schools
can give students leadership opportunities unhampered by the presence of
males as competitors, electors, or as followers.
Two areas have appeared in the research that indicate a clear advan-
tage for single-sex schools. First, the US work of Riordan (2002) who
maintained a consistent interest in the topic of schooling and gender con-
text across several decades. Once a strong supporter of single-sex schools,
Riordan’s more recent studies caused him to change his position as he dis-
covered the only group who can be seen to gain from the more restricted
environment are male or female students from marginalized groups, that
is, students with special needs based on class, race, and religion. Riordan
(2002) found that such special students do better in an environment which
allows a focus on their particular needs which can too readily become lost
in the typical diversity of regular schools.
The second area of research supporting single-sex schooling has to
do with teachers’ work. An American study showed clear advantages for
teachers in a single-sex girls’ school environment. (Note that the staff
composition at such schools is not necessarily single sex.) Women teachers
working in single-sex schools had more confidence in their capacity to be
heard in faculty discussions; they believed their issues were taken on board
by school management and that their opportunities for promotion were
considerably better than in coeducational schools (Lee et al. 1995). Good
conditions for teachers play a key role in enabling schools to attract and
retain excellent staff. This research does not show good conditions as an
essential feature of such schools, but rather the study has urgent implica-
tions for school leadership across all school types. Given that quality of
teaching has emerged as of high importance in schooling outcomes, it
would appear that all schools should try to establish a match between the
advantages found in girls’ schools in order to encourage the recruitment
of excellent teachers.
Note: A fuller discussion of the issue of single-sex education is avail-

able in Gill 2004, ‘Beyond the Great Divide: single sex or coeducation?’
University of New South Wales Press, Sydney.
THE CURRENT SITUATION REGARDING SCHOOL GENDER

CONTEXT
While research has failed to show that girl’s academic outcomes are cru-
cially linked to single-sex schools, the historical connection lives on in the
minds of many parents and teachers. Parental choice of schooling is idio-
syncratic. If parents have positive memories of their single-sex schooling,
they tend to want the same for their children while the reverse is the case
for those with negative recollections. To compound the subjectivity built
into this judgment, the situation then presents as a self-fulfilling proph-
ecy—in a context where people believe their daughters are more likely to
achieve highly in such schools, a feature of which the girls are undoubtedly
aware, it then becomes the most likely outcome.
There are many other factors involved. Parental support for daughters’
education is evident in the form of school fees and many other ways. Their
daughters must register their parents’ hopes and may be inspired to work
hard in order to live out the dream. Recent press releases of educators’
warnings about the danger of parents seeking to fulfill their own ambitions
through their children sound a cautionary note (retiring Eton principal in
The Australian, 19/5/15). Whereas once parents may not have encour-
aged daughters to aspire to high academic achievement, the currently
high aspirations and parental expectations of good results should not be
allowed to overwhelm other aspects of schooling experience.
While there are many established girls-only schools in the English-
speaking world which offer a superb education to their students, there are
others whose offerings may not be distinguishable from rank and file schools.
Good schools have experienced teachers of proven effectiveness as well as
carefully selected new recruits. They are well resourced and often feature
past pupils in important public roles in the professions and the arts. These
factors, along with the active support of parents, undoubtedly contribute to
the excellent performance typical of students from these schools. What can-
not be concluded is that the results are due to the school being single sex.
Furthermore, the impressive results of girls in excellent coeducational
schools disprove the argument that girls can only learn in a girls-only
schooling context. So the other side of the syllogism arises—girls do not
82 J. GILL ET AL.
need single-sex environments for their learning to thrive and neither does
being in a single-sex environment emerge as the most important factor in
girls’ achievement.
The question remains about the degree to which single-sex schools for
girls can supply experiences other than academic achievement that prepare
girls for life beyond school in ways that are not available to coeducational
schools. Some early research (Harris 1986) on this question provided
some evidence of girls-only school students finding more difficulty in
adjusting to the coeducational world of university than their peers from
coeducational schools. At the time of the study, girls were still a minority
within the tertiary student sector and hence lacked ‘critical mass’ in their
classes whereas by 2015 girls dominate numerically as university entrants.
So while girls may once have felt less confident in an environment new
to them, it is unlikely that would be the case in the current situation. Of
course, more current research is needed to investigate this question.
We have chosen to pursue the question of single-sex schools for girls at
some length because the discussion provokes questions about the mean-
ing of a good education for girls in current times. Key features to emerge
include having parents who are supportive of their daughters’ education,
who are themselves well educated and who can actively engage with school
topics and processes, all of which are of evident assistance in producing
quality educational outcomes for students. Whereas once active parental
interest and support was more likely to be directed to sons, the current
cultural expectations of women being in the paid workforce for much of
their adult lives has meant that parental support for daughters’ education
is a normal experience in middle-class families and for many working class
ones as well.
Another current movement that has captured educators’ attention
in recent times has been the repeated question of what about the boys?
Given that this issue also relates to some issues for girls’ education, it is
appropriate to look at the question a little more closely.
SO WHAT ABOUT THE BOYS?

Currently, there is a widespread perception of girls as educational winners
in a view of education as binary and polarized. The perception of girls as
the ‘winning team’ in this competition is presented as though all girls are
high achievers—which of course they are not. Several prominent theo-
rists (Baker 2008; Ringrose 2007; Arnot et al. 1999; Francis and Skelton
2005; Griffin 2000; Renold and Allan 2007; Walkerdine et al. 2001) have
roundly criticized this ‘successful girls discourse’ as misrepresenting the
case and willfully misleading public consciousness. Despite these cautions,
the idea of boys being poorly treated by standard education treatments
continues to thrive. While the history of this discourse is relatively recent,
its saturation in publications and conversations with education systems,
professionals, parents, and students themselves is quite remarkable. It
forms a potent first step in the proliferation of claims about boys hav-
ing special needs and as having ‘missed out’ on what is seen as a finite
supply of educational treatments. We propose a different story about the
situation.
Significant changes in the labor force across the English-speaking
world have led to the increasing adoption of technical solutions in indus-
try bringing about the demise of many low-skilled manual jobs that were
traditionally taken up by boys who left school before completion. With
more boys staying on at school (in some places this is a legal requirement
to obtain welfare support), many senior schools have adopted a broader
curriculum to assist in the effort to capture the interests of boys who
have been identified and/or who see themselves as non-academic. But the
problems for some boys can start much earlier in their school careers and
are often connected to disadvantaged background. The statistics on low
SES boys at school reveal that they are less likely to do well in the increas-
ing rounds of standardized assessment, more likely to be referred for bad
behavior, and more likely to require extra help with basic elements of
literacy and number. These problems have led to the setting up of a new
round of gender wars in terms of the claim that there has been a good deal
of attention to girls’ education and because of this boys have missed out.
Thus the argument is put on equity grounds presuming a finite amount of
educational attention to be diverted in a binary either/or focus.
Much has been written about the reductive simplicity of this argument
and the lack of comparability in its development. Too often, the initial
presentations of girls as ‘missing out’ in education had been presented in
a similar way—girls did not get what boys got. Hence, it is perhaps not
surprising that the pro-boys lobby adopted a similar stance despite not
having the same basis in accumulated research and data to sustain its posi-
tion. Notwithstanding, the message of education’s neglect of boys was
greeted with immediate sympathy by parents, teachers, school systems,
and the boys themselves rather than suspicion—the latter being often the
case with claims made on behalf of girls.
84 J. GILL ET AL.
Since mid 1995, the idea of a ‘boy crisis’ has been taken up across the
education spectrum in English-speaking countries by teachers, school lead-
ers, administrators, government departments, and parents. Governments
set up multiple enquiries into the education of boys in schools. The
Australian government provided prizes and much publicity for school-
ing practices associated with producing successful outcomes for boys.
Some educationists promoted the idea that schools had become overly
feminized and that a return to an innate masculinity is the only way ahead
for boys’ learning (Gill and Starr 2000). The many problems with this
argument have been dealt with thoroughly in academic publications and
press articles. However, the feeling on the ground—in schools, teacher
assemblies, parents, administrators, and the boys themselves—continues
to reflect the notion that the boys’ situation is a particularly glaring fault
of a system that has supposedly achieved optimal education for girls.
We see the argument about boys’ education as about social class rather
than gender. First, there is broad agreement that not all boys miss out on
educational opportunities—middle-class boys continue to be represented
among the high achievers. It is the situation of disadvantaged boys that is
of particular concern. In a time of high youth unemployment, many low
SES boys see traditional schooling as irrelevant but there are few other
pathways into any sort of job security. Rather than talk about ‘the boys’
as vulnerable in an educational environment allegedly increasingly geared
to girls’ needs, we see the plight of low SES boys as a requiring specific
attention but not at the expense of girls’ education.
TEACHING CULTURE RESPONDING TO NEEDY BOYS

The argument presented about it being the ‘boys’ turn’ in education has not
been developed in the same way as those earlier demonstrations of girls receiv-
ing much less educational experience than boys. However, the general senti-
ment about boys’ missing out has been picked up by schools and teachers. A
recent study of schooling in working-class neighborhoods revealed the wide-
spread concern from the teachers about the boys’ problems (Gill and Tranter
2013). In the classroom, teachers spent enormous amounts of time and energy
in their efforts to appeal to the boys and to engage them in learning, while the
girls were almost completely overlooked. By and large the teachers identified
the girls as good students—as indeed some were—but many others were not.
Another issue became evident in this study, especially among teachers.
This is a refusal to acknowledge gender difference at all. Most striking
was the fact that teachers were disinclined to notice which girls and which
boys were being rewarded or castigated because any sort of gender distinc-
tion was dismissed as sexist. The analysis suggested a new form of sexism
within which participants refused to recognize gender different treatments
or outcomes as the very suggestion was dismissed as accusatory.
In this example it seems that elements of an equity discourse which
requires all categories to be equal can overshadow any acknowledgment
of gender differences, with its implication that things are ‘not fair’—and
so gender is denied. In early days of the girls in education movement,
school policies were directed at compiling a gender audit of schooling
outcomes, attendance, achievements, positions in the school, and student
involvement. Currently, any gender disproportion in schooling treatments
is seen as a form of sexism. In today’s neoliberal world, individual agency
is the preferred explanation as both the principal and numbers of students
echoed—‘it all depends on the individual’. However, this practice renders
inequality invisible and thus it becomes no one’s responsibility.
Meanwhile, girls from disadvantaged backgrounds are quietly tuning
out of school. Many students registered their schools did not offer the
same sort of education as that provided for their cousins in middle-class
suburbs but the girls in particular expressed a feeling that they had been
abandoned by the education authorities. The situation of girls in disad-
vantaged schools deserves attention rather than being buried within the
general sympathy for boys.
The overwhelming atmosphere of the schools as experienced by the

girls entailed a pervasive depression about the future, an absence of
hope, as in:
Candy (yr 12): A lot of the good teachers have left because a lot
come here from other schools which they say are better … They’ll
tell us what’s wrong with us, our attitude and everything … And if
another contract comes up they take it because they feel like they’re
not achieving anything here either!
Crystal (yr 12) At this school you can’t really, from the subjects
we’ve got to choose from, you cannot get a high score!
Kylie (yr 12) I wanna get away from this kind of lifestyle. My par-
ents are on the dole. We’re poor, we’re poor. I hate it! They have
no ambition, they’re going nowhere! They’d stay here forever and I
don’t want to be like them. (Gill and Tranter 2013)
86 J. GILL ET AL.
Perhaps not surprisingly, concerns about gender equity and inequity

appear to have stumbled into an ideological battleground. Educators have
embraced the idea of inclusivity, fairness, and social justice as features
indicative of a proper professional stance. However, given the negativ-
ity associated with ‘sexism’—these days commonly registered as identify-
ing any difference between male and females—it seems that teachers and
school leaders are very reluctant to register anything that might suggest
either sex is advantaged or disadvantaged in educational treatment. In
disadvantaged schools, students of either sex may have particular needs
that are being underplayed or ignored. And so real progress on issues of
gender equity can be stymied. The point here is that in the aftermath of a
good deal of work in schools to overcome sexist practices, current times
pose new problems for schooling with respect to gender.
SO HOW FAR HAVE WE COME?

In this chapter, we have traced the movement for girls in education from
its origins in the research begun in the 1970s which revealed girls as typi-
cally missing out in educational treatments and outcomes. The recency of
gender inclusion across educational institutions is almost as surprising as
the length of the period when it was overlooked. Writing in June 2015 one
Cambridge student, a current senior, describes her college’s triumphal cel-
ebration of its decision to include women as students in the following way:
But as little as 30 years ago, this [inclusion of women] wasn’t the case.
Because 30 years ago, women were not admitted to the college. (The deci-
sion for inclusion) … will rewrite the history of this prestigious and well-
respected institution. (Chorley, The Telegraph (UK), June 30, 2015)
In a relatively short time, girls as a group have moved from being mar-
ginalized in senior school to being the numerically dominant group in
terms of school completion and access to higher education. In 1970, there
were 269 male university students per 100 female university students in
Australia. However, females overtook males in 1987 and now there are
80 males for every 100 females (Parr 2015). While female tertiary enroll-
ments are strongest in traditional fields such as nursing and teaching, nei-
ther of which was offered a university course before the late twentieth
century, they are also enrolling in the traditionally male-dominant fields
of law and medicine where they now occupy around 50% of enrollments.
However, certain areas remain overwhelmingly masculine in terms of

enrollments, among which are engineering, construction, and informa-
tion technology across most English-speaking countries, although less so
in Eastern Europe, South America, and Asia (Mills et al. 2010). Despite
considerable efforts by engineering faculties to attract more women stu-
dents, their numbers have remained well under 15% for the past 10 years,
suggesting that high school students’ perceptions of gender appropri-
ate professions still dominate at least some of their post-school study
choices. The situation calls for more research into the ways in which high
school girls envision possible futures and understand the range of possible
choices.
The movement for girls in education begun in the 1970s succeeded
in working to end much of the overt educational discrimination typi-
cally experienced by schoolgirls across the English-speaking world. Many
girls today are in a much better position to access higher education than
were previous generations. However, there remain several issues for
consideration.
First, the educational gains are linked to class, with middle-class girls
much more likely to benefit from high-quality educational experiences
than girls from low SES backgrounds. Given the importance of factors
beyond schooling in girls’ education such as parental educational back-
ground and preparedness to support girls’ education, these outcomes are
not surprising.
Second, teacher education courses need to continue to address gen-
der issues as an important part of their programs for all students so that
as teachers they continue to be alert to gender equity and to the ways
in which gender intersects with other sociocultural dimensions in their
schools and classrooms.
Third, there is a need for ongoing research into girls’ education in a
general effort to establish the best practice in all schools. The discussion
now turns to a brief overview of some current studies of girls’ education
to provide some ideas about research in the future.
RECENT STUDIES OF GIRLS’ EDUCATION

In recent times, research into girls’ education has tended to move away
from large-scale studies of gender differences seen in statistical surveys
to smaller studies focusing on the ways in which schoolgirls negotiate
life at school. Often this research addresses issues of particular interest to
88 J. GILL ET AL.
the researcher. Such studies seek to explore what is happening to girls in

school so that educators can develop a better understanding of the ways in
which current constructions of gender impact on girls’ motivation, expe-
rience of school, and learning. The following studies report on particu-
lar groups of girls and provide analyses of their understanding of gender,
identity, family, and connection within schooling settings.
Zannettino’s study of the ways in which teenage girls responded to
literary and filmic texts showed the girls attempting to project themselves
into futures that were hard to imagine but which were always envisaged as
different from that of their parents (Zannettino 2008). These girls were
aware of the pressure to have a career and to become individualized achiev-
ers in tune with the neoliberal turn in current governmental prescriptions.
They anticipated being able to lead a life that involved paid work and
hoped for a professional career. At the same time, the girls spoke openly
about their admiration for and attachment to their mothers whom they
saw as having struggled from backgrounds variously impacted by pov-
erty, migration, and language difficulties. They embraced the importance
of connection, family, and particularly mothers and sought to reproduce
that connectedness in their future scenarios. As well as having rewarding
jobs, they all imagined for themselves a future as mothers with children
although their notions of husbands and fathers were much less clearly
developed. Zannettino’s analysis deploys psychoanalytic theory to account
for the ways in which the girls’ imagined futures reflected gendered ideas
of adult womanhood at the same time as they envisaged independent pro-
fessional careers for themselves.
Another Australian study (Matthews 2002) looked at the ways in
which a group of Australian-Asian girls were able to use their ethnic
identity and amplify it as a badge of connection to one another, thereby
affording themselves a degree of distance and shelter from the wider
school groupings in their government coeducational high school. The
girls as a group happily embraced the image of Asian, nerdy, good stu-
dent which allowed them to pursue their studies in a school whose
broader working-class culture was largely anti-academic, at the same
time as they shared some features of the non-Asian girl culture within
the school. From this research, Matthews argues that schooling pro-
cesses are racialized and sexualized along with the more usual analytic
tropes of class and culture.
Both studies featured girls who saw themselves as the beneficiaries
of an education that sought to empower them academically as well as
in terms of potential life choices. The material conditions of existence in

their working-class neighborhoods and schools had impacted on the girls’
attitudes to future possibilities as they looked hopefully and cautiously to
the future.
A third study (Wrench 2012) investigated one particular subject area,
physical education (PE), in order to explore girls’ experience in the light
of student teacher attitudes and practices. This study concluded that the
area of PE was ‘awash’ with practices and understandings that reinforce
a white Anglo-Saxon male norm and hence it is important for students
and their teachers to be alert to the ways in which gender codes are being
negotiated within the practice of PE in schools. The study shows the ways
in which physical aspects of girls’ learning, their relationships to their own
bodies and those of others, can be calibrated in terms of a scale of accept-
able femininity derived from popular culture along with the school-based
learning oriented around skill and strength.
In all three of the studies cited above, the focus is on either a par-
ticular group of girls or a particular subject area. In each case, the rich
data sourced from observations and interviews was analyzed to reveal the
complexity of the task for girls to create a space within which they felt
comfortable to negotiate the conflicting pressures of their life worlds. The
examples above were deliberately chosen as each produced a picture of
senior schoolgirls attempting to imagine a way ahead beyond issues to do
with schooling, their particular backgrounds, and the wider culture. This
work adds depth and complexity to the picture gained from surveys and
head counts about the comparisons between girls and boys which was so
invaluable in fuelling the initial stages of research into girls’ education.
The current research orientation is much less focused on a comparison
between male and female school experience and more in terms of finding
out the meaning of life in schools for girls in current times.
In the following chapters, we introduce two in-depth detailed studies
of girls at school in which the aim was to discover the ways in which the
girls saw themselves in their immediate present, what they saw as issues
of importance, how the schooling process was helping them, and where
they encountered problems. As will be evident in what follows, we do not
present final conclusions about any particular event, but rather we offer
an invitation for reanalyses in the light of the current cultural theories pre-
sented in the earlier chapters. Our hope is that the reader will engage with
us in the analysis and thereby gain a more nuanced understanding of the
position of girls at school in current times.
90 J. GILL ET AL.
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CHAPTER 4
The Balancing Act
Women are supposed to be feminine and attractive and to be able to keep

men happy on the one hand, and on the other we’re told that we should be
strong … career women, and we should strive to get what we want. (Alex
12H)
INTRODUCTION
In earlier chapters, we have observed that girls today continue to con-
front contradictions in the messages they receive about how to be in the
world. At one level girls, especially middle-class girls, are primed to be
individual achievers while at the same time they face and are shaped by a
continual array of messages about acceptable femininity. Following sig-
nificant changes in the way in which schools educate girls we have noted
that more girls than boys are now successful in key indicators such as uni-
versity entrance and graduation. Research consistently notes the degree
to which girls value interpersonal relationships highly and spend much
time on them (Hey 1997; Renold and Allan 2007). In this chapter, we
describe the ways in which girls seek to balance the conflicting messages
they receive.
Consequently, we look more closely at how girls actively work on
themselves to become the kind of young women they think society wants
them to be—especially in terms of how they negotiate gender. We have
hinted earlier that this might involve some paradoxes signaled in the above

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52487-4_4
96 J. GILL ET AL.
quote. On the one hand, girls are encouraged and expected to do well in
school and to go on to post-school study and a career, and many embrace
these opportunities. They accept the challenges of neoliberalism and post-
modernity, with their focus on choice, agency, and individual success.
They take responsibility for choosing what they will do and be, even if
they have to remake these choices at a later time. They see themselves as
the agents of their own future. ‘It’s up to me’ is a repeated refrain.
At the same time, girls confront the realities of becoming young women
in a world still constructed around sexual difference and sexism. This
requires them to become aware of how they are seen from the outside,
and to factor in the gaze and evaluation of peers. Girls are bombarded by
sexualized images of teenage girls who combine thinness with a strident ‘in
your face’ sexuality—young girls who are using their agency and choice to
be active sexual agents even when this risks exploitation (Miller 2009). For
girls at school, while questions of body image and sexuality are central, so
too are challenges concerning how to operate in the world more generally.
Girls confront and must negotiate the inequalities that continue to under-
pin our society—the gender politics in their families, in their relationships
with male and female peers, in the workplace, and in the wider society.
These challenges sit at the intersection of the societal, the personal, and the
interpersonal and as such they comprise the focus of this chapter.
DOING GENDER
Central to these negotiations is the notion of gender. Earlier discussions
have looked at gender as a somewhat flexible label, a broader categoriza-
tion of individuals than had been available through the label of sex differ-
ences. Here we approach gender as it relates to behavior, a form of acting
and doing, not just a passive label. From this standpoint, gender can be
defined as a complex set of institutional, social, and individual practices
that are culturally reinforced, if not overdetermined, not necessarily con-
scious, and frequently contested. Connell (2011) argues that this view sees
gender as relational:
Relational theory usually understands gender as multidimensional: embrac-

ing at the same time economic relations, power relations, affective relations
and symbolic relations; and operating simultaneously at intrapersonal, inter-
personal, institutional and society-wide levels. (p. 3)
THE BALANCING ACT 97
It has been argued that gender is usefully conceptualized as something

one does (West and Zimmerman 1991):
We contend that the ‘doing’ of gender is undertaken by women and men

whose competence as members of society is hostage to its production….
Rather than as a property of individuals, we conceive of gender as an emer-
gent feature of social situations: as both an outcome of and a rationale for
various social arrangements and as a means of legitimating one of the most
fundamental divisions of society. (pp. 13–14).
A focus on gender as doing is consistent with the notion of normaliza-

tion, as proposed by Foucault, in which certain ways of being are culturally
sanctioned as ‘normality’ and actively maintained by individuals through
self-surveillance and self-correction. As Chanaria (2010) observes:
Foucault notes that normalization is one of the great instruments of disci-

plinary power and that the power of normalization imposes homogeneity,
but it also provides the illusion of individualization. (p. 310)
A key issue in looking at the lives of girls and young women is that the
operation of gender effects is often hidden from view, so that they are
assumed to be naturally occurring features of individuals and the world,
rather than reflections of power relations (Walkerdine 1990).
If gender is something one does in different contexts, then presumably
some social situations and contexts are more gender relevant than others.
Such a view assumes if not multiple selves or identities (as expressed in
Chap. 2), then at least a level of flexibility and responsiveness in individuals
depending on context.
THE PRESENT STUDY

The research that forms the basis of this chapter was completed as an
unpublished doctoral dissertation at the University of Sydney (Esson
2001) and derives from interviews with girls undertaken for that study. On
our examination of similar research on girls, women, and gender since this
time, we would argue that the multiple societal expectations of girls are
very similar to those experienced by girls in the original study (McRobbie
2007; Clark 2009; Read 2011). As McRobbie claims:
98 J. GILL ET AL.
The production of girlhood now comprises a constant stream of incitements

and enticements to engage in a range of specified practices which are under-
stood to be both progressive but also consummately and reassuringly femi-
nine. (p. 721)
A key argument of this book is that in recent times in mainstream

research on gender and education, a focus on issues affecting girls has
been to some degree displaced by a concern about boys, on the assump-
tion that girls are basically doing well in a post-feminist world—a claim
which is belied by data on the amount of self-injury and distress which
if anything, are on the increase among young girls (Hilt et al. 2008). A
recent study in Sydney, Australia, found that the most academically gifted
girls experienced the most stress in the senior secondary examination, the
Higher School Certificate, putting immense pressure on themselves to
succeed (Smith 2015).
We are not suggesting that there are any fundamental ‘truths’ about ado-
lescent girls. Nor do we deny the important contextual changes through
which technology has revolutionized girls’ communications. Social media
has become the mechanism through which girls bully and police ‘in’ and
‘out’ groups, often with devastating effects. Some girls have always thrived
in adolescence, balancing its various demands with ease and retaining a
strong voice and sense of self. Ironically, however, while the opportunities
for girls and young women have expanded and are currently presenting
an ever wider range of possibilities, the processes through which girls are
produced as gendered continue to impact on their lives in familiar ways.
The present study used a longitudinal case study design, involving mul-
tiple one-to-one in depth interviews with 40 randomly selected adoles-
cent girls. The interviews were based broadly on the work of the Harvard
Project on Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development, which studied
girls at several different schools in the USA (Gilligan et al. 1990; Brown
and Gilligan 1992). Each girl was interviewed three times over three years,
enabling a mapping of changes in perspective as they progressed through
adolescence. The researcher listened carefully as these girls described their
relationships and behavior with friends, family, boyfriends, and teachers,
as well as their expectations of themselves and the future, to explore the
different processes through which girls accommodate to and resist gender
expectations.
The girls whose voices and experience inform this chapter attended
two single-sex schools in Sydney, Australia. They are for the most part the
older girls in the study, girls who were first interviewed when they were in
years 9 or 11 (aged 14/15 or 16/17), and interviewed twice more over
the following two years.
TWO SCHOOLS: SIMILAR BUT DIFFERENT

The schools chosen for this study were both in the same part of the city of
Sydney. Hampden School for Girls (a pseudonym) was a fee-paying private
school for largely middle-class girls, set in lush grounds, where a sense of
order prevailed. There was an expectation that girls would behave in a
civilized manner. Enforced adherence to a uniform code ensured homo-
geneity in the ways girls looked, with a small number from non-Anglo-
European backgrounds. The school newsletter included articles from girls
on exchange overseas and photographs of sports teams, members in care-
fully matched outfits. The interviews took place in an office far away from
the main school.
Kildare Girls’ High School (a pseudonym) was a public girls’ high
school serving a diverse community, socioeconomically and ethnically,
largely lower middle and working class. Set behind a wire fence with
bitumen grounds, the school exuded a feeling of warmth and energy, a
sense of urgency—a crisis never far away. The school uniform was worn
with varying degrees of flair, sometimes with the addition of the veil. The
school newsletter pointed to some realities for girls at the school, includ-
ing poems about the loss of a student’s baby to cot death. Sex was talked
of openly, and former students visited with their babies. The interviews
took place in a small office near the administrative heart of the school;
parents waiting to be interviewed as a result of their daughter’s truancy or
misbehavior were a common sight.
Despite being only a few kilometers apart, the schools were very differ-
ent. However, both were committed to giving the girls every opportunity
to achieve to the best of their abilities and to broaden their aspirations. Girls
at both schools affirmed that their schools encouraged success, encour-
aged girls to do their best, and reinforced independence and responsibility.
Both schools emphasized the importance of wearing the school uniform.
However, in an important difference, the Hampden girls in the early years
of secondary school were more likely to mention other expectations as
well, such as ‘appropriate’ behavior and being ‘nice’.
We noted earlier that single-sex schools do not offer a ‘superior’ educa-
tion, at least in terms of academic success, but they are often linked with
100 J. GILL ET AL.
parental support for girls’ education. It has also been argued that girls’
schools are important sites in which to study gender practices because by
their very existence they affirm gender as central to everyday life (Chanaria
2010). Some aspects of gender can be writ large in single-sex schools,
for example, boys can become exotic due to their absence from the daily
scene. Other elements may be avoided or suppressed.
We focus on two interconnected aspects of the gendered disciplining
of adolescent girls to illustrate some of the issues girls confront as they
navigate adolescence. The first concerns girls and their bodies; the second,
their sense of themselves and their relationships with others. In these two
respects, how girls are seen by others and how they see themselves are
inextricably linked with their induction into what has been called ‘norma-
tive femininity’. This refers to the normally accepted ways of ‘being girl’ in
their environment. As Harris (2004) says, ‘Schools have always been the
sites for the production of normative femininity and “appropriate” young
women’ (p. 98).
In the findings presented below, all girls’ names are pseudonyms. After
each quote, the speaker is identified by a number referring to the year of
schooling (or in the case of 13, to the first year post-school), and a letter
identifying which school, with H referring to Hampden and K to Kildare.
GIRLS AND THEIR BODIES

The changes girls experience in their bodies at adolescence are dra-
matic. From being carefree, unisex children, girls grow breasts, bleed
each month, and gain fat in new places. This is not without excitement,
although it also brings new things to deal with. Kelly (8K) tells of getting
her first period, ‘I screamed. You could hear my echo through the school!
I couldn’t believe it … I was nearly crying.’ Taila (8K) describes having
her period in strongly embodied terms: ‘I hate it … it feels uncomfortable,
especially when it’s hot.’ Megan (8H) bemoans her ‘fat’ thighs. She says
she ‘knows’ that women are ‘meant to have fat on our thighs and bum…
I think they’re normal, but I don’t like them’ (laughs).
These changes are met with acceptance if not pride—they indicate girls
growing into women, and they enable girls to dress in sexy ways and to
play at being grown up. They also usher in a new body consciousness for
many girls and may bring a feeling of lack of control.
DIFFERENT WAYS OF BEING IN ONE’S BODY

Adolescent schoolgirls typically display many ways of being in their bod-
ies, some of which teachers try to restrain, like running in corridors. In
informal observations in this study many girls seem uninhibited and ‘at
one’ with their bodies, whooping and laughing uncontrollably, express-
ing irritation and anger, eating unselfconsciously, and having fun, as well
as experiencing hurt, pain, and rage. At these times, girls do not censor
or judge their desires and bodily responses—they scream and dance and
laugh and cry. Their healthy spontaneity and exuberance, implies a strong
level of bodily self-acceptance.
On other occasions, girls’ bodies become instruments for achieving par-
ticular outcomes. Many girls train their bodies to perform competently in
different ways, from riding a bike to playing netball, to swimming or mak-
ing jewelry, to playing a musical instrument or to being physically fit. Such
activities enable girls to experience their bodies as competent, as having
high utility, and possibly strong and powerful. Girls in this study who con-
tinue with sport are more likely to indicate general self-acceptance, to say
that they like their bodies, to describe themselves as happy, fun and easy-
going, and to say that they are different from others and don’t care what
other people think. Clark (2009) argues that although the opportunities
are limited, ‘girls can use sport to resist gendered expectations, countering
negative bodily image by placing emphasis on their embodied experience
rather than aesthetic appearance’ (p. 613).
In another orientation, the girls regard their bodies as if from the out-
side, as more of a project—something to be concerned about, worked on,
and appraised. Many commentators argue that girls’ bodies are key sites
of contradiction in adolescence (Bordo 1993; Miller 2009). The ways in
which the female body is represented in the media, through airbrushed
images of celebrities and hyper-thin models, creates challenges for many
girls. This is the case even though most girls know that what is being
presented is unrealistic. Concerns about their bodies are normalized in
the girls’ life experiences suggesting that such ideas have become struc-
tured into the habitus of being girl in the present time. Girls are more
or less expected to be concerned about their body shape, whereby they
become co-opted into the idea of personal responsibility and perfectibility
(McRobbie 2007). Such ideas are taken up unproblematically in ordinary
conversations, even though they are also connected with issues of well-
being and serious health problems such as anorexia.
102 J. GILL ET AL.
THE ‘NOT QUITE GOOD ENOUGH’ BODY
If you could, is there anything you’d change about yourself?

Um yeah … like my weight … take it down to about a size five probably
Size five!
Well, not really a size five. About a size ten, yeah (Laura, 9K)
How do you basically feel about your body?
Um, well, I don’t like it, obviously… (Vanessa 11H)
(Note: A size five in Australia is a size one in the USA and a size five in
the UK. The average dress size for Australian women is a size 14.)
Leah (10H) explains that ‘no-one’s like satisfied ‘cause no-one’s per-
fect, so no-one is satisfied with the way they look.’ Alex (11H), a year
older, is almost embarrassed at her feelings about her body:
I would like, I know this sounds silly to think that, but I still—you can’t help
wondering sometimes, thinking, ‘if I lost that’, or you know, ‘if I could look
like that model’, or whatever.
Even though both girls know that ‘no-one’s perfect’ it affects how they
feel about themselves. The ubiquity of images of thinness can confuse girls
about what constitutes a ‘normal’ female body. Kara (11K), a beautiful
Eurasian girl, is convinced she’s fat, despite having lost weight and look-
ing slim:
…if I know that I’m fat, then that would be on my mind … no matter who
says, ‘Oh no, you’re not fat’, I could always know, I always know that I am.
For many girls, despite most having a ‘normal’ body shape and size,
the image of the tall, thin, ‘perfect’ beauty operates as a compelling ideal,
challenging self- and body-acceptance.
Girls’ struggles with their weight and size are not just a response to
media images. Some girls are actively encouraged by friends and family
to work on themselves to achieve a ‘better’ size and shape. Peers ridi-
cule overweight girls. Kara (11K) describes in devastating terms her image
of fat girls, equating being overweight with being ‘scraggy and dirty’.
A pretty (and by implication thin) girl, by comparison, ‘looks neat and

clean’.
At Hampden, the ‘cool’ group attacks other girls by telling them
‘you’re fat’, whether they are or not. One-year group at Hampden has
an obsession with their thighs; in another group, girls are obsessed with
counting ‘stomach rolls’. This is something one girl says they ‘don’t take
…, seriously’, although they do ‘sort of’. Writing in 2015, we note that
body parts attracting concern now include female genitalia—labia and
pubic hair—due in part to the prominence and accessibility of internet
porn (Lofgren-Martenson and Mansson 2010).
Feeding the body presents a moral dilemma for some girls, associated
with discomfort and guilt. Marion (11K) laments the fact that ‘sometimes
I sit there eating chocolate and I think, “I shouldn’t be eating this” but
then I eat it anyway’. Sally (10K) most worries about:
What I look like when I’m going out and if I’m going to be with boys … I
never eat in front of boys because I get embarrassed (laughs).
Sally actually does eat in front of boys, but says that if she’s with boys,
even if she’s really hungry she’ll eat a McDonald’s cheeseburger, rather
than the quarter pounder she’d have with her family. ‘I won’t eat as big or
as much of things.’ Sally is not sure why eating is problematic with boys:
Oh—I don’t know, I think it’s—I don’t think they’d really care. I think it’s
just me thinking that, you know, they’re going to say, ‘Oh God, look at that
pig!’ or something.
Sally presents eating as a situated social performance, in which at times

she privileges other people’s views and how they might respond, aligning
herself with a critical voice that sees girls’ enthusiastic eating as excessive
(‘Oh God, look at that pig!’). What is required in this behavior—at one
level—is a move from knowing one’s body-self in terms of its physicality
and needs as felt from the ‘inside’, to focusing on how it appears from
‘outside’.
One in four girls reports being teased and/or actively encouraged to
diet in order to lose weight by family members—mothers, older brothers,
fathers and occasionally, sisters. In reinforcing distorted cultural images
of appropriate female body size, critical comments from family members
104 J. GILL ET AL.
personalize and individualize girls’ concerns about their body image, leav-
ing them unsupported.
MY BODY/MYSELF
Is there anything you would change about yourself?

My whole body! (laughs) … I’d make my legs skinnier—I’d make my whole
SELF skinnier. (Megan, 6H)
Unattainable beauty ideals can contribute powerfully to a nagging

sense of inadequacy and dissatisfaction that many girls feel about their
bodies and themselves, to confusions about who ‘I’ am and whether or
not I/my body are acceptable (Bartky 1992; Miller 2009).
Simone’s (11H) father has convinced his tall, slim daughter that ‘I’ve
got to exercise’ and ‘I’m getting fat’, making her scared of becoming ‘very
big’, like some of her aunts. She says she ‘had a nice big bawl and cried
my eyes out—I felt really down’, after trying on clothes she couldn’t fit
into. Two years later, the impact of girls’ concerns about appearance on
self-confidence is evident when Simone responds to a question asking how
she would describe a typical or average girl of her age:
I guess they’d be worried about their body and their weight, um and gen-
erally their appearance. Um, and what people of the opposite sex think of
them. You know, they’d be struggling with confidence, you know, how they
feel about themselves.
When Ellen (8H), who is tall and attractive enough to have considered
becoming a model, is stood up by a boy, she says:
I was really, really upset, and I was thinking ‘oh god, he mustn’t like me,
I must be so horrible’. I felt really bad about myself and how horrible I
looked—one of those days when you look in the mirror and go, ‘Oh yuk,
look at that, that figure in front of you’.
Here, Ellen slides effortlessly between looking horrible and being hor-
rible, and feels alienated from her body—‘that figure in front of you’. And
it’s not clear if she realizes what she is saying.
These examples suggest how ‘the gaze’—being the focus of others’

attention—is a keenly felt aspect of the girls’ self-consciousness and func-
tions as a control on how they see themselves. The links between my
‘body’, my ‘self’, and my ‘worth’ are strong. In focusing—at least some
of the time—on how they look, girls can become disconnected from
grounded lived experience based on reality. Many girls who look good feel
bad about their bodies, willingly itemizing shortcomings.
On the other hand, looking good strengthens girls’ self-confidence.
Miranda (10H) says that dieting and going to the gym help make girls
‘feel that, you know, they’re sort of, they’re worth something’. Beth (7H)
who thinks she ‘could be a bit skinnier’, says proudly ‘I’m working on
it, you know, doing exercises and all that’. These girls seem to align—at
least some of the time—with a discourse suggesting that a woman’s size
or appearance are indicators of her moral worth. This places bodily self-
improvement at the center of some girls’ ongoing self-project. In doing
so it confirms that the body can be a site of choice and power, consistent
with the neoliberal discourse of responsibility—your choice, your power.
CREATING AN IMAGE
Some of girls’ consciousness and energy is taken up with how to man-
age food intake and limit their body size. Some also, particularly younger
girls, focus attention on creating an acceptable physical appearance. While
the specifics vary, creating an image involves not just looking ‘right’ but
not standing out or being too different (in image) from one’s particular
sub-cultural group. The importance of creating an image is evident in the
amount of time many adolescent girls devote to reading, texting, talking
about and ‘doing’ their dress, and grooming. This is both fun and laced
with anxiety.
Girls in the middle-class school seem more affected. Zoe (9H) some-
times feels that her sister’s clothes are ‘gross’ and ‘really bad’, but hesitates
to tell her, for fear of making her think ‘oh goodness, I’m ugly.’ Sacha
(8H) says that normal or typical girls of her age are both ‘trying harder
[academically] at school’ and ‘feel deeply about what they’re looking
like, and how they dress’, each wondering whether her ‘other friends are
gonna like what they’re wearing, or whether boys are going to like her’.
Here, feeling ‘deeply’ relates to the judgment of others—friends judge her
clothes, while boys are assumed to judge her, in another link between my
appearance and myself.
106 J. GILL ET AL.
The regulatory practices engaged in by the ‘cool’ group affect some

more than others. Leah (9H) says it’s important to ‘wear the right clothes’
because otherwise ‘girls are criticized’. A year later, she draws attention to
a likely sex difference involved here:
girls’ll get all dressed up for something and guys’ll just turn up—Girls’ll
spend hours like getting ready, and they’d just turn up any old way.
Several middle-class girls incorporate appearance into their overall life

project. Natalie (13H) wants to be successful in business and believes that
dress and grooming are essential to success. She says that if ‘you’re dressed
well and present yourself well … obviously people are going to take you
seriously’. Some middle-class mothers actively encourage girls to dress
well—by not wearing ‘tatty’ clothes and by ‘getting dressed up’, suggest-
ing image making involves class as well as gender.
PROTECTING ONE’S REPUTATION

‘Doing gender’ also involves monitoring one’s behavior so as not to
detract from one’s reputation as a girl. Cynthia (11H), like many girls
in the study, believes in equal rights for women (although not necessar-
ily in feminism, which is often rejected or viewed with suspicion) and is
very successful academically. And yet she surprises herself in talking about
female behavior in front of boys, when she notes that burping is:
fine around girls, but I don’t know, for some reason around guys it shouldn’t
be like that. I don’t know why I’m saying this! This is totally what I’ve
always thought I’m against [a sex difference in what behavior is okay].’
In what sounds like the old double standard, her classmate Caro (12H)
explains some of the rules around sex. A girl can become known as a ‘real
slut’ if she ‘gives in every time’ and as a ‘tease’ if she ‘never gives it to them’.
Caro feels sorry for ‘love-blind’ girls who fall in love and get ‘fooled by the
other person and then they’ll give in to them’, only to be dumped when
the boys have ‘got what they want’. Where sexual reputation is involved,
girls from both schools receive clear maternal advice. Laura’s (9K) mother
has said, ‘don’t wear too revealing clothes’ and ‘don’t lead a guy on—guys
only want one thing’. Kelly’s (8K) mother tells her ‘how not to get into
trouble.’
And yet girls also resist these pressures, especially some of the Kildare
girls. Juliet (12K) notes that ‘society puts different labels on males and
females in relation to sex’ but her motto is ‘do no harm’. Rose (12K)
acknowledges that a reputation can come from ‘looking like a slut’, but
claims that this would not affect what she wore, ‘even if people said it,
because I don’t care what other people think’. Some girls draw on a dis-
course of individualism to make up their own minds about how they live
and how they look. Laura (10K) says ‘you should act yourself—don’t
accept media images of slim, sexy and beautiful’.
REFLECTIONS ON GIRLS AND THEIR BODIES

In this study, 85% of girls at some stage express dissatisfaction with the
way their bodies look, with almost all concerned about weight and size.
During annual interviews, only five girls are consistently comfortable with
their bodies and relatively unaffected by creating an image; more than half
accommodate to societal pressures with low or moderate levels of discom-
fort; and one in four tell stories suggesting significant pain, confusion, and
self-castigation. The group includes several girls with eating disorders.
Keeping girls physically active has been proposed as a potential therapy
by educators. In one large UK research study on girls and sport, girls said
they felt their bodies were ‘on show’ when they play sport and among
the reasons girls gave up sport was that they didn’t want to look sweaty
or to ruin their make-up (Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation 2012).
Forty-five percent also believed sport was too competitive. But the girls
wanted to remain physically active. A key challenge, the study argued, is
to find physical activities that girls like to do and for teachers and schools
to be supportive of girls in sport.
While monitoring the body and working to create a particular image
can affect girls of all ages, as girls get older, inevitably they accommodate
to cultural expectations about female bodies. They internalize the belief
that not only are they individually responsible for their bodies and how
they feel about them but that if they exercise choice—to eat well, or diet,
or dress in a certain way, or work out in the gym—they can increase their
self-esteem. In this process of accepting personal responsibility for their
appearance, girls’ awareness of cultural conditioning and tropes about
women and the importance of how they look, become submerged or
taken for granted as the ‘way things are’.
108 J. GILL ET AL.
Roisin Kiberd (2015) notes the impact of social media as expressed in

‘My Daily Routine’ YouTube videos, in which ‘perfect’ girls and young
women display their morning bodily routine, including make-up and exer-
cise. There is a strong element of performativity in this. In an interview
with Emer O’Toole, the author of Girls will be Girls (2015), O’Toole
likens the camera to a panopticon and is quoted as saying:
There is something quite Foucauldian in the fact that now, instead of maga-
zines, adverts, and TV shows created by corporate interests pushing the
beauty myth, girls and young women are pushing it on each other … For
me, these self-recorded performances of femininity represent girls on their
best behavior, performing the gendered ideals they have internalized, per-
forming the kind of beautiful, orderly, domesticated femininity our society
so values.
GIRLS’ SENSE OF SELF AND RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHERS

In adolescence, girls sometimes tune in to and privilege the views of others
and/or media images while at other times they contest those images. Here
we explore changes that encompass aspects of lived experience, including
emotions, ideas and self-expression, changes that affect girls’ orientation
to other people and to the world.
Ways of Being in the World

The importance of ‘connected’ relationships for girls and women—ones
in which there is strong mutual understanding and respect—have been
frequently noted (Hey 1997; Libbert 2015). Nearly all girls in this study
describe relationships with close friends that are open, trusting, and
mutually supportive, including confiding secrets and sharing problems.
Sometimes relationships are fraught, when girls are subject to ‘in’ groups
and ‘out’ groups and forms of bullying. Older girls present boyfriends as
offering close, open relationship. Two-thirds of the girls describe a close
relationship with their mothers, even when these also involve conflict and
resentment. In disputes with mothers, girls usually express the view that
they are listened to, even if at times their desires are overridden (e.g. when
they are forbidden to go out). Close relationships with fathers tend to
be described more in terms of doing things together or sharing common

interests, although some also include close communication.
In talking to girls, it is clear that in contexts where girls feel safe—with
close girlfriends, some boyfriends, most mothers, and some fathers—girls
experience and express the full range of thoughts and feelings, at least
some of the time. This includes showing positive emotions and pleasure,
behaving spontaneously and being fun-loving and carefree. In these con-
texts, girls can say what they think and feel without considering the con-
sequences. Most girls at times are also angry, sad, hurt, or resentful, and
tell of fights and disagreements, reflecting their experience and expression
of negative emotions. On all these occasions, girls appear to ‘own’ their
thoughts and feelings, and to be grounded in their lived experience.
At other times, girls appear strong and self-assertive and investing time
and energy to achieve goals. Many girls take pride in their accomplish-
ments and, when necessary, stand up against other girls, their families,
or teachers. Older girls frequently claim they are taking their schoolwork
more seriously, seeing the link with the world beyond school, and describe
themselves as becoming more independent and sure of their views.
Consistent with this, girls talk about working with friends, teachers, and
peers in task-oriented, functional ways to achieve shared outcomes. This
includes working constructively in groups through involvement in school
projects and taking leadership roles in the school. Of those who were
asked, most endorse competition, although several note that it can conflict
with being ‘nice’.
Sometimes girls monitor and seek to control their spontaneous and
assertive responses to the world in order to be seen as more ‘mature’.
Some take this upon themselves, others are encouraged to self-regulate
by family members, friends, and boyfriends. This self-regulation involves
watching themselves and deciding how to behave, and can include mod-
erating self-expression and self-assertion.
Sometimes girls’ self-regulation involves privileging the reactions and
needs of others over their own self-responsiveness. In relationships of
unequal power, girls learn to attend to the ‘other’ and to ‘manage’ their
interactions. This attentiveness can obscure what girls themselves actually
feel, and can distort their perception about who is in control, especially
in an age where everything is supposed to be ‘equal’. It can confuse girls
about when it’s okay to exert power and influence, and when it’s not.
The challenge for girls is to be connected and responsive to others while
110 J. GILL ET AL.
also recognizing and validating their own needs—to avoid a one-sided

accommodation.
Being a ‘Caring’ Person

Being closely connected to others is highly valued by most girls. Girls
take great pride in their ability to respond sensitively and caringly to other
people. In describing themselves, four out of five girls describe themselves
as accepting of others, good at listening to others, willing and able to help
others with problems, caring, able to cheer others up when they’re down,
and compassionate and giving. Nearly every girl is proud of her ability to
respond sensitively to others. Pia (8K) loves ‘helping people with their
problems’; Jill (12K) says ‘people can come and tell me things’. Gail (11K)
describes herself as:
very caring—I worry for everyone all the time—I’m full of love and friend-
ship … I’ve got the qualities to be a best friend with someone.
Schools are important in girls’ relationships in that they are the sites in
which girls play out their closeness and concern for others—whether the rela-
tionships are mutual or not. Through this, they learn key elements of being
‘good’ girls and women. Schools form the backdrop to girls’ obsessions with
best friends, with how they are seen by others, and with ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups.
While there is joy and sharing, private intimacies are sometimes betrayed,
and loyalty tested. Tiffs and serious fights among girls’ friendship groups
often involve deep and painful emotions and resentments that are keenly
felt and openly expressed. Stories from Hampden show elements of con-
nection and disconnection at work and the girls’ sense of the importance
of managing relationships well.
The History Lesson Disagreements with best friends inevitably occur.

Nicki (9H) describes a major disagreement with Pip, her best friend,
over a third girl whom Pip wants to eject from their friendship group.
Nicki is upset by this and decides to secretly give the girl a ‘heads
up’, saying she doesn’t agree with the decision but has been over-
ruled. The impact on Nicki’s friendship with Pip is dramatic: their
friendship is, in Nicki’s terms, ‘like being destroyed’. She describes a
history lesson that turns into an emotional drama:
we were in history and we just started crying … we were not work-

ing [out] well…because we were fight- … we weren’t actually fight-
ing … she didn’t want to sit next to me so I just moved.
But you were very upset –
Yeah—and then I went out of the room and when I came back she
wasn’t in the room, so I went looking for her, and I found her, and
she was crying with one of my other friends … in my group.
…
I just asked her why she was crying and … she didn’t want to tell
me … coz we were just sitting there and it was all quiet, then she
told me and um, I told her why I had been crying, and then we just
fixed it up—we just started laughing.
Despite being in history, Nicki and her friend focus exclusively
on sorting out their relationship, apparently without the teacher’s
knowledge or intervention.
Sometimes friends can be domineering and controlling and friendships

cease to be mutual and caring. Sacha (7H) tells a fraught story about her
relationship with Eliza. Sacha has worked her way into being ‘really close’
with Eliza, who is in the cool group: ‘We share secrets … I tell her every-
thing nearly.’ But Eliza exercises an almost abusive control over Sacha.
For example, when Eliza feels jealous or offended by something Sacha has
done, she excludes Sacha (‘she’ll just automatically stop talking to me’),
and also lies about her (‘she’ll just sort of go off and tell everyone else,
and everyone will hate me… she lies a lot’). ‘I try my hardest’, says Sacha,
reinforcing the unequal nature of the friendship. Eliza in her manipulation
of Sacha uses nearly all the tools in a girl’s hurtful armamentarium: exclu-
sion, the put down, the silent treatment, telling rumors, and humiliation.
But Sacha is caught in Eliza’s thrall, in which she must accommodate to
the unreasonable demands of someone she loves. There is no indication
that the teachers in Sacha’s school are aware of this drama; it isn’t part of
the formal curriculum.
In both these examples the care and detail with which girls observe and
live their interpersonal relationships stands out, especially compared to
studies of boys’ interactions (Pratt and George 2005).
For many adolescents there are changes in girls’ self-expression and
relationships which include learning to rein in their spontaneity and
responsiveness and to attend more closely to others. Here girls confront
112 J. GILL ET AL.
various elements of ‘normative’ femininity. While there are clear positives

in taking account of the needs and views of others, there are also times
when girls’ own felt responses take second place as their self-awareness
and self-expression conforms to more stereotypic forms of how girls are
supposed to be.
The Importance of Being ‘Nice’

Researchers have noted the critical role for many girls, especially middle-
class girls, of being—and being seen to be—nice (Brown and Chesney-
Lind 2005; Henderson 2014). Niceness is often deemed an essential
element of being liked, which is critical to many girls.
The discourse of niceness covers a multitude of meanings, which is part
of its power. These range from uncontroversial behavior like being friendly
and polite, to actions that are more ambiguous, such as not offending or
disagreeing with others and not showing negative feelings. Two-thirds of
the girls define niceness as not being mean and nasty to others, even when
they have been hurt or have good reason, though many admit that they
don’t always live up to this standard. ‘Meanness’ is easily confused with
anger. Zoe (9H) cannot say to her best friend ‘Oh, I’m really mad at you’,
because ‘I don’t like being mean to people—and hurting other people’.
Zoe struggles with how to be self-expressive and assertive with her friend,
equating feeling ‘mad’ with ‘being mean’.
Girls report various strategies for moderating negative feelings.
Sometimes they admit to strong emotions that look like anger, but reframe
them in ways that are less empowering. Ros (8H) most dislikes about her
personality:
…when I get in bad moods … when my brother comes into my room … at

6 a.m. and [makes a lot of noise] … and then I scream at him and then I get
in trouble for screaming at him.
Ros’s mother ‘expects me not to worry about it and ignore him—it’s

pretty hard to ignore a brother, though’. Here Ros calls her anger at her
brother’s intrusive interruptions ‘bad moods’, as if it’s somehow her fault.
Juliet (12K) tries not to get angry at all (‘I don’t get angry often’)
because:
You know, life isn’t there to waste, so—life isn’t there to be angry your
whole life, so you usually should just always look on the bright side.
This sounds admirable but also idealistic. Most girls in this study
acknowledge having felt angry but many are highly ambivalent about its
legitimacy and expression.
Niceness is often portrayed in idealized terms. Vivian (10K) describes
herself as being ‘as nice as I possibly can to people—even people that I
don’t like’. Despite people making fun of her, Vivian says, ‘I don’t really
care … I’ve been told that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say
anything at all.’ Vivian privileges niceness over expressing disagreement or
hurt. Some girls are explicit about dissembling in order to conform to ide-
alized images of niceness. Nicki (9H) defines niceness as involving being
‘happy all the time…if you feel sad, you put on an act’.
Girls do recognize the impossible ideal involved in always being nice.
Susan (9H) says niceness is ‘a stereotype—girls are expected to be nice,
whereas guys can be sleazes’. Girls, she says with irony, are expected to be
‘sweet, never horrible’. But this nonetheless affects whether she speaks up
sometimes, because ‘you think what you want to say isn’t being nice, and
it will lead to fights so you just don’t bother.’
Niceness—and its corollary of not being mean or angry—is an ideal
that it sits alongside idealized notions of body image and being successful
in life as yet another field of behavior where girls are pressured to live up
to images of being restrained, quasi-perfect beings who don’t make waves.
(McRobbie 2007; Read 2011).
Learning to Be Less Sensitive

Consistent with needing to be nice, a surprising number of girls talk of
learning not to get upset about things. Sixty percent of girls in this study
specifically refer to becoming less ‘sensitive’ and emotionally responsive
learning to ‘take jokes’, to not take things to heart, and to ignore hurtful
comments. This brings rewards but it also reflects changes in knowing and
awareness that alter girls’ experience of the world. Sally (9K) describes
herself as:
fun, ‘cause like, I don’t know, people insult you, and I just take it as a joke
… and I get along with nearly everybody like that, so.
114 J. GILL ET AL.
Sally also takes it as a joke when her father puts her down for being in
the ‘dodo class’ in maths. If she let it bother her, she says, ‘I’d get really
down about myself, so—I didn’t want to, so I just take it as a joke’. Sally is
trying to be resilient by opting for a stronger sense of herself in which her
upset is disallowed. She concludes pragmatically that ‘you’re better off to
… take things as a joke than get upset about things’:
’Cause, I don’t know, if you get too upset about some things you feel down
about yourself and put yourself down, and it can cause suicide, and things
like that.
Here Sally is talking about being put down (reframed as a ‘joke’), which
is mentioned in the same breath as ‘put[ting] yourself down’, which can
lead to suicide.
Self-Regulation: Learning to ‘Stop and Think’

Laura (8H) describes how she’s changed in the last year: ‘I’ve become
more mature and open-minded—I think about what other people feel and
their point of view before I speak.’ Simone (11H) says something similar:
‘I can get on with people better now—with adults. And slowly I’m learn-
ing to stop and think.’
Learning to ‘stop and think’ involves a two-step process: having a
watching brief vis-à-vis the self, and monitoring one’s responses to put
the brakes on spontaneity and ‘stop’. This enables one to think—to apply
cognitively mediated standards to oneself or certain social situations.
Younger girls are particularly aware of this requirement, although most
girls describe it at some point.
Kelly (7K) says proudly that she’s someone who ‘speaks my mind but at
the right time’. A year later, things have changed. She says:
last year I used to just … speak out what I felt, you know, not thinking of
anybody else’s feelings or anything [telling people] flat out what I thought,
and they’d get offended, and I’d be in trouble off them. [Now] I just think
before I speak.
With the poor performers on her soccer team:
instead of saying, like ‘Just try your best’, I’d say, ‘oh you’re really good!,
just, ‘you’re doing good, you know’.
Kelly reports that she now says things “in a different way”, but she is
actually saying different things, unsure how to express her frustration at
team members who don’t pull their weight because it might lead to con-
flict and ‘trouble’.
Half the girls specifically mention having learned to watch what they
say and/or to think before they speak, or have it as a goal. Self-control is
an essential requirement for adulthood, citizenship, and individualization
and a prerequisite to being a good and productive worker. On the other
hand, girls acknowledge the threat of ‘trouble’ and of speaking their mind
as a risky business, suggesting socialization into a more traditionally femi-
nine way of being in which ‘keeping the peace’ is an important skill.
Choosing When to Be Forceful

A contradiction is played out in some of the examples below, in which
girls describe choosing to suppress their exuberance, individuality, and or
leadership ability. The girls who present as ambitious, bright, and con-
fident are the most likely to reframe in pejorative terms what look like
strengths, using words such as ‘loud’, ‘aggressive’, and ‘bossy’ to describe
themselves. These epithets continue to be used today to describe success-
ful women who act assertively or in leadership roles (Henderson 2014).
In her first interview, Marion (11K) says that her mother has taken
her to task ‘because I yell too much’ and for ‘shouting at my sister’. Two
years later, she defines loudness in a different way. Being ‘loud’, she says,
equals ‘[saying] what you think—and people might not want to hear that’.
With her close friends, ‘I’d just say it’, but with others, ‘where people
don’t agree on something … I don’t want to be in that situation.’ Here
Marion’s loudness has become saying ‘what you think’, and she is consid-
ering carefully when this is appropriate.
Hannah (8H) wants to be less ‘aggressive’. Compared to a year ago:
I can accept things a lot more, and deal with them without becoming
too aggressive.
…
How did you used to be?
I think I used to, if I disagreed with something, I think I’d push it to the fact
where I’d try to change people around me, what they were thinking, you
116 J. GILL ET AL.
know … I’ve heard examples of myself, and I realize that at the time I did it,
my opinion isn’t the be-all and end-all.
For Hannah, expressing strong opinions—and especially trying to

change other people’s views—now constitutes being ‘aggressive’, and
something to be worked on. Hannah first attends to herself (‘I’ve heard
examples of myself’) and then downplays what she thinks in favor of what
she assumes others are thinking (‘my opinion isn’t the be-all and end-all’).
Here Hannah’s forceful self-expression has been hijacked and reframed
into something more socially palatable.
Vivian (9K), already a student leader with ambitions to be school
captain, has had her ‘bossiness’ drawn to her attention by her friends.
However:
Most of the time I realize myself. I listen to myself and think ‘stop being so
bossy, stop bossing people around’, and I’ll say [to myself], ‘Fine, I’m not
doing it’, and I’ll just sit back and I’ll do nothing.
Vivian presents a dichotomy between telling others what to do and

doing ‘nothing’. When Monica (8K) stands up for her friends in a fight,
she’s told by the powerful group to ‘watch my back’. Narelle (10K) doesn’t
offer the correct answer in a training session at work because ‘there was
only about ten [trainees], and I was the only girl’. Embarrassed at getting
the right answer, she defends her silence by saying, bizarrely, that ‘maybe
they thought I cheated or something, but I just didn’t want everyone
staring at me’.
In these examples, girls come under pressure—self-imposed or reinforced
by others—to tone themselves down. Some of this might be considered
part of ‘growing up’ but it is also gendered. To the extent that it is accepted,
it allows girls fewer opportunities to learn to forcefully express themselves,
negotiate conflict, and resolve disagreements in constructive ways, or to
exercise leadership over others with flair and confidence. Girls do not neces-
sarily shun success—in academic areas or sport or creativity, many embrace
it. But when it comes to dealing with other people, particularly people whose
opinions are seen to matter, girls often moderate their thoughts and feelings
to avoid confrontation rather than being open and expressive.
Here we’ve outlined some of the ways in which girls suppress feel-
ings and thoughts largely through redefining them in negative terms. Do
teachers recognize this phenomenon and how do they respond? Many
girls do extremely well academically and excel in extracurricular activities.

Some sit by in silence. These girls are considered to be ‘ideal’, successful,
students. And yet alongside their achievements, some girls—although not
all—accommodate to notions of femininity that are potentially compro-
mising, and can fly ‘under the radar’ in schools—especially among girls
who are compliant and well behaved. As Charlton (2007) notes:
…for many of the mainly middle class girls who constitute these ‘educa-
tional successes’ traditional femininities still work to constrain and restrict
who and how they can be. (p. 122)
Learning to Manage Difficult Males

In looking at how girls ‘do’ gender we are drawn to consider their rela-
tionships with the males in their lives. Outside their single-sex schoolgirls
have many opportunities to interact with males in general. Despite the
rhetoric of equality and the claim that we have entered a post-feminist era,
we see little evidence that there has been significant change in male–female
relations in recent years.
Girls learn to ‘manage’ their relationships with males in a variety of
ways. Nearly 60% of the girls describe needing to interact strategically
with fathers who are domineering or aggressive. Girls describe having to
contend with fathers who try to exercise control by imposing their opin-
ions. Many fathers are reported as having to be ‘right’. ‘He doesn’t lis-
ten’, says Juliet (12H); ‘very opinionated’ says Gail (12K); ‘wants things
done right’, says Natalie (12H); ‘needs things done his way’, says Simone
(11H;) he’s ‘one minded … you listen to me … I don’t want to hear any
more, that’s it!’, says Diana (10K); ‘He tells me how it really is … he has
the last word’, says Cynthia (10H) cryptically. Ellen’s (10H) father ‘thinks
he’s right, you know, typical male kind of thing, they’re always right’.
He is the same with her mother. When her parents disagree, she says, her
mother usually backs down, reinterpreting her loss as reaching ‘an under-
standing—that’s what my Mum says’.
Vanessa (10H) has a close, spontaneous relationship with her mother,
but with her father, who is quick to anger, she is much more careful:
With my dad, like um, I’ll say things to a certain extent, but I’ll be calm about it
… because I know he can get angry easily, and if I’m calm he’s got to be calm.
118 J. GILL ET AL.
Vanessa describes her father’s ‘angry voice that really makes you back
down’, and ‘the teeth that go like this (clenches teeth) … He’s got more
power … [and is] sort of more dominating’. Vanessa, a middle-class girl,
doesn’t seem to feel an actual physical threat and a year later, she describes
challenging her father’s dominance:
I’ll just say what I think and I don’t care what he thinks. I’ll just say, you
know, ‘you’re not always right; this is what I think and you can take it or
leave it … And I don’t want to hear anything more!’ (laughs)
Several girls describe relationships with older brothers, who use low-
level aggression to take over parts of the house or to force them to do
domestic tasks.
These examples don’t apply to every girl but they are common to
many girls in both schools. The girls’ stories are often presented with wry
humor, in terms suggesting that this is ‘just the way men are’ and that
girls’ responses are ‘just what you have to do’ as a girl.
Making Allowances (and Other Forms of Accommodation)

At times, an understanding attitude can impact on girls’ awareness of their
rights in their relationships with males. One tactic is to ‘make allowances’,
by using one’s understanding of another person’s behavior to undermine
one’s right to criticize it or take offense. This is evident particularly among
older girls in both schools.
Alex (13H), a year after leaving school, ‘makes allowances’ for her boy-
friend and male housemate who won’t do their share of the housework:
I’ve had to nag a bit which I don’t like. But I know that it’s only because
their mothers have done everything for them, and they’re not used to notic-
ing things like the bathroom needs cleaning … so I nag at them, and they
get annoyed, but they still do it in the end.
Here, Alex is in a Catch 22, where making allowances for the boys’
lack of domestic awareness tempers her anger at their behavior. But this
obscures the gendered nature of the situation. This example also illustrates
how the term ‘nagging’ operates to belittle women’s justified requests of
men, who in not responding, precipitate the need for repetition.
Juliet (13K), after she has left school, tells several stories of being chal-
lenged and/or put down by her new boyfriend and her employer in which
she uses different strategies to accommodate and avoid direct confronta-
tion. For example, she stops fighting her boyfriend’s desire that she do
more cooking and ironing, as long as he doesn’t ask her to do it (‘if he
didn’t ask, I did it, kind of thing’). She doesn’t feel undermined when
he explicitly doubts her ability to do an accounting degree, even though
she notes that ‘deep down’ he would think, ‘do accounting, do well, but
don’t do better than me’. And she behaves ‘nicely’ rather than get angry
when insulted by her employer who “used to yell at me … ‘get the fuck
out of my office’, he would scream at me”. After two weeks, the employer
stopped yelling. Juliet says:
I’m glad that I was nice, I’m glad that I just took it and realized that I didn’t
care because it wasn’t personal, it was between nine and five and he was just
being mean to be mean to someone.
In these examples, Juliet suppresses her anger through rationalization

(fighting over chores isn’t worth it), reframing (her boyfriend is ‘encour-
aging’ her by doubting her ability), and making allowances (‘it was just
between nine and five’). In one sense, these tactics are adaptive, enabling
Juliet to continue to live with her boyfriend and to survive at work. But
they involve accommodations that are imposed from outside, and any
distress Juliet may feel is downplayed. Juliet as a living, feeling person
with rights doesn’t matter, so that being treated with disrespect is accept-
able because ‘it wasn’t personal’. Her tolerance of what has happened also
obscures the sexual politics involved with her boyfriend, and outright sex-
ism with her employer, who ‘did not like girls and women’.
Managing Sex and Power

Girls like Juliet talk about dampening aspects of their responsiveness,
including hurt and annoyance, so that they avoid conflict. This becomes
dangerous when girls cease to know or acknowledge what is happen-
ing to them and misread events. Tina’s (12H) experience with an older
male family friend who employs her in his restaurant is an example of this
potential danger. Despite knowing he is attracted to her, Tina assumes that
if she behaves professionally her lack of romantic interest will be respected.
120 J. GILL ET AL.
But repeatedly her employer comes up and physically touches her. Tina
responds by trying to push him off and then by putting up with it. Once
when she tries to say something:
he just ignored it … it just continued, so there was no point … I just thought

if I kept shrugging it off and like pushing him away.
Tina knows—and then in order to keep her job sets aside knowing—
that her boss is not only attracted to her but is prepared to step over the
line. Instead of feeling outrage, she dampens her responsiveness by ‘shrug-
ging it off’. She is therefore unprepared when one night he tries to rape
her. Here, Tina’s choice to ‘ignore’ sexual harassment works against her
being clear about her rights and about what is actually happening, and
leaves her vulnerable to abuse.
REFLECTIONS ON GIRLS’ BEING IN THE WORLD

AND RELATIONSHIPS
Becoming more ‘mature’ and self-disciplined involves elements that one

would expect girls to embrace—increasing self-discipline, self-confidence,
responsibility, and so on. These behaviors are expected of capable adults
in our society. But when increased self-control involves being less forceful
or expressive of one’s views and more accommodating and accepting of
others, it aligns with more traditional expectations of females.
Being expected to be calm and even-tempered and thus fit with a gen-
dered habitus ‘the right way to be’ is hard for girls to ignore. In many sto-
ries, girls describe actively avoiding confrontation by holding themselves
at bay in order to keep the peace. They ‘manage’ their relationships, par-
ticularly with males who seem more powerful, so that a naturalized (and
unproblematized) male domination and/or aggression is kept under con-
trol. In this, girls do the emotional work in relationships, maintaining care
and connection, and keeping the peace. Especially in unequal relationships
with fathers, boyfriends, and employers, girls make strategic calculations
about when it’s okay to act powerfully and when to accommodate. This
requires a careful reading of the other person over time, so that their likely
response is known and factored into interactions, a process that positions
the girl as unequal. Most girls accept this role as normal mature accom-
modation and are blind to the implicit gendered disciplining.
Common to many stories is a discourse of personal responsibility which

provokes guilty feelings when girls fail to maintain a calm demeanor. Girls
assume responsibility for behaviors that some people see as ‘sensitive’,
‘mean’, ‘bossy’, ‘moody’, or ‘aggressive’, and then work on themselves
when their behavior offends. This dynamic assumes that when people crit-
icize girls’ behavior, they are correct, and it’s the girls’ fault and responsi-
bility to fix. In this process, cultural expectations of girls are individualized
and transformed into personal judgments which masks their function as
gendered stereotypes.
CONCLUSION
What does Australian society see as most important in a woman?

Women have to be perfect—manage the family, the home, have a job and
look good … [but] this perfect person … is probably killing herself on the
inside, going ‘Get me out of here!’. Vanessa (11H)
Along with the many messages girls receive about being able to do
anything, about having the right to choose their path in life and about
their absolute equality with boys, they have to negotiate more problematic
territory. The difficulty lies in the ways they live in their bodies, express
themselves, and where they focus their interpersonal attention.
Girls at adolescence encounter pressures to appraise their bodies as if
from the outside and to work on themselves to conform to stylized physi-
cal images (or to actively reject them); to be more attentive to how they
behave and to suppress vitality and intense emotion; and to tune into oth-
ers’ thoughts and feelings in ways that potentially undermine their own
needs and perspectives and minimize conflict. There are classed and raced
elements to this process, with the middle-class girls being more susceptible
to controls exerted by family expectations and the girls from less privileged
backgrounds having a less constrained experience. But it is something all
girls have to come to terms with. To varying degrees girls resist. Most girls
resist some of the time, and a few adopt an almost masculine, instrumental
approach to their lives, which, while not unproblematic, provides a degree
of protection.
We are not arguing that girls are disempowered at adolescence. This
is clearly not true. The girls in this study are often successful in multiple
122 J. GILL ET AL.
areas of student life. Much of what we are talking about occurs in particu-
lar interpersonal contexts. In fact, a number of girls make a distinction
between standing out in terms of talent and/or academic success, which
is endorsed—and deciding when to stand out in relation to interpersonal
interaction, which is seen as riskier. The issue is amplified when girls inter-
act with males in their lives, suggesting the heavily gendered nature of the
problem.
Part of being an adolescent girl, even in the twenty-first century, is to
negotiate a path between confident self-expression, ambition and action,
and a more accommodating, conforming approach to others. This reso-
lution of potentially contradictory categories fits with the biography
of acceptable femininity, and it is one reason why many young women
today say they feel stressed inside, even when they appear to be fine on
the outside (Hemmen 2012). To the extent that girls have difficulty
seeing that others are exercising power over them, they may have dif-
ficulty in dealing with confrontation in their future lives as workers and
citizens.
Angela McRobbie sees the phenomenon of girls and young women
embracing academic and work success, an active sexuality and ‘feminine’
style and dress as part of what she calls ‘a new sexual contract’ in which
girls are ‘endlessly working on a perfectable self’ in ways that leave no
time for social action (2007, 718). Referring to McRobbie’s work, Clark
(2009) says:
Angela McRobbie has argued that although models of girlhood have osten-
sibly shifted from those of marriageability to capability (as modern eco-
nomic subjects), the accompaniment of a ‘new sexual contract’ means that
such educational subjects can still be ‘read’ as safely within the confines
of attractive heteronormativity, self-consciously policed by young women
themselves. (p. 612).
Our interest has been on the ways in which these cultural forces impact
on girls’ lived experience. It takes courage and fortitude to succeed at
the ‘balancing act’ of being a self-oriented, competent, and still socially
acceptable adolescent girl (Renold and Allan 2007). We have shown some
of the ways in which ordinary interpersonal interaction can cause girls to
cover up their felt sense of personhood.
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CHAPTER 5
Girls at School: The Formation of Learning

Identities
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter, we are concerned with the role of schooling in the girls’
development of understanding themselves as learners and as persons in the
world. Hence, we focus on the making of learner identities, a process as
described by Reay as one where ‘pupils construct themselves and are con-
structed by others as particular types of learners in relation to both other
pupils and their teachers’ (Reay 2010, 279). We argue that the school is
centrally involved in this process and we demonstrate particular features
of current schooling practices which contribute to the girls becoming par-
ticipative active learners and other potentially limiting ones which work in
the opposite direction.
To do this, we describe a study undertaken in two girls-only schools
not far from the center of one Australian city. The study investigated the
ways in which girls describe their schooling experience and the challenges
they encounter as they move into and through the senior years. In par-
ticular, the study examined the ways in which the girls experience making
choices about study pathways and eventual careers in terms of their emerg-
ing self-awareness and the different kinds of support from significant oth-
ers in their lives. Of immediate interest is the way the girls transformed
self-understandings from childhood naivety and relative innocence to the
more complex world of senior student and young woman. A crucial part
of this process concerns how the girls are required to become increasingly

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52487-4_5
126 J. GILL ET AL.
aware of themselves as autonomous learners and future workers, aspects

of their identities in which the school plays a central role. Hence, we write
about the girls as produced as schooled products in their senior years of
high school.
In our analysis, we argue that some dilemmas for girls in the senior
high school years are triggered by the requirements of the curriculum.
The mission of senior school moves away from earlier understandings of
the purpose of education. It is no longer about finding yourself and your
talents from a smorgasbord of subject offerings and teaching and learning
styles. In Australian schools, senior school curriculum subjects are pre-
sented as part of a system oriented to student participation and placement
in a competitive rank order of achievement with significant consequences
for post-school options. In this system, curriculum options comprise a
forced choice as girls search for the best strategy to optimize their scores
in the final ranking. In this process, girls are required to see themselves
as individual competitors and to have an accurate estimation of their own
capacity in order to choose the ‘right’ path. Such choices involve a degree
of separation into a self whose primary motivation is self-actualization at
the cost of belonging in a group of friends with whom they have shared
their earlier school years.
WHY GIRLS’ SCHOOLS?

Our aim was to study how mainstream girls, who are neither socially mar-
ginalized nor exceptionally advantaged, are responding to the pressures
of the times, especially as they navigate subject choices in senior school.
As we searched for sites to investigate how schools ‘grow’ the successful
girl student, the private all-girls school presented interesting possibilities.
Even though research findings fail to support the claim that girls require
a single-sex school environment for academic success (detailed in Chap.
3), there are still in Australia some all-girls and all-boys schools claiming
specialized expertise in gender-segregated schooling.
Single-sex schools were deliberately selected for this investigation as
potential sites of the sorts of contradictions to be experienced in the
changed and changing relations of the current generation of girls and
the educational expectations of parents and the wider society. Hence, the
choice of two mainstream girls’ schools which were both well established
and recognized as successful, operating within generally middle-class com-
munities. In this choice, we reiterate the contention of earlier researchers
GIRLS AT SCHOOL: THE FORMATION OF LEARNING IDENTITIES 127
choosing girls schools as sites for investigation that will allow the research
‘to see how gendered empowerment is both operationalized and thwarted’
in this setting (Chanaria 2010, 306).
Both schools are fee-paying Catholic schools. The fees involved are less
than those of the elite girls’ schools in the area but sufficient to indicate
parents are making a conscious choice for their daughters. Hence, the stu-
dents can be described as daughters of the aspirational middle class with
hopes for academic achievement leading to professional careers. Curiously
enough, in interviews, no girl alluded to her attendance at an all-girls
school as being particularly unusual. While they were aware of their par-
ents having chosen the school, the girls appeared to accept its gender
exclusivity as unremarkable, perhaps in line with the idea of the traditional
elite model of private schooling in Australia. As one girl commented in an
interview:
and mum thought all girls would be a good idea and we’d heard good
reports about this school.
The girls’ lack of comment on the single-sex nature of their school-

ing is surprising as it contrasts with the claim of prominent US gender
researcher Patti Lather who had argued that the situation of
girls in private single sex schools is particularly significant because the space
names and locates gender as a fundamental organizing principle of everyday
life. (Lather 1992)
Yet it seemed that for the girls in our studies their single-sex environ-
ment passed almost without notice. The idea of gender being a ‘funda-
mental organizing principle of everyday life’ had apparently become so
everyday it rated no comment. This disjunction returns us to Bourdieu’s
notion of habitus which suggests that the ‘normal everyday’ to which
one has become accustomed is taken by participants as simply the way
things are—and thus the way they ought to be. Hence, our investigation
was designed to look inside two such schools at the ways in which every-
day schooling practices were organized around gender and the degree to
which they elicited gendered responses in the girls at an obvious level and
at a level below conscious recognition.
As seen in their websites, the two schools selected for the study advo-
cate the separateness of boys and girls learning and at least one of them
128 J. GILL ET AL.
claims a tradition of specialized expertise in fostering a learning environ-

ment for girls to flourish. Both schools draw from a middle-class com-
munity who can afford a fee-paying school in the hope their daughters
will get a ‘good’ education—interpreted as a high enough score to enter
the university course of her choice. Both schools enjoy strong support
from their parent communities who see themselves and their daugh-
ters as benefitting from social connections within their communities
and between other comparable schools in the neighborhood. However,
despite many similarities, the school websites differ significantly. One
describes its mission in terms of inculcating traditional virtues of integ-
rity, compassion, and respect while the other engages with the debates
about the value of single-sex schooling as providing the best environ-
ment for girls’ successful learning. This school’s acute awareness of the
modern pressures on girls is revealed by the bold declarations of ensur-
ing their commitment to
no gender stereotyping of subject choices and the freedom from gender stereotypes
in exploring their identities and taking risks.
It seems that one school embraces its traditional role in the production
of ‘good girls’ well schooled in Christian ethics, whereas the other invokes
the competitive image of the neoliberal individualized success story. Of
course, websites are but one version of marketing and perhaps only mar-
ginally related to the reality of life within the schools.
THE SETTING
The schools are situated along one of the ring roads, each about two
kilometers from the city center. Both have been in place for more than
50 years but their origins were markedly different. One was designed to
provide education for the daughters of the expanding middle-class fami-
lies, whereas the other catered to the educational needs of the daughters
of migrants post-WWII, many of whom came from southern Europe from
families of non-English-speaking backgrounds. Some 60 years later, the
original differences have almost completely disappeared, with the study
finding no significant difference between the populations in terms of the
accepted SES measures. Originally, both schools were staffed by religious
personnel but this too has long gone with the sisters having been replaced
by teachers and school leaders with high credentials and a demonstrable

commitment to excellence in schooling outcomes.
Both schools occupy large grounds displaying a mix of gardens and the
usual array of playing areas, tennis courts, picnic tables, and so on. The
school buildings are a mixture of old and new reflecting both their long-
standing reputations and their more recent expansion and development of
schooling resources. Both schools adhere to school uniform requirements
and so their students are immediately identifiable in their differently col-
ored blazers and skirts in the traditional figure-disguising styles typical of
schoolgirl uniforms.
The composition of the senior girls’ uniforms was distinctive with the
pleated skirt and stockings replacing the tunic and knee high socks of
junior girls, identifying their status as no longer child but not yet woman.
At one school, the special status of seniors was identified by a sweater des-
ignating the wearer’s status as a ‘leaver’ at the end of the year.
THE STUDY
The study described here involved 260 girls in the last three years of school
who participated in surveys of their experience of school, their preferences
regarding study styles and courses, their means of getting assistance from
others regarding schoolwork and choices to be made, and their level of
awareness about the business of school and the expectations associated
with it. Girls were recruited in equal numbers from years 10 to 11 in order
to gain access across the senior years.
Data was gathered through two surveys administered 15 months apart
as the girls moved through the senior school years. For half of the girls, the
first survey was undertaken in year 10 and the second in year 11. For the
other half, the first survey was undertaken in year 11 and the second in the
second semester of year 12 by which time they had made choices about
study pathways and post-school destinations. The survey collected data
on family background, level of parental education, aspirations for educa-
tion, family size and career, as well as responses about the choices they had
made and their means of making those choices.
Most of the survey questions were adapted from previous survey ques-
tions validated with a similar age range of students (James et al. 1999;
James 2002a, 2002b). They were presented as statements with responses
to be marked on a Likert scale and scored on a range of 1–5 against ran-
130 J. GILL ET AL.
domly changing directions of positive and negative. They included items

such as
• Overall I enjoy school.

• My parents encourage me to do well at school.
• Getting organized for university is so complicated I don’t know
where to start
• A university degree would improve my chances of getting a job
• In general, men are better than women in Science and Engineering
• A university course would offer me the chance for an interesting and
rewarding career
After completing each survey, a total of 18 girls from both schools were
interviewed to generate a more complete picture of school experience and
issues that had arisen. Interview questions were developed from survey
responses and include:
• Can you tell me the subjects that you are doing this year and why
and how you had chosen them?
• Who do you speak to about your work and study plans?
• Do you have a strong idea of what you want to do as a career?
• Have you thought about the course or training that you want to do?
• Imagine your future for a while. What do you think is an ideal career
for you? Why?
• How do you or would you find out about a field of interest?
• What are the three most important things for you to consider when
deciding on your future ideal job?
The interviews allowed for the findings of the survey responses to be

explored further. Interviews were limited to girls who had completed
both rounds of the survey. Recursive interviews with the same informants
allowed the researcher to notice and follow up on any changes between
the years interviewed relating to choices, decisions on subjects, and issues
around people assisting them in the task.
The overall approach taken was mixed methods with data gath-
ering through interviews and surveys. Survey data was analyzed
through the use of statistical processes such as SPSS (Statistical
Package for the Social Sciences) and path analysis, while the inter-
view material was transcribed and then subjected to a thematic analysis
to identify the main themes of the girls’ accounts. All names used for
students and schools are pseudonyms.
The survey results showed no significant differences between the two
schools based on standard SES measures. Hence, the data of 260 girls
was combined for analysis. (See Yuen (2011) for a complete account of
method.)
A NOTE ON CURRICULUM
In the first nine years of schooling, young Australians study a common
curriculum of specific study areas in line with requirements of state depart-
ments and educational policy. The senior school years involve a refining
of curriculum requirements wherein each student must choose subjects
based on individual abilities, school offerings, and post-school ambi-
tions. The much narrower group of subjects undertaken in the final years
constitutes the basis for the end of school assessment following which
each candidate obtains a rank score (known as an ATAR or Australian
Tertiary Admission Rank) which determines entry to university courses.
University entry is not simply a matter of aggregate score, it also involves
having studied in courses that provide a relevant knowledge base in the
preferred area.
Choices, supposedly made on a combination of student’s demon-
strated ability and a perceived interest in the subject area, can become
very complex tasks. The current Australian curriculum includes a range
of levels in some subjects—notably Mathematics and English—to allow
variation in levels of abstract knowledge compared to applied knowledge.
At times, students may be advised to take a different level of a subject in
order to maximize their final aggregate score. For example, if you choose
Mathematics as one of your strengths you may be advised to take the
applied version of the subject as you will likely gain a higher score than if
you take the more abstract (and possibly harder) version.
Senior school thus becomes a time of heightened competition as stu-
dents strive to maximize their chances of getting the highest score possible
to gain entry into their chosen course. Even those students who do not
intend to apply to university are drawn into the competitive spirit of the
final years. In the schools in our study, students are unlikely to withdraw
from completing the final year—a common occurrence in government
school students from disadvantaged backgrounds (Gill and Tranter 2013).
132 J. GILL ET AL.
Schools in the non-government sector market themselves in terms of the

scores gained by students in previous years, thereby attracting parents who
aspire to daughters’ high achievement.
A more stringent process of narrowing down the curriculum occurs in
schools in the UK where students typically undertake a small number of
subjects in senior school which forms the basis for gaining offers of places
at university. In the USA, where universities are less demanding of stu-
dents having prior knowledge of or prior learning in particular courses, the
experiences of senior high school are less constrained by strategizing sub-
ject choice to achieve the best possible grade. However, the widespread
use of standardized testing such as the SAT (originally Scholastic Aptitude
Test used for tertiary entry, recently just SAT), along with particular entry
requirements at the most prestigious universities, does ensure a highly
competitive experience, even if the student placements are perhaps more
perceived as products of individual capacity and less of her/his educational
institution.
PROFILING THE GIRLS
The general profile of the girls to emerge from the survey data shows
a group of young people who are generally academically purposeful
and secure. More than 90% of the girls respond positively to the idea
that they are supported and encouraged by their parents and an equally
high proportion are sure that they want to do well at school. A slightly
lower proportion respond that they enjoy school—they are after all
adolescents and this is not a common trope among adolescents! But
less than 20% responded negatively to the question of enjoying school.
They are consistently positive in seeing themselves as doing as well as
everybody else at school (under 10% disagree) and confident in their
sense of progression as learners (70% think they are doing ‘pretty well’).
In many respects, the girls’ responses are fairly typical of middle-class
adolescent girls.
While a similar consensus was elicited by the question about university
being seen as a good thing and one that was anticipated to help with get-
ting a job (80% positive response), their responses to questions about how
to apply revealed considerable uncertainty. More than 50% of respondents
felt that getting organized for university was decidedly complicated. Most
see university as a desirable goal but it involves a degree of apprehension.
Fig. 5.1 Responses in percentages to My parents encourage me to do well at school
Fig. 5.2 Responses in percentages to Overall I enjoy school
While the majority plan to go to university, they are less sure about what
tertiary study entails. Their responses to some of these questions are pre-
sented in the following graphs (Figs. 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, and 5.5).
134 J. GILL ET AL.
Fig. 5.3 Responses in percentage to I am doing as well as other people my age
Fig. 5.4 Responses in percentages to I am doing pretty well

Fig. 5.5 Responses in percentages to A university degree is so complicated I don’t

know where to start
The following section makes links with the schooling practices of senior
school and factors known to have an effect on girls’ education derived
from previous research.
KEY THEMES EMERGING FROM THE DATA
The Emerging Self as the Schooled Product

There are many ways in which schools are understood to develop capacity
and to produce students as schooled products. For example, working with
the entering student and transforming her into one who can deal with basic
literacy and number in the early years is a familiar and expected outcome
of the schooling process. In the senior school, subject choice becomes one
mechanism wherein the school is centrally involved in the identification of
student capacity with implications for student identity and gender.
At year 10, the girls in our study are required to choose between subject
areas for their final years of schooling. Choices are to be based on areas of
student’s demonstrated capacity and her career direction, the latter being
often weakly formed and untested. A crucial element of this choice is the
effort to leave all options open for fear of canceling educational possibili-
ties into the future. This feature is particularly important in the case of
girls who have not decided at year 10 what they want to do in terms of
career. For the few who are clear about their choice, it is a case of simply
following through recognized pathways. For others—the majority—who
136 J. GILL ET AL.
are undecided about their futures, it is a struggle to balance a clear under-

standing of their own capacity with attitudes to potential careers and life
courses. Having to make subject choices confronts the girl with the idea of
future plans in ways that have not been previously encountered.
The Self as Learner: The Individualized Student

A sense of oneself as learner is a particular feature of the process in senior
school. Being clear about your capacity as a learner leads to fewer problems
regarding choice of subjects and career directions. The value of having a
direction appears very strongly in the girls’ talk about the choice process.
As Donna (year 10) says
for the girls that don’t know what they’re doing at all … they find it difficult
because they don’t have a lot of subjects to choose from so they can’t really
get a taste of everything.
In other words, the girls learn to see the value of having a sense of direc-
tion as it informs a planned pathway through the next stage of education.
However, at year 10, it is clear that the majority of them have barely begun
to think about life after school and the practical implications for senior
school pathways. At the same time, the sense of making the wrong choice
and possibly missing out on potentially fulfilling life courses presents as
a frightening possibility that also underscores the importance of choice.
Up until year 10, schooling can be seen as a collective endeavor.
The girls understand themselves to be following an established pathway
through the prescribed curriculum, common elements of which are set
out by the school and the education authorities to be covered at each year
level. Apart from a general recognition of some students as having special
talents—often in areas such as music or art—the class follows a similar
route at a similar pace. In year 10, the project of the school changes. It is
no longer the task of introducing students to particular areas of knowl-
edge so that they can develop some understanding of different disciplines.
At year 10, the task of schooling becomes more an individual project
as each girl is required to work out her particular talents and potential
career direction and then to construct a study pathway for the final two
years of school. Hence, the schools require each student to construct a
Personal Learning Plan, known as a PLP, which identifies the directions
of her interests and the study pathway she needs to take to get in to her
preferred course. The construction of the PLP comprises the first step in
the girl identifying herself as an individual learner with specific capacities.
While much is made of the PLP at its inception in year 10, we note that
it becomes less prescriptive and less regarded as the students pass through
the senior years.
In particular, it seems that the requirement to nominate a career direc-
tion causes difficulty for many girls at year 10. By year 12, most of the girls
have changed their minds and some are still floundering in search of career
direction as they complete schooling. While we develop some of the post-
school issues in the following chapter, at this point we return to choice as
we demonstrate the ways the girls are required to think about themselves
in the process of choosing.
The Process of Choice

The central point of the choice-making exercise is about strategy. The
school’s role in the exercise is less about furthering student knowledge in
a particular subject area than about positioning the student to achieve the
highest possible score in the aggregate ranking. To accomplish this goal
successfully requires an accurate appraisal of the student by the teacher
and a clear understanding from the student of the particular career she
wishes to pursue.
Together with advice from parents and teacher appraisals, each girl
is required to undertake a self-evaluation in planning her future study.
The individual girl has to focus on herself as separate in confronting her
choices, a position that distances her from friends and peers in arbitrary
ways. For some the change in approach comes as a surprise as does the idea
of the essentially competitive ranking, for example
well this whole ATAR thing and what I want to do at Uni only occurred to
me last year … that you needed an ATAR to get into a course. Susie (year 12)
Given our findings from the overview of research into girls’ education,
the exercise of requiring each girl to nominate a sense of her capacity is
likely to be fraught with issues of confidence and self-assurance. The ten-
dency for girls to underestimate their capacity as students and their poten-
tial achievement levels (as noted in Chap. 2) indicates that there needs to
138 J. GILL ET AL.
be careful attention to this exercise from teachers, parents, and counselors

in order to assist girls in achieving a more or less accurate estimation of
potential.
In some cases, the process works well. For girls who have established
themselves with a special skill and have developed a positive learner iden-
tity, the choice process seems fairly straightforward:
Kerry (year 12): Well after I’ve finished school, I’m kind of interested in
performing, drama or performing arts because I’ve danced for 11 years and
my dad was a drama teacher and so I’ve enjoyed acting and performing from
a young age, so yeah, I’m pretty good at it … I’m thinking of getting into
the XXXX drama course and then seeing how well … don’t really know how
hard job prospects are yet until I try, at the moment I’m doing hospitality
as a backup.
Kerry speaks with perceptible confidence developed in terms of an

established skill, supported by engaged parents. For her the choice process
appears as a foregone conclusion—even if she does not get her first option
she has a backup plan. Sadly, her case stands out from the majority of the
girls for whom choice is a much more muddled affair and elicits a lack of
confidence as well as a heightened consciousness of their inexperience.
While the profile of the girls generally shows them to be good students
in the sense of being engaged and diligent, most do not have a strong
sense of identity or talent. Thus, their task in the choice process becomes
one of discovering their academic strengths and weaknesses and position-
ing themselves as competitors ready for the final ranking.
Some of our informants describe their efforts to make decisions in a
fairly haphazard way while others are more directed and confident about
themselves.
Donna (year 11): In year 10 … looking through books and writing down
most of what we enjoy doing … our favorite subjects are and what we’re
good at, what we feel we like doing, what’s our favorite subject and then
from there, go into looking at careers around it, that involves most of those
skills and stuff that we’re good at … I like design and all of that, so I look
around … interior design and interior decorating and I got architecture and
I thought … I’ve always been interested in houses … I kind of thought,
oh, looks good, looks interesting … it was like all just heaps of different
jobs, not a set one, until I finally, was like, oh, I really, really want to do
architecture
While Donna is clearly not closely directed in her thinking, she does
consistently refer to the process as one of matching interests (favorite,
what I like) with ability (what we’re good at)—which is the key message
of the process of making choices.
In confronting choice, the girls become newly aware of the risks
involved. As the choice process unfolds over years 11 and 12, for many
girls the initial enthusiasm becomes dampened by self-doubt as subject
and career choices have to be reconsidered in light of grades achieved,
their ebullience, and fervor quietening into anxiety. By year 12, very few
girls still believe that they can become whoever they want and now they
are serious and brisk, attending to the continuous demands of endless
assessment pieces and homework. They have no time to dream, it seems
hard enough just to keep up and to try to make each grade a personal
best. The celebratory note is distinctly missing in the more senior girls’
accounts.
Appraisal and Its Effects

At one level, the exercise of choice making renders the girls more vulner-
able to the assessments of others, especially teachers whom they regard
as knowing what counts in terms of academic capacity in particular areas.
Despite many of the girls identifying themselves as ‘doing as well as every-
body else’ in the survey data (70% agree), many of them appear to be
unsure about their actual capacity when faced with the self-appraisal built
into the choice process.
What I’m Not Good at!

In searching for a sense of their own strengths, many girls look to their
dislikes, as if by excluding what they currently find difficult is sufficient
grounds for sound choice making.
Very few interviewees speak about ‘being good at’ a particular study
area. When asked to identify strengths, they often reply in terms of where
they know they are not strong. It seems that the question provokes a ready
identification of weaknesses. This certainly emerges in the girls’ responses
to making choices.
Tracy (year 11): I did accounting for last semester and I dropped it for this
semester because I didn’t think … it is quite hard for me and I don’t really
like the system … the balance sheet, the journals … I don’t really like it.
140 J. GILL ET AL.
Sometimes a girl uses the excuse of lack of interest to avoid subjects

that appear difficult:
(Lucy year 11): I was looking at business kind of things—the marks you
need were a lot lower … but I’m not that interested in it.
Here, Lucy worries about setting the goal too high and decides to
explain her choice against a particular option in terms of lack of interest
which is more acceptable and less confronting than saying it’s too difficult.
In seeking self-evaluation, many girls look to teachers’ judgments and
comments as a trusted source of information, seeming to readily accept
what they are told rather than to trust their own estimations of their
capacity. This feature appears particularly true for those whose parents had
not studied at tertiary level and for whom the actual grade is accepted as
a true and accurate definition of student ability rather than being seen as
one result on one test. In choice making, student grades become more
important and more likely to be seen as an accurate reflection of student
capacities Unfortunately, this practice—of accepting oneself as defined by
a particular grade level—can work to confirm the girl involved as pegged
to that level rather than to inspire exploration of other learning options.
Moreover, as seen in the example of Kerry above, some girls are in a
much better position for making choices than others, depending on their
connections and the availability of relevant knowledge and timely guid-
ance. The socially reproductive effect of those with the right sort of cul-
tural and social capital being advantaged in the choice process is clearly at
play.
Teachers appear to comprise the key informants as the girls seek to
assemble knowledge of themselves as people with learning capacities.
Parents can also have a role in this process, as can family members and
friends whose opinions are valued but the teachers are seen first and fore-
most as those with a professional role in determining the girls’ learning
power. Many of the girls agreed with Donna who replied to the question
about who helps with the subject choices:
the teachers mostly.
The effort to establish oneself as a good learner serves to align the

previous years of school experience in terms of a sense of effectiveness as
a learner currently. Some girls will give up and describe themselves as ‘not
very bright’ or ‘not able to do’ particular subjects as by this strategy they
can avoid the sorts of confrontation demanded by the choice process.
The girls are perhaps clearer about their sense of themselves as good
academically or not than they are about their sense of themselves as per-
sons in the world. Some describe themselves as not very confident—none
say they are confident, clear thinking, persistent, responsible, and all the
usual array of adjective encountered in job training manuals. Furthermore,
some do describe themselves as not wanting to be the person in charge,
avoiding responsibility for fear of making a mistake, features which lead
to a perception of insecurity about their self-perceptions, an insecurity not
likely to be helped by the forced choice of decision-making at year 10.
What is less obvious and hardly noted by the informants is the process
whereby the school actively guides choice making in the interests of high
grades which will cast a halo effect on the school and enhance its competi-
tive edge through its reputation for high achievement. Thus, the preoc-
cupation with subject-specific capacity can be seen to benefit not only the
student but ultimately the school’s market value as a worthy competitor
in the ‘good school’ stakes. The final years of senior school are also the
crunch time when fee-paying parents look for the payoff for their years of
investment in their daughter’s education. Given the vested interests of the
school, the parents, and the related communities, one is drawn to ask how
autonomous the girls really are as choosers and to whom are they respon-
sible for their choices?
Resources to Assist with Choice

While teachers are seen by the girls as having insight into their aca-
demic skills, they are not generally equipped with broad and up-to-date
knowledge of careers. So the exercise of nominating career-related sub-
ject choices calls on the student gaining knowledge about careers from
any sources she can find. Not surprisingly then, for some girls the career
knowledge involved in task of choice making presented difficulties.
In trying to form choices, the girls were thrown on their own knowl-
edge of careers, some of which came from popular media as in:
Josie: I wanted to be a lawyer when I was 11—a lawyer like the one on TV
Ally McBeal.
142 J. GILL ET AL.
But these earlier notions were soon overtaken by more realistic

appraisals.
Alana (year 11): I don’t have a strong sense of what I want to do as a career.
Not a specific job that I want to aim for completely, I’m sort of like cross
between a few things, physical education teacher or a paramedic, physio-
therapist, around that area, yeah.
Anne (year 12): I had leaned towards doing journalism for a little while but
my mind changes a lot. And I went to an information night at the university
and that actually put me off doing it. So I decided not to.
Interestingly, most girls turned to family members in their effort to

choose a suitable path. Parents were frequently nominated as having influ-
ence on the girl’s opinions:
Lucy (year 11): Mum thought a dietician would be good … not really a
park ranger (which is what I’d said) because our family doesn’t get into that
outside stuff at all.
But for many the idea of a future career was very vague, as described
by Nicole:
Nicole, (year 12): Because in year 11 I had to pick subjects, no, in year 10,
I was picking subjects and I didn’t know what I really want to do, I think
there was a time when there was nothing really that I liked … so I just
picked one. And it was between accounting and a business type subject and
my sister had done Business 1 in the first semester and she said it’s not that
good. So I just went with accounting …. I don’t know, it’s like I don’t really
have a plan for next year … I don’t even know what I want to do. I do want
to do commerce but I’m not sure if I’m going to. Then I don’t know what
other options I could put down … so yeah, I’m just worried about what I’m
actually going to do.
For others, advice came from siblings:
Lucy (year 11): That’s the one (sister) doing teaching. I was going to do
maths methods—she did maths methods in year 12 and so I talked with her
and saw her stuff and then decided I’d do Applied Maths. I just talked to
her about the subjects I liked, talked about it all, talked to mum as well …
so they all help me …
Marie (year 11): My brother’s in university … he said that the change from
year 11 to year 12 isn’t as bad as it was from year 10 to 11. Cause you’re
used to all the workload and you kind of expect what the subjects are going
to be about.
For others, the prospect of a gap year to explore other things afforded
a temporary respite from the burden of choice making, as in:
Lynne: I am going to work in the winery with my sister. I can just do one vin-
tage there and then maybe after that travel and then go back to the uni thing.
All the girls take the choice issue very seriously and try hard to reach the
solution that seems best for them.
Amanda (year 11): Yeah, I’ve asked lot of people and like a English Studies
is more the analytical side of things, but like the only confusion I have is
you ask what kind of jobs you can do with that and I thought, journal-
ism, because I was interested in that at one stage. But then I asked some
people about that and they said, oh no, you’d be better off with English
Communications, if you did journalism. So it’s just about what, where’s it
going to get me in life more … I spoke to a huge range of people like my
parents and then I’ve got friends who are teachers … friends from around
here, like year 12 girls that have just been through, all their sisters, coun-
selors, year level coordinator … the most useful person was probably my
Mum’s good friend, she actually works at the school as a teacher.
For this speaker, as for the majority, the question of subject choice is
clearly connected with other imponderables associated with career. This
feature causes ongoing anxieties in many girls as they struggle to envisage
their future selves as workers.
Institutional Resources
The girls are also assisted by psychological testing personnel contracted
by the schools to assist in the matching of self-estimates with the range of
interests displayed by individual girls. In speaking about this testing, the
girls show an acceptance of the results of the tests as though this ‘scientific’
definition holds a truth beyond anything they could themselves reach.
In year 10 you do work education which is based around all the careers and
things like that … you do a survey on the computer, it’s a program that the
144 J. GILL ET AL.
school buys and it looks at your interests and your profiles and then gives
you job options. I came up with 10!
For others, the array of possibilities and their lack of knowledge about
what work entails combine to make the choice about work and related
school subjects seem almost impossibly difficult:
Ellen (year 11): It was the end of last year (year 10), I was thinking of
graphic design but I wasn’t sure and then I was thinking of graphic things
like visual arts and I was trying to get into work experience places… That
made me wonder, maybe it wasn’t the right thing … the school has career
people who are in actual jobs coming in and talking to us and this one girl
said ‘it’s not really about art, it’s more about showing yourself a lot, putting
yourself out there’ and I’m not very confident…’
The speaker is drawn to her self-knowledge about confidence levels

which appear inevitably to interact with potential choices. The idea of
making a life decision without adequate information and with concerns
about what the work might demand in terms of personal style can seem
both extremely challenging and frightening.
Gendered Choices
We hear no comments from the girls about their choices of subjects or
jobs in terms of gender—nothing about teaching being a good choice
because you could be at home with the kids during the holidays or nursing
being great for dealing with family ills, tropes common in career discus-
sions with girls in previous generations. These girls are keen to explore
the possibilities for themselves in terms of rewarding careers from what
appeared at first to be an individualized gender neutral perspective—what
will best suit me!—but their actual nominations of careers are decidedly
gender influenced, with teaching and nursing dominating with the pro-
spective university graduates and beautician, child care, hairdressing, and
hospitality for those going to trade school. However, this feature of their
choosing passes without remark from the girls or their teachers. The indi-
vidualized press that accompanies the process of choice seems to mask any
consciousness of gender.
Girl Apart
Even though the girls opt for traditionally gendered careers and their
choices fell into groups, they are positioned as individual loners by the
process of choosing. For example, one participant comments:
And then I spoke to a lot of my friends about it that I sit with at lunch and
recess and that …. But I think the only problem there was that I’m doing
such different subjects to them in year 12. … I think I mostly got advice
from the teachers … going through the booklets and they explained the
courses.
Most girls understand the importance of choices made in senior school

in terms of later lives and they find this connection daunting. They repeat
a concern about getting it (the choice) ‘right’.
As shown in the above examples, the girls are individualized by the
act of choosing. Having to choose makes the girl superconscious of her
responsibility to herself in ways that potentially cut across group loyal-
ties and sense of belonging. In choice making, she is required to divorce
herself from earlier girl-centered feelings and group memberships. Hence,
friendship groups and social supports garnered through time in school are
sacrificed to the dominance of individual achievement as evidenced in the
rank score which they accept as infallible in its determination of the next
phase of their lives. Commenting on the ideological conflict embedded in
a similar situation Adkins notes
the idea of performing an individualized subject biography—‘living one’s

own life’—is in sharp conflict with the conventional expectation of ‘being
there for others’. (Adkins 2003, 29)
And yet this is precisely the situation that the requirement of choice
making as an educational process, structured into the senior school cur-
riculum, provokes for the girls in this study. Of course, not all the girls find
it equally challenging. Those lucky few for whom the choice emerges as
clearly in line with a particular capacity they have established report little
trouble. Others whose choices line up with those of some within their
friendship groups appear less bothered than do the majority who experi-
ence the challenge of choice making as a frightening task to be faced alone
with ‘rest of your life’ implications.
146 J. GILL ET AL.
One feature of the girls’ experience as choosers relates to the posi-

tion of ‘new girl’ having to take responsibility for a decision with major
implications without sufficient knowledge of the possibilities or accurate
self-appraisal of learning futures. Consequently, the process of taking
responsibility tends to throw the girls back on the cultural capital avail-
able to them through their upbringing and in so doing serves to negate
any sense of themselves as agentic individuals within a collective endeavor.
Intersections of Class and Knowledge
Cultural Capital in the Choice Process

Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital as a significant facilitator of educa-
tional success for those whose families display an up-to-date knowledge
of learning and its application in professional life is very much at play in
the choice process (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). Girls whose parents
had attended university are more knowledgeable about and comfort-
able with the implications of choosing subjects. Our data shows a small
tendency for the girls to rely on fathers as advisers for choosing senior
school subjects rather than mothers, which possibly reflects the distribu-
tion of the participant population in which more fathers have university
degrees than mothers. As one comments:
my mum doesn’t talk to me about subjects, it’s more my dad now.
For the girls with support from highly educated parents, the choice of
learning areas is a matter for them to take responsibility and they are posi-
tioned as central agents in the choice process. As Peta says:
Peta (year 11): I choose the subjects myself and tell my parents and they
support me … giving advice and justifying their reasons … dad knows a lot
of people and with subjects like economics and history he’s really good at
those subjects and helps me.
But it’s a choice with support, a kind of qualified independence. The

act of choosing is identified by the student as ‘her’ choice but it is made
within the boundaries of parental opinion and advice. Similarly, Kerry
describes her practice of choice making:
Kerry (year 11): I run ideas past my parents and see what they think … they
support me with continuing drama but they also want me to have a fall back
option which I’m trying to cover right now.
Kerry speaks with confidence and appears to be less fearful of making

a ‘wrong’ choice. These girls are in a much better position for making
choices than others, given their connections and the availability of relevant
knowledge and timely guidance. The socially reproductive effect of those
with the right sort of social and cultural capital being advantaged in the
choice process is clearly at play.
The girls whose family background does not include university have a
different approach. They are eager to acknowledge the care and concern
from parents, especially mothers, who are mentioned frequently, but they
also register their responsibility for the decision as they cannot expect their
parents to know about higher education and its workings:
Lisa (year 11): my mum was there (at a session on subject and career choice)
and she just listened to what I said really and she asked me a couple of
things but she was just making sure I knew what I wanted … it’s mainly my
decision.
Lisa sees the choice as her own responsibility, unlike those whose par-
ents have knowledge of the university system and can actively support and
advise their daughters. In some cases, the very act of choosing arouses an
awareness of their parents’ lack of capacity to advise:
Addison (year 10): well mum and dad never did uni so that makes it a bit
harder, but they’re just as interested as I am … we got all the brochures and
went through them. I picked the jobs I was interested in—there was a huge
list—I chose pretty much on my interests and if I like it or not.
For these girls, the assumption of responsibility becomes the only

option. At the same time, they are very keen to reiterate their parents’
pride and concern for them.
Donna (year 11): they were happy with my choice … they don’t know much
about it but they were glad that I knew what I wanted to be.
All the girls respond to the requirement to make it your decision, to be

in charge of yourself. There is no mention here of following either parent
148 J. GILL ET AL.
in terms of a career, or even a job. They make no allusions to gender—they

may not realize that some professions divide along gendered lines—but
their comments certainly reflect the self-‘responsibilization’ rhetoric of the
neoliberal chooser (Budgeon 2001). This case presents as one example of
the way in which the rhetoric of individualization serves to mask the gen-
der components of choice.
In one case, we encounter a reverse psychology at work. Most of the
girls from backgrounds without university experience proudly note and
affirm their parents’ care and concern for them. While these parents are
described as excited about the possibility of their daughters getting to uni-
versity, they exert no influence over course choice or related career. One
girl from this background who had proudly declared her parents would
always support her freedom of choice and never be ‘pushy’, not like other
parents who insist on their daughters aiming high, suddenly finds herself
at a loss in her senior year having changed from her initial goal of accoun-
tancy and is now floundering without a direction:
Nancy (year 12): I’m really worried because I don’t know what I want to
do. My parents just say it’s your decision, do what you want to do. But I
don’t know what I want to do. They don’t want to influence what I do and
so they say it’s up to you.
This example shows how complex and frightening the whole choice
issue can become and the idea of freedom to choose can become a burden
when dealing without necessary information, support, and knowledge of
alternate options.
In Nancy’s case, the problem of identity could not be more clear. Her
desperate plea of ‘I don’t know’ is ostensibly about the career she might
want but in reality her comment could be read to mean ‘I don’t know who
I am and so I can’t choose—you are supposed to know but I don’t’. And
of course her situation is potentially more difficult in that her parents offer
loving support but, as they have not studied at university, can’t access the
sort of knowledge that might be able to help.
Little Breakthrough of the Academic Glass Ceiling

The girls generally seem ready to accept the judgments of their abil-
ity from their teachers and the indications from records of their grades
without protest. They also internalize the valuation of academic skills as

revealed in the competition for scores as the absolute arbiter. There are no
suggestions of repeating subjects or trying again for a better grade or with
a different teacher. The girls appear to feel that they are on a moving path-
way and the assessment of the rank grade is the determining factor in their
journey. In fact, the requirement of making choices appears to constitute
the estimation of the girl’s academic ability in a frozen frame, which fits, as
we have indicated, with the idea that girls are inclined to see their capacity
as fixed and hence resist the idea of working on themselves as learners to
advance beyond the current moment (Dweck 2008). Of course, this need
not be the case and equally surely teachers can and sometimes do misun-
derstand student potential. However, without the necessary cultural and
social capital working to negotiate alternate pathways, it seems that the
girls are destined to proceed in terms of the teacher’s estimations of ability
and their own often shaky sense of themselves as adults.
From an educational perspective—and from the standpoint of lifelong
learning—the mindset that accompanies the choice process at senior high
school is distinctly counterproductive. The risk that the girls face of mak-
ing the wrong choice and choosing against particular learning areas is ever
present. And the choice is presented as a one-off thing—get it right now
and learn to live with the consequences.
A decade earlier, a similar study carried out in another Australian state
had noted:
subject choices in/for senior school are often constructed by the school and
the students as final and binding. Such choices are often based on limited
information … and they do not take into account that in today’s work life it
is very common for adults to undergo more than one major change in direc-
tion in their careers and occupations. (Atweh et al. 2005, 17)
Sadly, despite this clear warning, in the current and even more precarious
world of work (made especially so by the Global Financial Crisis), it seems
as though the senior school curriculum appears to maintain a tight linear
orientation in terms of school-to-work connections. While this practice can
be seen as of highly debatable value in terms of educational benefits, as seen
in the above quotation, we are arguing here that it has particularly negative
implications for girls in senior school and their post-school lives.
150 J. GILL ET AL.
CONCLUSIONS AND SOME RECOMMENDATIONS

In this chapter, we argue that the process of a forced choice of subjects
and careers that is required by the current curriculum structure in senior
high school can have negative connotations in the education of girls. At
a practical level, the choice calls for a well-developed sense of self and
an accurate estimation of one’s capacity, both qualities unlikely to be
achieved by many 16-year-old girls. We demonstrated the sense of risk
and fear that accompanies the task of choosing for many of the girls in our
sample, especially those for whom the desired prize involves being a first-
generation university student.
Even more importantly, the way in which the choice is presented appears
to foreclose on alternate options, thereby shutting the girls out of particu-
lar learning areas in the future. We argue that this move is unnecessary,
unwarranted and anti-educational. In the current context of high youth
unemployment and the precarious nature of work, it is surely incumbent
on educators to permit and encourage students to come back to educa-
tional programs they may have previously decided against. Educational
assessment policies that give rise to curriculum structures that foreclose
on student options should be disallowed and replaced by praxis-oriented
educational pathways that encourage alternate routes.
Need for Strong Academic Identity

Our analysis of the girls’ experience of making choices about future direc-
tions has demonstrated the necessity of a well-developed understanding
of one’s academic potential. Given the gender implications of self-concept
involved (discussed in Chap. 2), there is a need for a better process of
assessment so that the girls can understand themselves in terms of learning
potentials. Too often the girls in our study evidenced an awareness of what
they were not good at, and seemed to account for this in terms of lacking
innate ability. So they made choices against certain subject areas more
clearly than making positive choices for others. In Dweck’s terms, the girls
appear to take the position of being intellectually limited by nature, from
a consciousness of themselves as lacking skills, rather than seeing them-
selves as potential learners ready to take on new knowledge. The process
of requiring choice appears to confirm and solidify their impressions of
themselves as persons of fixed and possibly limited ability.
Such learning identities are produced by the choice requirement and

operate against the promotion of further education.
Girls at school need to be encouraged to develop a more active sense
of their own potential for learning and having agency in their interactions
with their contexts. We would suggest there needs to be a way in which
choice becomes a process of actively choosing in favor of a particular area
rather than choosing against another. To this end, we would like to see
more attention paid in schooling to the idea of girls’ becoming aware
of their strengths and potentials in academic areas. Currently, schooling
has concentrated assessment practices on the idea of showing what the
student knows, how much has been learnt and the quality of the student’s
application of her knowledge. On the basis of this study, we suggest that
in order to make positive choices about future studies, the girls require a
more developed understanding of knowledge pathways so that they can
envisage alternate routes to desired destinations.
Too many girls in the current sample are being required to make choices
before they are ready to do so. Education literature routinely contains a
good deal of discussion about the notion of schooling readiness. We sug-
gest here that the idea of ‘readiness’ would ideally be kept alive through-
out schooling experience. In this way, students not ready to make the sorts
of choice routinely expected in senior school could be allowed to follow a
more general path until the time they demonstrate a level of self-awareness
and understanding which indicates they are ready to choose.
Knowledge of Alternate Pathways

At a practical level, it would seem that the idea of alternate pathways to
finishing school, for enrolling in particular courses, the requirements of
moving between fields, or of returning to study should be made avail-
able to the girls well before the moment of decision. Schools are obvi-
ously trying to cope with the need for the provision of ‘career counseling’
in current times. One avenue mentioned by the girls in this study was
that of having successful people—often old scholars—involved in particu-
lar professions come to the school and speak about their work and the
path they had taken to get to their present position. Along with the usual
procession of success stories, we suggest that narratives of people who
have taken alternate routes, studied in different areas and then come to
a better understanding of their vocational potentials, would also assist in
young people achieving more realistic and flexible goals. The current style
152 J. GILL ET AL.
of career information described by the girls here is very perfunctory. No

doubt this is a very difficult, complex, and constantly changing area but it
is one where there is definitely room for improvement.
Having discussed the way the process of forced choice making can
affect girls in senior school, in terms of their sense of themselves as indi-
vidual subjects of capacity and potential, we turn to a discussion of their
expectations of life as adult women which formed the second part of the
investigation in this study.
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South Australia.
CHAPTER 6
Post-school Pathways and Girls’ Imagined

Futures
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter, we continue the analysis of the girls’ formation of self-
hood in terms of gender, identity, and subjectivity as they approach leav-
ing school. Here, we focus on the ways in which they envisage themselves
as adults amid the world of work. We are concerned with the ways they
make decisions about careers, relationships, and prospective parenthood,
all of which are mediated by social background, self-awareness, and imme-
diate context.
In the previous chapters, we outlined how the institutions of family
and school along with features of social background, cultural inheritance,
geography, and place combine to produce forms of girlhood that the girls
adopt and are likely to elaborate in terms of their imagined lives in adult-
hood. We have shown that the girls in our studies construct and ratify their
sense of self as a shared experience of girlhood within a group setting.
We suggested that there are observable effects of the currently dominant
neoliberal global culture in the girls’ lives, chief among which are compe-
tition and a self-made personhood. The period of senior school has been
identified as a particular location within which these effects play out as
they prepare to embark into life beyond school.
All of these features are brought to bear on the decisions the senior high
school girl is required to make regarding life beyond school. Senior school
choices highlight the importance of self-knowledge and confidence as the

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52487-4_6
156 J. GILL ET AL.
girls finely hone their decisions drawing upon a self-knowledge of intellec-

tual capacities, personal ambitions, and the responses of significant others.
The process of choice making draws on the girl’s capacity to imagine an
independent self no longer supported by the structures of school and fam-
ily. This process challenges her subjective sense of self in unfamiliar ways
that can be both stimulating and frightening. While the idea of moving on
can be exciting, in its promise of independence and beckoning adulthood,
it also implies going it alone. For as Walkerdine has pointed out, despite
the uncertainties, not to move forward on the educational conveyor belt is
never an option for the middle-class girl (Walkerdine et al. 2001).
The girls’ social backgrounds play a key role in career choice making.
Future visions are inevitably affected by prior experiences. For girls primed
by exposure to a range of life possibilities, locations, careers, and travel,
imagining themselves in different places and times is easier than for those
whose lives are more circumscribed. Of course, the former are from more
affluent homes with resources to fund enriching experiences. Thus, not
only does social background affect the girl’s academic achievement levels
but it also impacts on the directions taken after leaving school. As noted
by Wyn in her 2009 book Touching the Future:
In particular, young women from high socio-economic backgrounds appear

to be the most responsive to the pressure to achieve academic and labour
market success. (Wyn 2009, 8)
As seen in Chap. 5, the girls in our study whose parents had been
to university appear significantly advantaged in the process of choosing
courses and careers. Their narratives display a confidence borne out of
knowing they are traveling a familiar path, as well as one that is expected
of them. In projecting themselves into adult working lives, it seems that
the ability to come up with viable imagined possibilities enables them to
move forward, to make plans for the next stage. Once again, we note that
those girls whose life experiences have involved meeting with and knowing
about a variety of people, settings, and professions are better placed that
those with more limited experiences—a feature strongly reflected in their
deliberations about futures.
Curiously, while the dimension we have been calling cultural capital fea-
tures strongly in the girls’ hopes and plans, there is little mention of gender.
Of course, gender is not the main determinant in future decisions—for one
is never just simply gendered, but also belongs to collectivities of family,
POST-SCHOOL PATHWAYS AND GIRLS’ IMAGINED FUTURES 157
culture, neighborhood, community, clubs, social media groups, and oth-

ers that impact on daily experience. The absence of attention to gender in
their life choices initially seems to imply that the neoliberal conception of
individualization has won out over other worldviews regarding job choices.
It is as if the girls are saying ‘It all depends on the individual and we know
we can do anything!’ having become so attuned to gender divisions in the
world of their single-sex schooling, their homes, or more generally the
Australian workforce, that they do not seem worth mentioning. In our
analysis of the career choices of girls in senior school, we note evidence of
gendered thinking but gender was not nominated by the girls themselves
as a relevant factor in their future plans. Only when responding to ques-
tions about family and parenthood did they talk about what they saw as
an urgent need specific to their gender. This concerned not waiting too
long to get pregnant, if one had made a conscious choice to have children.
In other respects, their future plans appeared certainly individualized but
relatively ungendered. On closer inspection, however, the situation appears
a little different.
In this chapter, we look more closely at the girls at the point of leav-
ing school and at the ways in which they envision future lives and make
decisions about themselves. The process of making plans and envisioning
futures fuses two significant dimensions of girls’ subjectivities. Not only
do they have to make self-assessments which elicit aspects of self-concept,
capacity, and confidence but they also have to imagine themselves par-
ticipating in the adult world of women, work, relationships, and potential
parenthood. Given the issues raised in earlier chapters about girls’ self-
confidence along with their awareness of the challenges associated with
women’s lives in balancing career and other commitments, it is evident
that the task of future planning demands serious consideration.
CONTEMPLATING THE FUTURE
For some girls, the task of choosing forces them to confront an existential
awareness that has not been part of their previous thinking. Rather than a
somewhat disembodied notion of themselves ‘grown up’, in nominating
a career direction they have to take action on their own that relates to a
future in very specific and important ways. The task of being the chooser
is necessarily accomplished on one’s own behalf, provoking a heightened
sense of individualization and compelling them to think of themselves
as autonomous individuals, separate from the more familiar collective of
158 J. GILL ET AL.
class and group. In new and powerful ways, their choices provoke subjec-
tive responses depending on their level of self-awareness and readiness to
embark on the thinking involved. Many informants are acutely aware of
their position as being solely responsible for their decisions. They labor
under the idea that choice is to be ‘of their own free will’, while at the
same time they try to work out which choice would leave the chooser best
placed for whatever might happen next. And, as we have seen in Chap. 4,
much of the girls’ earlier choice making—about clothes, behavior, style—is
heavily influenced by a gender code developed with a group of peers for the
purpose of belonging and fitting in—hardly an experience of being freely
choosing individuals. In opting for a career, the girls see it as important
that the choice is theirs, freely taken, and many cite parental support for
their own ‘free choice’. This situation recalls Dillabough’s comment that
Bourdieu’s point, I believe, is that no one is ultimately free. Individuals are

certainly bound by the conditions of their political, economic and cultural
circumstances. (Dillabough 2004, 498)
Certainly, the girls in our study show marked effects of their cultural cir-
cumstances, being generally from relatively advantaged backgrounds and
well versed in acceptable ways of being for adolescent girls in the twenty-
first-century urban Australia. As noted in Chap. 5, only one dimension of
their economic, cultural, and social conditions—the level of parents’ edu-
cation—appeared to have a profound effect on their approach to choos-
ing post-school pathways. There was a marked difference between the
experiences of girls whose parents had university experience and those
who had not. Thus, their responses reflect differences in the availability of
relevant cultural capital brought to bear on decision making. Here, we are
interested in the ways girls’ career choices also reflect this factor, with par-
ticular reference to the case of girls with nongraduate parents—the first-
generation university students—and how they approach career choice.
Analysis of the interview material revealed the girls’ use of a different
lens from which to view their imagined future selves from the one they
had applied to the question of school subjects. No longer could they lin-
ger within the time shelter afforded by schooling; they must leave this
particular educational arena and in the process of leaving, envisage future
directions. Many express a desire for independence, a welcome sense of
freedom and lifting of restriction, even if they are to continue living at
home. Independence for these girls appears to refer to a state of mind
more than anything else. They do not anticipate changed living condi-
tions—at least not yet! Many see themselves as benefitting from par-
ents’ ongoing care as they leave school and envisage a gradual entry into
increasing financial independence. For some, there are qualifications in
this process as Ellen says:
my parents want me to be independent when I get to uni. They are going

to try to not support me so much so I’ll have to earn my own money then.
Ellen’s statement highlights the security of her background as she reg-

isters she has always had ‘so much’ support. Her parents’ wishes for her
to be more self-sufficient are enacted within the security of their shared
class position. Others from less privileged backgrounds are confronted by
the harsher reality of needing to organize some form of financial indepen-
dence, whether that be study support or part-time employment, in order
to embark on post-school education. Still others are hopeful that they will
be able to secure full employment in order to fund themselves, a brave
ambition given the current high levels of youth unemployment.
While it is clear from the interviews that there are considerable differ-
ences between the girls in terms of economic security, there is also a strong
sense that they feel all in the same boat in terms of making decisions about
life pathways. Their comments are infused with ideals of equity and the
general understanding that everybody has both the opportunity and the
responsibility to make their ‘own’ decisions. On the basis of her study of
over 1000 young Australians, Bulbeck writes:
Young people yearn for and believe in equal opportunities, but … their
‘imagined life stories’ indicate massive inequalities in the personal resources
that will allow them to achieve their goals. […]They claim to live in a world
of gender equality, even as they continue to cherish performances of gender
difference. (Bulbeck 2012, 17)
The girls in our studies exhibit similar disjunctions between their per-
ceptions of an ideal of social equity and the reality of significant gender
difference in the future worlds of both work and domesticity. Their capac-
ity to hold to what might be conflicting, if not mutually exclusive, desires
is a significant finding that should not be dismissed as illogical but rather
as indicative of a potentially suppressed knowledge of the difficulties
involved.
160 J. GILL ET AL.
For example, as Zannettino discovered with slightly younger girls’

imaginary constructions of their future selves, motherhood took center
stage. But this imagined reality was perceived as needing careful nego-
tiation and mediation as the girls realized the potential conflict between
mothering and career. In the voice of one informant:
My dream is not to stay home and look after children, although I would like
children in my life. I would like to travel a lot, to be my own person at the
same time, and have a job I really enjoy and that I’m good at. (Zannettino
2008,469)
Others in the present study speak about the choice between mother-
hood and career as ‘difficult’. At times, it seems as though the idealization
of life as an adult woman with all its impossibilities is one way in which to
stave off the difficulties of choice in the present, lest one be limited by the
frightening consequences.
The ‘choice’ of going to university appears to have become the most
common orientation for the girls in the study, so much so that it hardly
emerges as choice at all. Baker (2008, 7) describes the progression to
university as ‘an inevitable choice’ so much has the idea been adopted
and accepted by current generations of young Australians. The girls in
our studies have similar notions, with the majority (75%) identifying uni-
versity as their preferred choice post-school. As Donna, a potentially first-
generation university informant, says ‘I always thought I’ll be going to
uni when I finish year 12’ in which she typifies the attitude of the major-
ity of her peers. However, for those whose families had no experience of
university life the idea of ‘university’ is very vague. For example, Marie at
year 10: ‘I definitely want to go to uni at the end of school but other than
that I’m not sure yet.’ Here, university appears almost as an extension of
school with the girls expecting that university experience will enable them
to work out a direction for the next stage.
By choosing a generalist degree at university, girls can delay or post-
pone the actual business of career choice for a little longer, despite the two
being seen as intimately related in much of the official career development
literature. For some girls, the idea of university presents as a sort of mora-
torium on future planning, a choice that precludes the need to choose. So
choice is delayed until after university. As Peta comments:
…the main priority for us all right now is what happens immediately after
uni. I suppose once I’ve settled down and everything my Mum and Dad will
probably start asking about getting a partner and stuff.
Here, the speaker rejects the idea of the move to university as life defin-
ing and prefers to see the ‘what happens next’ question as more impor-
tant—as well as enabling a delay in choice making. Curiously, she refers to
her parents’ expectations as the primary driver for herself to begin separat-
ing from being dependent upon parents, a position that is both somewhat
childlike and reflective of a middle-class consciousness. In addition, she
seems to be sure the same consideration would apply to all her friends.
In the process of nominating an idea of working life after school, the girls
continually waver between a position in which they are maintaining child-
hood privileges associated with parental protection, as in Peta above, and
trying to assume a more independent position. In this sample, indepen-
dence is less often seen and if seen is always qualified.
CHOICE SEEN AS BOTH POSITIVE AND IMPERATIVE

FOR NEOLIBERALS!
The girls interviewed welcome the idea that theirs is the right to choose, a
right which they regard as synonymous with an essential freedom indica-
tive of power over oneself. This position aligns with the understanding of
a neoliberal subject who espouses values of self-reliance, autonomy, and
independence (Davies and Bansell 2007). In Baker’s study of low-SES
young women, she notes that they too see choice as necessarily progres-
sive, democratic, and egalitarian, as exemplified by one speaker:
It’s good to be a girl, now that there’s a lot of choice for everyone; you can
be whoever you want to be so it’s much better than it was. (Baker 2008, 53)
Certainly, the sentiment of present times being better for girls and
women is repeated by many girls in our studies. This sentiment is stron-
gest among the year 10 informants who were the youngest to be asked. By
the senior year, the girls are significantly more realistic and less optimistic
about their potential futures.
The idea of choice itself holds both positive and negative connotations.
While the girls generally welcome the idea of having the right to make
162 J. GILL ET AL.
choices about their futures, in confronting choice the girls become newly
aware of the risks involved. Many girls speak about their concerns to get the
choice ‘right’. Given the way in which the curriculum structure in Australian
senior schools functions as a centrifuge, spinning off students through one-
way doors without return possibilities, their concern is surely warranted.
Choices against certain subjects can shut students out from particular learn-
ing areas in the future, thereby foreclosing options. Consequently, the cur-
riculum structure in this neoliberal form of education functions in much
the same way as had the traditional streaming of students by measured
IQ, forcing a selection which reproduces distinctions of class and gender.
However, the current sorting function is not readily recognized because
the students are now themselves responsible for making the selection. The
process works to confirm the concept of differential abilities as set patterns
rather than offering potentially different routes to achievement.
Although most of the girls in our studies are not disadvantaged by any
of the usual classifications, their case falls at the acutely sensitive point
wherein aspirational middle-class parents look to schooling to give their
daughters a ‘good education’ which is commonly interpreted as achiev-
ing university admission. For those girls whose parental background does
not include university experience, the issue of choosing subjects carefully
takes on an added significance. These girls see themselves as pioneers in
breaking new ground for their families in completing school successfully
and going on to higher education. And they understand that it is their
responsibility for a choice of strategy to optimize their chance of fulfilling
their parents’ hopes. This situation is reminiscent of Reay’s wry comment
that ‘education has been reinvented as an aspirational project for the self—
within a neo-liberal framework’ (Reay 2013, 665).
At the same time, the girls seem to really like the idea of choice and to
see themselves as choosers with responsibility. In this, they are in line with
neoliberal ideology in which the individual competitor is a key player and
those who don’t join in are ‘losers’. Baker argues (Baker 2008) that a pro-
gressive ideology of choice is overstated, functioning to hide the ongoing
potential for inequity and injustice in the lives of young women. While the
girls in our studies could be seen to be more privileged than Baker’s infor-
mants, they too subscribe to the idea of a socially progressive ideology of
freedoms for girls and women in current times.
However, their actual experience of choosing is often inconsistent with
their ideological position. For example, as we argued earlier the idea of
free choice is itself an illusion as choices are inevitably made in terms of life
circumstances. In the case of adolescent girls, choice about how one pres-
ents oneself in terms of dress and style can often be a function of advice
from the group of girls to whom one belongs or wants to belong, rather
than being a freedom of self-expression. As we have seen in Chap. 4, the
powerful friendship group can at times replace the traditional institutions
of family and school in its capacity to prescribe decisions for individual
girls, especially in the junior high school years. By senior school, at a time
when school assumes a more directive and businesslike role in terms of its
overall project, the choice of subjects, and by implication careers, becomes
a compulsory and unavoidable feature of their experience.
In a similar vein, Australian higher education once reserved for the
top 5% of the population is now open to a much larger proportion in a
reconfigured and much enlarged university system. Even as an ‘inevitable’
choice, it still holds concerns for girls who do not see themselves as intel-
lectually strong. Some of the girls interviewed in our studies try to deal
with the tension with humor, as when Donna says
…we talk about uni and what if we don’t make it through uni and what are
we going to do … sort of joke and say we’ll just marry someone rich (laughs).
In this comment, Donna shows she understands herself as a ‘new

woman’ for whom the old customs of relying on—or trying to ‘catch’—a
rich husband are no longer available, even laughably outdated. But her
next comment following a question about her parents’ attitude to her
career plans shows she is very aware of the risks in the path she plans to
take:
They’re pretty excited because they didn’t go to uni when they finished
school … they want me to succeed … they know I’m so keen on going and
wanting to do architecture … they’re pretty happy about it … they’ll be
happy when I finish it … I will be too.
Other girls also face the challenge to ‘make the grade’ in families where
there is no experience of higher education—some like Amanda who, when
asked about her parents’ reactions to her plans, says
…I don’t like to talk about it … they’re very high scores. I don’t expect
them to be interested … in case I don’t get it … I don’t really say a lot just in
case … I just keep it to myself really.
164 J. GILL ET AL.
Some girls feel exposed if they name an ambition and anticipate embar-
rassment and disappointment if their grades are not high enough. A strik-
ing feature of the girls’ responses is the way in which each girl appears to
feel compromised in being positioned as a competitor, an alien quality in
terms of her previous school experience in which she has spent years as a
fellow traveler, functioning at more or less the same level as her classmates.
As noted above, the girls’ narratives evidenced a widely shared percep-
tion that life in the present is much better for women. This attitude aligns
with a rejection of feminism as a discourse of victimhood, once regarded as
a necessary reflection of women’s situation, but which fails to adequately
reflect the reality of the lives of young women today (Bulbeck 2012;
Scharff 2012). So the girls’ attitude to the future is evoked in terms of a
conviction that the world is there for the choosing, even as they experience
difficulties in transforming this idea into their lived realities. They relish
their self-perceptions as choosers and believe that through choice they can
assert their rights and power. But as we have seen, their choices are often
forced within a set of demands that call upon their self-estimation of abili-
ties and capitals through which they are governed and potentially tied to
precarious and uncertain futures.
A paradoxical feature of the girls’ position is that while they reject the idea
of a gender gap within a generally accepted ideology that girls can do any-
thing they choose, their actual choices, like those found by previous research
in the area, emerge as highly gendered. Bulbeck summarizes this position as:
…while desire for education has exploded, the gendered nature of occupa-
tional desires has shifted but not shattered. (Bulbeck 2012, 30)
A similar picture emerges from our study in terms of data gained from
the survey of 260 participants. Of the 25% of girls (N = 65) who planned
to enter Technical and Further Education (TAFE) courses, the largest
group opted for the vocation of beauty therapist, followed by childcare,
hairdresser, and then hospitality, leaving only 17% (N = 11) doing courses
leading to less gender traditional employment. Of the 75% (N = 195) who
planned to study at university, the largest group planned to study arts
and humanities (30.4%, N = 60), slightly larger than those who opted for
health sciences (29.8%, N = 58). For this group, the most popular career
choice was teaching followed by nursing, but their list of possible careers
was considerably broader than those of the TAFE girls. Those aiming for
degrees envisage a wider range of possible jobs rather than being narrowed
down to a particular area as happens in the trade training.
In summary, their career aspirations continue to be oriented around
traditional expectations of gender-appropriate work, with most of the girls
wanting to do something that involves caring or looking after people, even
if their official career choice sounds highly professional such as medical
doctor, engineer, or personnel manager.
It is disappointing to note that the girls’ aspirations are also uninformed
by knowledge of current workforce composition. Features such as the
current oversupply of primary schoolteachers, the huge fluctuations in
demand for engineers, the lack of available positions for qualified nurses
in the big city hospitals are unknown. The girls interviewed appear to see
the choice of course and career as a function of individual ability and per-
sonal aspiration unfettered by structural features of the workforce. From
our analysis, it would seem incumbent on the school to provide students
with this knowledge in order for coherent and realistic choices to be made.
NOT THE PERSON IN CHARGE

Few, if any, of the girls see themselves as becoming leaders in their chosen
professions. They are much more likely to position themselves as team
players or as junior employees. In Ellen’s case, there is an explicit rejection
of being in a leadership position:
Ellen (year 12):I didn’t want to do architecture … because I didn’t really

want to be the person in charge. I just want to work for people … the guy
who spoke to us about architecture, he stressed that you’re in charge … if
anything goes wrong you have to be prepared to take responsibility and
make sure it’s all followed through correctly … it’s a lot of pressure … cos
he said that if you do make mistakes often then you might end up in court.
While the above example is particular to the idea of sole responsibil-

ity and then liability, it is not unusual for the girls to describe themselves
as workers in lesser roles. The survey responses revealed that the idea of
being your own boss is not very important for the majority of the girls
(Fig. 6.1). Only one-third across the years 10–12 aspire to be employ-
ers, while the rest are either neutral or reject the notion. This proportion
does not increase with their progress through the senior years suggesting
166 J. GILL ET AL.
Fig. 6.1 Responses in percentages to Thinking about the future, how important is
it for you to be doing a job in which you are your own boss
some strongly internalized views about not wanting to have leadership

responsibility.
To some degree, this finding can be explained by the absence of power-
ful female role models in their lives—as almost no mothers (0.8%) of the
girls in this survey are in management or corporate roles, although their
school leadership teams do include both women and men. Nor, however,
do these girls conform to the image of superwomen, the can-do girls as
proposed by Harris (2004) as the dominant picture of girlpower at work.
At this stage, these girls do not expect exceptional careers, rather they
imagine themselves content with being middle-level players at work.
If the girls are shying away from leadership as employers, it seems
unlikely that the current gendered nature of the workforce will change.
The global gender gap index in English-speaking countries hovers around
0.70–0.75 where 1.0 indicates equality (WEF 2015). This figure is con-
sistent with the gender difference in wages which persists despite a range
of laws put in place to render male and female workers more equal. Once
again, it would appear that the girls have internalized messages about the
ways in which work is structured by gender with the predominance of
males in leading roles. Across English-speaking countries, media repre-
sentations of leadership in business and the professions would reinforce
the picture of male dominance. Consequently, the girls appear to have
accommodated to this gendered distinction by positioning their imagined
working selves as followers rather than leaders. The presence of capable
women at the helm needs to begin with a rewriting of female occupational

desires (Bulbeck 2012).
Nonetheless, one survey finding that is promising is shown in Fig. 6.2.
For more than 60% of the girls, an important dimension of a satisfying
job is their participation in decisions, an orientation that could be made to
grow through careful mentoring and guidance. This dimension has been
shown to be crucially important in studies of the retention of professional
women in careers (Ayre et al. 2014).
CLASS EFFECTS IN THE SCHOOL TO WORK TRANSITION

Another striking feature of the girls’ talk about futures is that, despite
many of them having had part-time jobs or vacation jobs, most have only
very slight knowledge of life in the workforce. This means that in their
imagined working futures they are trying to fit into situations that are
mostly unknown.
In year 10 you do work education which is based around all the careers
and things like that … you do a survey thing on the computer, it’s a pro-
gram that the school buys and it looks at your interests and your profiles
and then gives you job options. I came up with about 10 things, teaching,
physiotherapy … but a lot of different things more to do with people rather
than being in an office … you get like a package thing and you take it away
but it’s really up to you whether you look at it or not … Macie year 11
it for you to participate in decision making
168 J. GILL ET AL.
Macie’s comment illustrates a tension between using a standardized

approach such as a computer program that works out what each candi-
date is best suited to and undertaking the decision by oneself, the latter
being the way one is supposed to do it. For many girls, going through the
motions of subject and career choice causes them to reiterate an under-
standing of self-responsibility as the ultimate decision maker.
Previous research has detailed surveys listing young people’s aspirations
for life in the twenty-first century and has demonstrated that, while ambi-
tions are formed in similar terms across class differences, there remains a
class effect in that the young people from privileged backgrounds have
more resources to help them fulfill their future dreams (Bulbeck 2012;
Harris 2008). Once again, the ideology of equity functions to screen out
the general understanding of class privilege:
They (and indeed their parents) do not understand the world in terms of class
relations, but proclaim that everyone is ‘the same’, even as they are aware of
fine distinctions in economic resources and cultural capital (Bulbeck 2012).
In a similar vein, in this study we have been able to show differences

in the quality of thinking that goes into the reflexive biographies of the
girls across the schools by capturing their thought processes at the time of
decision making.
IMAGINING A CAREER
Most of the girls responded to the schools’ demand that they nominate
a career direction in order to assist in the subject choices. One problem
with this exercise is that by year 12 almost every one of our informants
had changed her mind about the career selected two years earlier. Some of
them had changed because of not liking the particular subjects associated
with their career choice, others had found more information about what
the particular career entailed and found it less attractive, still others vacil-
lated in some distress about not knowing what to do. The high degree of
change would appear to demonstrate the problem of requiring them to
make a choice before having sufficient knowledge and understanding of
the range of possible careers.
While many girls may not have been clear about the particularities of
certain careers, they do share a common idea of what a career was in terms
of an adult working life. In other words, they share a conception that the
work should be both interesting and rewarding. In the interviews, despite
being unsure of their particular choice, the girls acknowledge some

ideas about careers in general that show their desire to find a career
they liked and one that would continue to develop their learning. Some
examples:
Peta (year 11):a career is more of a long term thing … [you] need to work
your way up.
Raeleen (year 10): I want to be learning new skills every day … [I] … don’t
want to be stuck at one point … I want to be challenged and moving up.
These are the voices of ‘new’ women careerists who want their chosen
field, whatever it be, to provide opportunities for personal growth and
learning. The analysis of the survey responses shows that similar views are
held by the majority of the girls (Fig. 6.3).
Whereas previous generations of women had seen the usefulness of hav-
ing a job as just a way of filling in time between leaving school and mar-
riage, the girls in the current study are clearly anticipating finding in work
a serious commitment and the opportunity for continuing growth. But
the problem of choice still haunts them too. As Raeleen (year 10) says it
is important to
…work out what you want to do before you go and get married or have
children … you have to be sure of what you want to do before you go and
do it … like raising a family…
it for you to be doing a job in which you learn new skills all the time
170 J. GILL ET AL.
So they are not planning to be drifters. Instead, they want a clear idea
of what they would hope for in life rather than wait to see what happens.
PAY VERSUS JOB SATISFACTION

At a general level, many girls note the significance of job satisfaction, say-
ing that money was important but not so much as being in a job they
would enjoy doing. For example, Alexia is very clear about the pleasure
to be had from work and could imagine her chosen career—nursing—as
delivering great satisfaction.
Alexia (year 11): (on being asked what affects her choice of career) … most
important that I enjoy it basically. I’m getting what I want out of it … that
I’m always there (at work) because I want to be … enough money to live
off … in nursing I’d be doing it for the satisfaction and for helping peo-
ple … money wouldn’t really come into it.
This sentiment of job satisfaction over monetary reward was not

reflected by the majority of the girls surveyed who nominated earn-
ing power as both important and a critical feature of their chosen job
(Fig. 6.4).
Others who are less sure of their chosen career speak in more general
terms about their investment in work in the future:
Nancy (year 11): I would like to have a good job as well as be happy in my
relationship and in my work as well. I don’t want to feel second best.
The positive idea about enjoying work and also needing money comes
through in many imagined futures:
Macie (year 11): I’d want to enjoy it … like looking forward to going to
work … money probably helps so long as I can hold up a good lifestyle. Have
a car, pay for children if I have them.
In the above quotation, the speaker is clear about the need to enjoy
work but she is also aware of the material conditions—money would
‘probably’ help and the idea of lifestyle is developed in terms of a car and
possibly children. The latter remark clearly identifies a sense of children
seen as a choice rather than the inevitable destiny.
it for you to be doing a job in which you earn a lot of money
For some girls, the idea of an adult working life is seen in terms of serv-
ing particular needs:
Amanda (year 10): for me a job would be just to support my lifestyle. I like
playing a lot of sport and I like shopping and spending money so I need a
job that will let me do that.
For this speaker, a job is a means to an end which involves freedom

to play and material goods rather than a quest for more knowledge and
personal fulfillment. While there are similar elements of a ‘me generation’
outlook in other comments, the majority of the girls’ responses are in line
with the idea of doing something socially useful and individually fulfilling.
Most of the girls expect their careers to provide meaningful work.
For Kerry at year 10, meaningful work means a chance to work toward
her ideal of social justice. She sees herself championing the cause of the
marginalized:
Kerry: if I do become successful … I’m a believer in fair trade and donations

to third world countries … I would like to be able to give a voice to those
people … child soldiers, to be able to tell people about … homelessness and
animal cruelty.
172 J. GILL ET AL.
Contact with people emerges as significant in most girls’ anticipation of

a satisfying job. In this outcome, the girls have found a way of reconciling
their deeply felt ‘thinking of others’ orientation with being a committed
worker (Fig. 6.5).
A clear and consistent majority of the girls feel it is important that
their jobs would involve contact with a lot of people—in many cases in
interviews, this is expressed more specifically in terms of helping people—
children, the poor, the sick, and so on. This response reflects their ideal
of work as performing a service for others, a position that fits with their
development of a female gender identity discussed in Chaps. 2 and 4.
At the same time, their career has to be something they have chosen,
identified as fitting with their skill set and intellectual and social capac-
ity, a source of personal pride and continuance. This somewhat romantic
vision of career is evidently produced by both their senior school experi-
ence and the broader neoliberal ideology that interpellates them to pres-
ent as individual choosers and inflects a good deal of career success in
their future narratives. They are, following Bourdieu, learning to play the
game (of schooling and its purposes) in ways associated with their position
in the mainstream of young female lives in the twenty-first century. The
question here is for educators to relate to the adequacy of their grounding
it for you to be doing a job in which you have contact with a lot of people
in knowledge and understanding of the world of work and of their own

potentials in order to be able to make viable decisions.
DREAMING OF DOMESTIC EQUALITY

The girls’ future narratives often—but not always and not centrally—
include the idea of a partner. Partners mentioned are always male but
otherwise largely unspecified in terms of looks or lifestyle, although there
is some mention of the desirability of their having a good job. The main
feature of their envisioned partnerships is equality in all things, with par-
ticular stress on domestic chores. Here is a typical comment:
Donna (year 11): I would expect him … everything to be equal, like house-
work. I’d expect him to have a job as well and both of us work … I want
everything to be equal.
Recent studies of the typical share of domestic chores accomplished by

men and women in the household very rarely reveal this idealized equal
sharing as evidenced by the girls in the present study. In most cases, it
seems that women continue to do the major share of the domestic labor,
while their male partners are more likely to take responsibility for chores
outside the home such as gardening, car maintenance, and chauffeuring
children (ABS: Time Use Surveys 2013). The young informants appear
unaware of the difference between their ideal of equity and the likely real-
ity, even though their experience in their own homes reflects typical gen-
der divisions of labor. In presenting their ideas about how their lives will
be, they consistently envisage a much more equal partnership as part of
their claim of the brave new world for women they spoke of earlier.
Nonetheless, in terms of actual work all the girls see women’s and men’s
work both inside and outside the household as equally important. In their
survey responses, they strongly disagree (over 80% negative) with the idea
that men have careers while women have jobs. These findings suggest that
girls expect to have a career (Fig. 6.6).
Their responses to other propositions of gender equality are not as
strong but still positive. More than 57% reject the breadwinner–home-
maker model for themselves (see Fig. 6.7), apparently expecting to con-
tribute equally to the family income (over 60% agreeing, Fig. 6.8).
174 J. GILL ET AL.
Fig. 6.6 Responses in percentages to the question Men have careers, women have
jobs
Fig. 6.7 Responses in percentages to the question All in all it is better for the
family if the husband provides most of the income and the wife takes care of home and
the family
They do not agree that a woman with an interesting job would nega-
tively impact on relationships with male partners (over 74% disagreeing,
Fig. 6.9) and they also disagree with the proposition that a man’s career is
more important than the woman’s in the event that decisions have to be
made for the good of the family (see Fig. 6.10).
One proposition which showed more ambivalence concerned expecting
the man to relocate to another in city if the woman gets a good job offer
Fig. 6.8 Responses in percentages to the question ‘Men and women should con-
tribute equally to the family income’
Fig. 6.9 Responses in percentages to the question ‘A woman’s relationship with

her partner is better if she doesn’t place too much importance on her job’
(see Fig. 6.11), the uncertainty of their responses being reflected in over 40%
undecided and about equal numbers of year 12 girls agreeing and disagreeing.
At the same time, as stated above, many girls describe themselves as not
wanting too much responsibility at work, not wanting to be the one in
charge, so their estimations of themselves at work draw on their sense of
themselves as persons of capacity but also with indications of wanting to
be helpful, valued as team players, and being socially useful.
176 J. GILL ET AL.
Fig. 6.10 Responses in percentages to the question ‘If someone’s career should
suffer for the good of the family, it should be the wife’s and not the husband’s’
Fig. 6.11 Responses in percentages to the question ‘A man should be prepared to

relocate if his wife gets a better job offer in another city’
IMAGINING A FUTURE OF WORK PLUS CHILDREN

While the traditional ideal of marriage might appear less dominant in
these girls’ future visions than once was the case, motherhood drew
frequent mentions. The prospect of children enters into their future
dreams more often than partners. In this case, the girls are aware that
the inclusion of children in a ‘having it all’ life story is not likely to be
without particular implications for their careers. The following com-

ment is a typical example:
Donna (year 12): I want to get married, have children and be an architect
at the same time … I always think about it because my family tell me that it’s
a pretty stressful job and you’ll always be working, if you’re going to have a
family it’s going to be hard … so I always wonder.
Discussions about family make it clear that for many girls having chil-
dren is a choice, notably one that involves timing:
Kerry (year 12): I’d like to work for someone else first and get the hang of it
and then definitely get my own business and then get married … I’d rather
be younger when starting a family … late 20s maybe but no older than that.
This comment may have proceeded from frequent media discussions about
the desirability for women to bear children before they are ‘too old’ but it also
reflects a teenager’s vision of the idea of being 30 as impossibly ancient! It
indicates the idea that girls must accomplish a great deal in a relatively short
time, a feature present in many of the girls’ comments. In this way, the girls’
stress about choices is further emphasized by the notion that a great deal has
to be done in a very short time and will require careful management.
For some, the idea of being able to work part-time appeals:
Peta (year 12): if I do have children I’d like to sort of work from home if I
can, sort of work part time … I’d like to be able to work and balance fam-
ily life as well. But I don’t know if it would be possible. If I have a child in
the first couple of years I can’t because I have to take care full time sort of
thing, I would probably do freelance journalism I guess or graphic designer.
Perhaps write a novel or script or something—something I could still do at
home while working.
In this connection, some of the girls directly name their own experience
of women working plus family as both indicating how heavy the commit-
ment can be and admiration for the working mother.
Sally (year 12): I look at my mum, she’ll work all day and then come home
and cook and clean … she is pretty much full time at work and then full time
work at home … she’s got all the stuff at home as well.
178 J. GILL ET AL.
Sally has a concrete example of her mother taking the whole respon-
sibility of work and family. She recognizes that this is no easy life—but
definitely possible and apparently desirable.
The survey data show that nearly half the girls agree to the proposition
that it is difficult to raise a family and have a successful career. Perhaps
many of them, like Sally, have seen mothers work hard at both. Older girls
appear less likely to see the combination as straightforward (Fig. 6.12).
Fig. 6.12 Responses in percentages to It is difficult for women to have successful

careers and raise a family at the same time
Fig. 6.13 Responses in percentages to It is difficult for men to have successful

careers and raise a family at the same time
When the same proposition was made regarding men, very few girls
agreed with most imagining fewer difficulties for men in combining career
and family. This result suggests that the girls maintain the traditional
image of childcare as primarily women’s work and not men’s, despite con-
siderable media attention to the role and importance of fathers in recent
times (Fig. 6.13).
While we have argued that the girls are both aware of and affected by
media representations of gender relating to how girls should look, act, and
behave, we have to conclude that their response to media is perhaps less
keenly felt when the topic is about men’s roles in childcare.
GIRLS AS UNITS OF CAPACITY

In order to make choices about future careers, the senior school cur-
riculum requires students to know about the connections between study
pathways and career prospects within which the university requirements
and/or assumptions of prior learning are a specific feature. The girls
are expected to have a reasonably accurate understanding of their own
capabilities in which their teachers play a huge role, along with their
schooling history, annual reports, and so on. Even more importantly,
they have to have a positive mind-set in which they see future learn-
ing as part of their continuing education whether or not they choose
to enroll in higher education. They need a level of confidence about
their own capacity to advance in their chosen direction and to enjoy the
experience.
These middle-class girls appear to have understood from their parents
the importance of a fulfilling career. They see themselves as having the
capacity for work and as potential workers, even though they may not be
clear about which line of work they will follow. Far from being daunted by
the prospect of being in paid work for much of their futures, they envisage
having a job that is rewarding and will generate future learning opportuni-
ties. Their optimism is perhaps a product of their lack of awareness of the
realities of working lives, along with their general sense of progress and
excitement at the prospect of moving on.
CONCLUSION
In our analysis of the girls’ thinking about their future lives, we have sug-
gested that the senior curriculum at schools which requires them to opt
180 J. GILL ET AL.
for particular courses and careers should also include education about the
various workforce directions, the economic, legal, and political ramifica-
tions of particular industries, and specific commentary on the degree of
gender inclusiveness of particular fields—this latter having been shown
to be important in terms of worker satisfaction and sense of belonging.
The topic of gender in the workforce is beyond the scope of this book,
save to say that recent revelations concerning the problems experienced by
professional women in attempting to climb to higher levels of their profes-
sions indicate that there is a need for young women to factor in informa-
tion about pockets of established male exclusiveness before venturing into
related career choices.
In terms of their futures beyond the world of work, we note that chil-
dren and babies are mentioned relatively often—but always as a considered
choice, neither inevitable nor assured. Several girls note the problem for
women’s careers when children are involved, reflecting the ongoing issue
of childcare provision which has become something of a political football
in the Australian media in recent times. As planners, the girls emerge as
more realistic about children than they are about partners or jobs. Clearly,
for these girls the traditional picture of the woman as mother as the high-
est point of female fulfillment is no longer the dominant image, but the
idea of children does appear among their imagined lives as adult women,
most of which have yet to be scripted.
There was of course considerable overlap in the girls’ thinking between
the ways in which they attempted to select study paths and their imagined
future careers. While the rhetoric of the future is replete with reference
to new ideas, jobs never before contemplated, welcome opportunities for
well-educated newcomers, and so forth, the reality of the girls’ choices
presented here is neither radical nor revolutionary. The adolescent ideal-
ism as expressed by one girl who suggested a career relating to assisting
third-world countries stands out from the fairly predictable nominations
from the rest. From an educationist viewpoint, this suggests the need
for much more exploration about future possibilities. Toward the end
of the study, we were drawn to register that the dominance of the all-
encompassing competitive achievement orientation seemed to prevent the
girls from much further thinking. One clear expectation that did emerge
was that they would all be much happier when the final examinations were
over—that appeared to be the highest point in their envisioned futures at
this time.
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CHAPTER 7
Girls at School: A More Complex Picture
Alice … is the Victorian child putting together the wild world of grown
up rules and hidden intentions and violent feelings and incomprehensi-
ble conventions. (Byatt, A Whistling Woman, 2002, 141)
It seems that the above comment about Alice in Wonderland could equally
apply to the young women and girls whose stories have populated this book.
With her long golden hair and pretty blue dress, the fictional Alice appears
as the embodiment of childhood innocence and Victorian girlhood. As we
have seen in the preceding chapters, that idealist image has not been totally
squelched, although it possibly lives on in the minds of policy makers and
service providers as an adult construction of girl rather more vibrantly than
in the girls themselves. But that’s not the whole story of Alice. She is also
an explorer to whom it falls to engage with the rules and concerns of adults
and peers in her present world and with all of the inherent contradictions,
logics, and performativities she confronts in the different zones into which
she travels. And her energy and effort in trying to accommodate to these
rules and to recognize cultural patterns and achieve some sort of sense of
herself as belonging are also recognizably at play in the world of girls today.
In this work, we have suggested that not all is well with the situa-
tion of schoolgirls today across the English-speaking world. We do this in
the face of our recognition and acknowledgment of the many significant
improvements in girls’ education in the past three decades. In fact, girls’

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52487-4_7
184 J. GILL ET AL.
academic successes have become so much an expected part of the current

order of schooling and achievement that they go almost without saying.
As Baker (2010, 1) points out: ‘The prevalence of the discourse of success-
ful girls (and failing boys) in Australia and internationally has been widely
documented’. The discursive pairing of successful girls and failing boys is a
deliberate ploy which we have amplified in the earlier chapters to demon-
strate the political concerns that have haunted the girls in education move-
ment since its inception in the 1970s. Our position is that the girls’ success
has been used by the boys-in-education lobby to accentuate their claim
of boys’ disadvantage and to urge more attention, funding, and remedial
treatments for boys in school. In this effort, they have been decidedly suc-
cessful, even if demonstrable results from educational programs for boys
are yet to be accredited as enduring features of schooling outcomes.
Furthermore, we have suggested in this work that educational research
has been neglectful of girls during the twenty-first century, an outcome
due to the concentration of attention from educators, policy makers,
researchers, and governments on questions of boys’ education. The impe-
tus for this book has stemmed from some challenging suggestions in the
small stock of work on girls’ education in recent times which urges the
need to look behind the fact of good results for some girls into the pro-
cesses and practices of schooling through which girls are produced as ‘sub-
jects of capacity’ (McRobbie 2007, 726).
We deliberately chose to concentrate on the high school years for our
investigations as they comprise a specific time of change during which
the girl students are required to focus on ideas about themselves in terms
of subjective identities and as soon-to-be adult women participating in
the world of work. Using the themes of gender and identities as works
in progress, we wanted to explore their sense of themselves as both indi-
vidual girls and as participants in collectivities of family and friends both
inside and outside school. Hence, we sought their views on the life worlds
they inhabit presently and those they could imagine for themselves in the
future. At this point, it seems appropriate to look back over the ways in
which our argument has developed in order to present a more complete
picture of issues for girls in the current moment.
The closing decades of the twentieth century witnessed widespread
changes in the general understanding of girls’ needs in education.
Consequently, despite acknowledgment of persistent disadvantages related
to class, race, geographical location, and all the other minority labels,
girls in English-speaking societies are now seen as generally well served by
GIRLS AT SCHOOL: A MORE COMPLEX PICTURE 185
standard educational experience. While acknowledging the many signifi-

cant improvements in schooling outcomes for girls, we contend that the
situation is still precarious in its capacity to deliver an appropriate educa-
tion in terms of fitting girls for a fulfilling life.
We began this work by noting, alongside recognition of some girls’
academic success, a cultural phenomenon of widespread concern about
girls as presenting difficulties for educators, carers, parents, and guardians
generally. Charania (2010) describes this as an ‘articulated social anxiety’
about girls today which hinges on widely accepted truths about adolescent
girls in which
the very notion of girl is brought under a critical gaze and cast as a social
being: imagined and real, ideologically produced and physically experienced,
universal yet culturally specific. Charania (2010, 307)
In Chap. 1, we presented some examples of current writing about girls

which demonstrates this crisis ridden theme, amplified by current popular
media portrayals of girls living haphazard lives in the exciting but risky
spaces between peer friendships and a desired but-not-just-yet settlement
into key and potentially lasting relationships and careers.
A pervading sense of danger and risk prepares the ground for the main-
tenance of the sort of constant surveillance to which today’s girls are fre-
quently subjected. Some surveillance is exercised by parents and teachers
and other adults in positions of responsibility, but perhaps the most constant
and strict surveillance is exercised by the girls themselves, either on their
own or in their friendship groups as seen in Chap. 4. We showed the girls
as continually engaged in monitoring and modifying aspects of themselves,
their bodies, behavior, attitudes, and presentation of both themselves and
their peers. This work of establishing identities is often gendered in its gen-
eral aim of achieving a desirable and socially appropriate femininity within
the particular cultural group. The gendering of the girls was shown perhaps
most clearly in terms of their modifications of their behavior around males
in their life worlds, a practice we identified as indicative of their accommoda-
tion to the concept of a male power as by definition stronger than their own.
The debate about whether this surveillance has been produced by a
constructed crisis in order to condone the exercise of power over girls
or is a legitimate outcome of care and concern is beyond the scope of
our argument here. What we have shown is that there is a good deal of
uneasiness in girls’ public presence and self-rating as a result of their being
186 J. GILL ET AL.
constantly appraised and found wanting. Thus, the consistent research

findings of girls’ lacking the confidence and optimism about life chances
typical of their male peers can be seen as a product of the sociocultural
reproduction of a gender order in which girls are still classed as unequal
and wanting.
Following Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, we see the girls as absorbing
and acting upon the many gendered clues in their social and cultural con-
texts—their gendered habitus—which causes them to behave in ways con-
sistent with adolescent girl behavior and to exercise caution in relation to
situations and behavior which might feel disruptive in terms of acceptable
femininity. Researchers have found that some girls may at times resolve
the many inconsistencies they encounter by the exercise of a confront-
ing shamelessness (or ‘ladettes’ as termed by some British researchers e.g.
Jackson 2006) which allows them to act out an individualized position of
defiance and rebelliousness. At other times, girls will opt for a hyperfemi-
nine presentation which seeks to emulate the skinny models in the teen
fashion magazines and consciously sends the ‘right’ signals as fitting with
current teen fashion and sexual availability. And all the time the majority of
girls monitor themselves and one another as they trial a developing sense
of self within an environment of being constantly ‘on stage’, subject to the
gaze of others.
What emerges from this experience of constant monitoring is the girls’
culturally induced sense of imperfection, a pervasive, and awkward incom-
pleteness accompanied by the continual desire for betterment and the
commitment to work toward a more acceptable improved self, whether
that be in terms of physical perfection, likeability, school grades, or loy-
alty and friendship. In this connection, Gill (2008) writes of the current
dramatically increased intensity of self-surveillance, its extensiveness, and
related psychological requirements such as not only making over how one
is but also making over how one feels about oneself. The peer group which
can function as both a buffer to and an instrument of the girls’ constant
self-appraisal, plays a central role in the girl’s development of a socially
acceptable gendered identity among a set of peers. In terms of this func-
tion, school is crucially important for girls in that it provides a site wherein
the girls can establish themselves as socially aware and learn practices of
behaving that affirm their place as successful girls within their particular
groups and from there into the wider society.
In the second chapter, we presented key themes from current social
analysis which have sketched the ways of the world within which educa-
tion takes place and young people approach learning. These include the
idea of the risk society, a concept detailing the ways in which earlier tradi-
tional institutions such as home and family have lost their power to define
and determine how people should live, only to be replaced by institutions
with more economic leverage, seen as more appropriate to the needs of
the current times. Globalization and the knowledge economy are themes
that have impacted on schooling across the Western world, orchestrated
within a general arena dominated by neoliberal philosophy. Feminist the-
oreticians have argued that we have arrived at an era of post-feminism
wherein the major themes of feminism have been subsumed by the neo-
liberal political climate such that feminism appears outdated, irrelevant,
and only to be talked about in the past tense (McRobbie 2009; Scharff
2012). There have been many warnings that in post-feminism there will
be reversions to a gender order not very different from the one of the past,
although it may be presented in ways that sound more like the older femi-
nist ideals of freedom to be oneself, acceptance, and mutuality. The idea of
a new/old gender order—possibly policed by the girls and young women
themselves—comprises a recurrent theme in the analysis presented here.
In Chap. 2, in the overview of the research on gender we pointed out
that much of the early psychologically based study of what was called ‘sex
differences’ was grounded in male experience. A feature of this work was
to construct and compound any differences identified rather than register-
ing the differences within either sex which were often much larger than
differences between the two. We also noted the enduring power of the
truisms that still abound in terms of popular accounts of gender difference
(including those of teachers and parents), despite the fact that most of
them have been almost completely officially discounted. It would appear
that people are drawn to recreate the familiar distinctions in a world to
which they have become accustomed and consequently reiterate features
of gender division in expectations, behavior, and language. But how then
are we to account for the persistence of gender in everyday interactions,
in young children’s firmly held beliefs about a gender divided world? In
this instance, we employed Fine’s idea of seeing young children as ‘gen-
der detectives’ (Fine 2011) who are bent on reading the world in terms
of systematic distinctions from which they develop codes of thinking and
action.
Here too, we suggest the usefulness of a standpoint that refuses the
distinction between individual and society and sees the two as essentially
intermeshed. In this we call upon the work of Bourdieu, Connell, Nash,
188 J. GILL ET AL.
and numerous of their followers in our effort to explain gender not just in
terms of individual behavior nor in terms of generalizations about society
and culture but rather as formed in the interactions between the two in an
ongoing dynamic in which we are all involved. This standpoint enables a
rereading of some earlier research studies whereby we could point to the
sociocultural impact of particular gender classifications and the inevitable
variability in individual take-up of gendered positioning. The picture of
gender thus generated is of an ongoing, dynamic, interactive, and reflexive
feature of the lived world and its inhabitants. At this point we introduce
ways of researching gender and develop the idea of using mixed methods
as the best way to construct a comprehensive picture of gender as an active
construction deriving from people’s actions, experience and language, as
well as from cultural clues and social dimensions. From this position, we
turn to the work of schools and the girls being educated there.
We begin Chap. 3 with an overview of what we call the ‘girls in educa-
tion’ movement beginning in the last three decades of the last century
and currently languishing in the complacency induced by the demon-
strable success of some girls in high academic achievement. By returning
to an account of initiatives taken in the interests of girls’ schooling, we
show that the initial reformist energy was fuelled by a dawning realiza-
tion that up until the closing decades of the twentieth century most
girls across the English-speaking world had significantly fewer chances of
gaining a good education than did boys. They were less likely to com-
plete school, to study in the range of highly regarded mathematics and
science subjects, to be seen by teachers and parents as intelligent, or to
recognize the sexism inherent in gender division as exemplifying struc-
tural inequity.
Feminist educators working on a range of fronts strove to make girls’
experience of school, their curriculum choices, self-concepts, and future
planning more similar to those of their male peers. Some educationists
periodically called for more reflection on the type of education being pro-
moted and questioned if the changes really represented the interests and
needs of girls and worked toward their benefit. However, the current gen-
eral response has been inclined to ignore such questions and to celebrate
girls’ achievements as individualized success stories in ways consistent with
a neoliberal standpoint.
At the same time, the very success of some girls provoked a widespread
backlash in terms of attention being drawn to male underachievement,
which was shown all the more dramatically because of the girls’ success.
In fact, changes in the labor force, specifically the drying up of low-skilled

manual work which was once readily available to boys who left school
early, offer more ready explanations for boys being visibly disenfranchised
by current schooling in that it no longer operates as a stepping stone into
the workplace. However the potential offered by the discourse of ‘fail-
ing boys’ which pointed to schooling as the problem was taken up vehe-
mently by advocates of needy boys as schooling provided a target that was
both more immediate and easier than the labor restructuring provoked by
globalization and technological developments. The change in educational
attention from girls to boys was accompanied by a level of complacency
about girls’ schooling, as seen in a widespread demise in research on the
situation of girls in schools in recent decades.
By Chap. 4, it was time to look at studies focusing specifically on the
school experience of mainstream girls from the girls’ own points of view.
In Chaps. 4, 5 and 6, we provide accounts of in-depth studies conducted
over several years across four girls’ schools in two different Australian
states. In Chap. 4, we present the results of an investigation of girls’ sense
of themselves, their concerns, and their accommodation to and shared
experience of consensual attitudes about girls’ behavior and concerns.
In the first study, the girls across two different schools demonstrate
a good deal of common understanding about the meaning of gender in
terms of its effects on their lives, the ways they feel about their bodies,
themselves, their relationships with other girls, family members, and the
broader society. The idea of having to struggle with the sense of being
inadequate in terms of body image, weight, and general desirability is a
continual theme in these discussions. The commitment to being nice is
also pronounced in their accounts of how one ‘does girl’ in school. This
issue is presented in terms of a moral order of how one ‘ought’ to be and
also pragmatically in terms of their shared understanding of the value of
being conciliatory and smoothing away negative social interaction. Some
of the girls’ comments reveal them to be denying their own felt responses
in favor of an acceptable legible femininity—a situation deeply at odds with
the idea of the neoliberal individualized agent. The girls sound impres-
sively reflexive and self-aware as they talk about trying out attitudes and
behaviors which will be acceptable to their particular group of significant
others. A strong theme in their narratives concerns the ways in which they
are required—by themselves and others—to accommodate to the presence
of males in their lives. They speak of adopting strategies for ‘getting by’
and ‘not causing a fuss’ in which they give precedence to the male’s powers
190 J. GILL ET AL.
of defining the situation—in their language and behavior they often reiter-
ate a theme familiar from an earlier traditional gender order.
Chapters 5 and 6 present accounts of another study of girls in senior
high school years confronting the required curriculum choices and antic-
ipating their future lives. By studying mainstream girls in situations of
relative privilege—fee-paying schools—we are able to show some of the
potential conflicts in which they are caught up. As daughters of aspira-
tional parents, the girls respond to the allure of neoliberal rhetoric—to
be your own person, take responsibility, it's your choice, and so on. But
those girls who lack cultural capital (such as provided by graduate parents)
often appear out of their depth in confronting the complexities of higher
education pathways. The impact of the girls’ backgrounds follows through
to the ways in which they regard future possibilities.
The picture derived from the descriptions of the girls wrestling with
making choices in senior school is very different from the popular cho-
rus in the press about girls doing very well at school, ‘dominating’ in
terms of academic results at the end of school and out pacing the boys in
terms of numbers proceeding to university. This picture is presented across
the English-speaking world and has provoked widespread concern about
boys ‘missing out’ in both schooling and later life chances. At the same
time, it should be noted that surveys have shown that by age 24 males are
more likely to be in education than are females (Collins et al. 2000; Weiss
2004; Wyn 2014). This picture would indicate that the girls’ choices often
lead into short-term post-school educational pathways rather than more
advanced study options or alternate routes. It is possible that the channel-
ing associated with making choices at senior school operates to confirm
girls in their self-understandings as persons of fixed abilities rather than
being inspired with the ideals of lifelong learning.
But it cannot be denied that some girls are consistently high achiev-
ers in the end of school competition, from which they do enter highly
competitive academic fields. However, these successes are often hard won
and involve significant challenges for the girls themselves. Even when girls
make the ‘right’ choices and reconcile an accurate assessment of their abil-
ity with a field they find appealing, the actual experience may not be suc-
cessful. In a study of women in engineering, it was found that women who
did enter this non-traditional course were high performers who relished
the challenge of their chosen field. However, women engineers have been
repeatedly identified in international studies as much more likely to quit
their course without completing. This outcome has been accounted for as
a lack of fit between their style of study and work and the masculine cul-
ture of the profession. From Bourdieu’s standpoint it could be argued that
the habitus developed in terms of self as capable, high achiever, effective
group member was out of kilter in the engineering environment where the
individual woman felt herself to be a ‘fish out of water’ in the masculinist
culture. For some of the women the situation was intolerable and escape
was the only solution.
This example suggests that getting it right in terms of choice of pro-
fession requires more than capacity to do the job well but concerns the
fit between person and context. Non-traditional career choices should
involve some educational preparation for dealing with being in the minor-
ity situation. Of course all jobs require something like this and it would
appear that the girls making choices are aware of the importance of getting
that aspect right. Some actual work experience at relevant worksites may
be most helpful in allowing students to test their sense of fitting with the
reality of life in the workplace. Certainly in the current study it was use-
ful in determining a lack of fit in at least one of the reported cases. This
concerned a student who had opted for accounting was given experience
in a large open plan city office, whereupon she decided against a job that
involved sitting at a crowded desk all day.
JOINING THE DOTS
At this point, it is possible to demonstrate some interesting contrasts
between the two studies described above. In Chap. 4, we show that the
study of girls from two different girls’ schools—one a government pro-
vided free school and the other a fee-paying non-government school—
reveals a high degree of similarity about the ways in which the girls adopt
a gendered standpoint regarding acceptable ways of behaving, dressing,
and generally being girls. Apart from some small elements of behavioral
refinement, there is little to distinguish between the girls from the two
schools. It seems as though the script of ‘being girl’ is identified and
shared in ways that work for them across class differences. On the other
hand, Chaps. 5 and 6 deal with the studies conducted in two schools with
very similar profiles in terms of background (established wealth and secure
employment) and yet it is in this group that differences in parental educa-
tional background are continually observed. The issue that provokes the
difference is the degree to which parents can assist with daughter’s choice
of school subjects and courses in higher education. Evidently, the avail-
192 J. GILL ET AL.
ability of cultural capital derived from university experience is centrally

involved in the advice given to the daughters of graduate parents as they
approach higher education.
This availability contrasts with the cultural capital involved in knowing
the appropriate ways to ‘be a girl’ derived from knowledge that is shared,
practiced, and refined by the girls themselves in concert with cultural cues
from widely available media and family expectations. In both cases, the
reproductive effect of institutionalized education is clearly evident. In the
first example, conventional schooling provides a necessary site for the devel-
opment of a shared gender consciousness and identity—which we have
suggested involves strong elements of conventional femininity—whereas in
the second it is the processes of senior school that potentially at least pro-
voke the reproduction of class difference, with the daughters of graduate
parents much better equipped to make decisions about higher education.
We conclude our investigations of the school experience of main-
stream girls with a conviction of the importance of schooling in their
lives. However, the reasons for this importance may be different from
those usually associated with schooling by educators and parents. First,
the school provides a central site for the girls to develop an understand-
ing of themselves as socially skilled participants in contemporary culture.
Like no other site in the current times of relatively small family groups,
the school offers the possibility for girls to interrelate with others, some
of whom share their backgrounds, attitudes and practices, and others who
do not. And the interrelationships forged by adolescent schoolgirls form
an important part of their learning about the ways of being girls in the
current times. In their small groups, they form intense relationships which
can be very close and sometimes very fraught in the rough and tumble of
getting along, protecting oneself, and knowing others. The ‘bitchiness’
frequently noted by teachers and other girls is often a product of their
deep knowledge of one another which involves knowing how to be hurtful
as well as how to be supportive. Rather than dismiss the negative behavior
as exemplifying bullying, enlightened schools and teachers make a point
of addressing these issues in social education classes in which the girls are
brought to recognize their own power and the means of dealing with
negative experiences. But generally it’s the unofficial social function of the
school that makes its contribution to the girls’ growth in self-knowledge
and social development very important.
In the senior years, the case is reversed. In these years, the official
school program involves a sorting function designed to maximize each
girl’s chances in the final examination. It does this by requiring girls to
think about future careers and then to choose subjects relevant to those
career directions. As we have seen the process is far from exact, relying as it
does on a good deal of subjective assessment by teachers and the students
themselves before the actual ranking can take place. As we have described,
the processes involved in making choices in senior school can become
extremely stressful.
At one level, heightened stress levels are a corollary of expectations
placed on girls to do well, which has become a general expectation of girl
students today. It can be a particular stress for girls whose families antici-
pate they will be first generation university students, the situation of many
of the girls in our studies. Even in these times of schoolgirls ‘dominating’
in the final examinations there are increasing reports of the levels of stress
they encounter.
The most recent report of the Australian Lifeline Studies which moni-
tors stress in the population identified young women aged 18–19 (the
lowest age group surveyed) as experiencing the highest levels of stress
(99%) when compared with all other population groups. The study identi-
fied concerns about the future as the primary stressor for this group. In
the media (Schetzer 2015), this report was encapsulated with the header
‘Young female and wealthy experience highest stress’, repeating that con-
cerns with how to make choices about their futures was the most common
cause of stress in this group. This report presents a very different picture
from the ones about girls dominating in senior school results. On the
basis of our studies, we believe that the girls who were struggling with the
forced choice of future direction in year 10 provided a real indication of
the complex situation faced by girls in education at the current time.
Other reports describe young women in their 20s as more likely to be
unemployed and also comprising the most stressed group (Wyn 2015;
OECD 2014). It would appear as a matter of urgency that the school
routines connected to school leaving could be better managed so as to
avoid causing these problems for many girls. We can no longer afford to
be complacent about girls’ education as a result of the demonstrably high
achievement of the top girls. It is important to look at the whole picture
before one can feel the issues of girls and schooling have been overcome.
194 J. GILL ET AL.
LOOKING MORE CLOSELY AT A ‘NEW’ GENDER ORDER

To the extent that mainstream girls feel drawn to the appeal of a conven-
tionally feminine personhood and have adopted ideas of niceness and not
making a fuss in ways that sustain them as acceptable girls and women,
they are not well placed for a smooth take up of the whole neoliberal
package. All the girls agree that the decision about senior school is to be
their individual responsibility but they struggle with the requirement to
stand up for themselves when that might be seen as ‘making a fuss’. In
their efforts to balance the discursively reiterated themes from neoliberal-
ism and gender, the majority of girls in the second study opt for career
pathways that fit with traditionally female dominated jobs such as nurs-
ing and teaching rather than being available to take up the promise of a
newly ordered world. While they own their choice of career—this is what I
want!—it looks as though they are creating a re-enactment of the old gen-
der order by embracing ‘female appropriate’ jobs with low status and low
pay. The only difference is that they are led to believe they have chosen
the positions for themselves, rather than being pushed into it by getting a
limited education and little sense of entitlement as experienced by women
in previous generations.
By looking more closely at several groups of girls whose education
would at first appear to be characterized by relative privilege, we have
shown that the sociocultural logic of neoliberal times is closely linked with
new forms of a gender order that is problematic for girls and women. To
some degree, this outcome can be seen to have emerged from the impetus
for gender equality in educational experience. By making girls’ experience
of schooling more like that of their male peers the girls are encouraged to
embrace the world of competitive and strategic individualism more typical
of male school experience. Moreover, we suggest that, in trying to fulfill
the currently accepted masculinist model of a confident, self-made entre-
preneurial agent, the girls confront challenges as they strive to maintain
something of the social connectedness and group belonging characteristic
of girls’ development in an earlier tradition. The situation vividly recalls
Gilligan’s writing some 25 years ago:
For girls to remain responsive to themselves, they must resist the conven-
tions of feminine goodness; to remain responsive to others, they must resist
the values placed on self-sufficiency and independence in North American
culture. (Gilligan et al. 1990, 10)
If North American culture is replaced with neoliberal worldview (which

sounds highly similar) Gilligan’s comment seems impressively prescient
and most appropriate in terms of the situation confronted by girls in our
studies.
The intersectional effect of these conflicting demands comes to a head
as girls approach the final years of schooling. At this time, they experience
pressure to become self-actualized and aware individuals who must choose
between not just school subjects but also future life directions in a move
that often separates the chooser from her immediate support system. As
suggested in Chap. 5, in choosing subjects that will bring her the high-
est aggregate tertiary entry score and entrance at the best university, each
girl is necessarily placed as a competitor in a system of winners and los-
ers. Some will manage this move with grace and skill while for others the
negativity and self-mistrust elicited by the elementary school spelling bee
will be re-enacted.
Paradoxically in these new educational times, girls’ many academic
achievements are routinely applauded but they can present particular
dilemmas for female adolescent students. The rhetoric aligns with the goal
of feminist educators in the effort to produce independent clear-sighted
young women with the capacity to engage in their post-school worlds
as fully participating citizens. However, the reality is more one of forced
choice, with the potential for reducing the girls’ confidence in their capaci-
ties and causing them to seek a likely refuge in the tried and true post-
school female pathways as safe options. Several researchers write of the
process as post-feminist, not meaning that feminist ideas are no longer
relevant but rather that we are at a stage in which those ideas have been
co-opted by neoliberal government philosophy into a regime of individu-
alized choices subject to market ethics and divorced from any feminist
politics.
Another irony of this situation is that, while we would support the
idea of girls being planful and strategic in their choices of school sub-
jects and careers, we have raised real concerns about the process with its
stress on the individualized girl as the unit of competitive capacity destined
to steer her unique path into an unknowable future. We have suggested
that forcing curriculum choices at senior school can be seen to be more
clearly in the interests of school efficiency than deriving from educational
merit. Moreover, we have suggested that the processes involved in choos-
ing future pathways presumes a level of identity clarity and settlement that
is not often present in 16-year-old students, particularly in current times
196 J. GILL ET AL.
when the rhetoric continually describes the possibility of refashioning one-

self to meet a multitude of new and innovative possibilities in the world of
work. Not surprisingly then, we have seen the majority of girls opting for
traditional gendered career pathways in their chosen fields of further study
and work choices, thereby reinhabiting familiar positions in a gender order
albeit in the guise of a freely choosing neoliberal individual.
FREE CHOICES: FREELY CHOSEN?

Choices could happen without the cost of the girls being required to give
up other ways of operating in their life worlds. A sense of collective well-
being is not necessarily erased as a consequence of operating within mar-
ket forces as an individual. Ideally, girls’ education would incorporate the
positive aspects of their sensibilities of group loyalty and caring concern at
the same time as developing in each student a sense of her own potential.
For example, a longitudinal investigation of the reasons for the low
numbers of female students in engineering courses revealed that the
minority of women who did enroll responded to opportunities to engage
in work that was socially useful such as ‘Engineers without Borders’ which
organizes engineering work in third-world countries or with other oppor-
tunities for applying their specialist skills in local situations to solve social
problems. In this way, the women engineers were able to develop their
choice of a non-traditional field in terms of improving social conditions,
thereby achieving real career satisfaction and blending a more tradition-
ally female approach of environmental and social concern within a male
dominated profession (Mills et al. 2014).
In senior school, the idea of essential connections between education
and the world of work is continually reiterated. This feature is in keeping
with concerns raised about positioning in the new knowledge economy
and the need for new employees to demonstrate a range of skills. A func-
tional view of the purpose of education dominates in this neoliberal con-
struction. And yet schooling can and does accomplish a range of other
outcomes, also important for living in the current world. Chief among
these is surely the capacity to build relationships and to acknowledge dif-
ference in a world increasingly comprised of numbers of people moving in
to the settler societies across the English-speaking world. An understand-
ing of diversity and a commitment and capacity to work together are skills
more clearly related to the girls’ tendency to be aware of others, sensitive
to their needs, and to form relationships across difference. These are the
sorts of skills practiced and tested in the girls’ peer group relationships;
however, they tend not to be tested, scored, or registered as standard
components of a ‘good education’. They are, however, essential elements
of building an understanding of citizenship in a multicultural world, as
well as being the sorts of praiseworthy outcomes of great teaching and
positive school leadership. And they fit well with Gilligan’s ‘ethic of care’
as an important way in which many girls are likely to view the world and
to choose to operate within it. The girls in these studies gave voice to these
sorts of understandings at the same time as they worried about which
course to take, which career to strive for, along with how to be the caring
considerate personality they’d learned to associate with the feminine ideal.
Of course, the connection between education and work is very impor-
tant, perhaps more than ever, and schools ignore it at their peril. A cursory
reading of school marketing sites frequently includes examples of former
scholars who have made their name in one or other of the prestigious
professions. However, deep changes in the ways that work is organized
in recent times have profoundly shifted the nexus between a good degree
and a good job. Media reports of graduates without jobs or without jobs
in the fields for which they have trained are disturbingly common. The
situation is particularly challenging for girls and young women, especially
those who have chosen careers such as teaching junior school, a field with
few opportunities for newcomers in the present time.
In addition, while it is true to say that more girls as a group complete
their schooling and emerge with better grades than their male peers, their
chances of finding work are often relatively poor. Collins’ study (2000) had
shown that girls who had completed school were less likely by age 24 to be
in full-time work than were boys who had left school before completion.
More than a decade later, after 2008 and the Global Financial Crisis, devel-
opments within current labor markets have not recovered. A recent survey
shows that in Australia in 2015, 30% of young women (aged 20–24) are
not fully engaged in either work or study—10% higher than the figure for
men in the same age group a situation reflected across OECD countries
(OECD 2015). A key researcher in youth studies notes that ‘the nexus
between education and work has effectively broken down’ (Wyn 2015, 5).
The suggestion from such commentary is that young people’s edu-
cation should be better geared to learning about the world of work in
general, its relation to the larger economy and its impact on life choices,
along with better counseling, work experience courses, and so on. While
not wanting to diminish the sense of urgency about these matters, our
198 J. GILL ET AL.
study suggests that girls at school would achieve great benefit from such
courses in that they would be better prepared to address career choice
with a more up to date and developed knowledge of the current state of
play. Ideally, the outcome would provide a much clearer basis on which
to make decisions about courses at school and beyond which would allow
for and encourage possibilities and alternate routes. Of course the ultimate
irony is that just when more girls are finishing school with good qualifica-
tions for post-school work or study, the availability of the hoped-for jobs
is drying up.
We have indicated some of the possible reasons for girls’ continuing
to congregate in positions post-school with low pay and low status. The
culturally mediated lower self-confidence of girls, along with their intense
involvement in the culture of ‘being girl’, would appear to offer some
explanation for their reluctance to engage in non-traditional areas such
as STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), and
for their choices to work as carers and helpers across many fields. Once
qualified, these factors can contribute to explanations of their significantly
slower advancement when compared with males across the range of pro-
fessions—although we would suggest that other aspects of a strongly mas-
culinist culture are also at play. We note that the existence of a masculinist,
if not overtly sexist, work culture is less often acknowledged, as evidenced
in recent revelations in Australia of the experiences of women working as
surgeons (Matthews 2015).
Certainly, the difficulties found by many women in terms of accessing
higher levels in their professions are often described in terms of women as
lacking confidence and a fear of being self-assertive. Rather than yet again
‘blaming the women’, we suggest the concept of a gendered dimension of
habitus offers potential for action, understanding, and reform.
The requirements for women in leadership appear as more developed
versions of the confident self-assured entrepreneur, a challenge many girls
have already had to negotiate in their senior years at school. Meanwhile
recent developments in management theory consistently call for a more
consultative and collaborative approach as needed for effective leadership
in the current workplace (De Meyer 2010). The irony of this develop-
ment is that the qualities of collaboration and cooperation developed in
girls’ life experiences are now seen as desirable for current leaders but the
chances of girls and women achieving leadership positions still appear low.
Studies have repeatedly revealed girls and women undervaluing their
capacity and underestimating their achievement while the reverse is true
for boys and men. With self-promotion becoming ever more centrally
involved in the job application process it seems that in the interests of
equity girls may need some explicit lessons about and practice in acquiring
and maintaining an accurate perception of themselves and their capacities.
But of course the degree to which such a strength would undermine the
public image of acceptable and desirable female behavior in their local
culture could work against them.
BEYOND CHOICE: BROADER APPLICATIONS?

In this book, we have used the issue of subject choice making in senior
school as a tipping point in girls’ education in Australia at the current
time. The move from understanding oneself as part of a group following
a shared path changes abruptly in year 10. While the choice issue aligns
with the take-up of neoliberal ideology in the process of schooling, we do
not see choice as an inevitable problem for all girls at all times. Rather our
position is that any schooling process that provokes deep and significant
cultural change in student understandings must be undertaken carefully
and ideally would involve a good deal of explanation and discussion with
all involved. In this work, we have suggested that the ways in which choice
in senior school is usually accomplished in Australian schools is a useful
example of the issues that are involved in girls’ education more generally.
So while other school systems in English-speaking societies may adopt dif-
ferent approaches, we argue that there will be similar issues aroused by any
procedure that provokes disruption in the ways that students understand
themselves, the project of schooling and their place in it.
HOPES FOR THE FUTURE
Finally, it seems appropriate for us to identify what we hoped this book
would achieve. At a basic level, we would hope that teachers and parents
and all others working with adolescent girls would be encouraged to see
that time spent in group interaction should not be dismissed as idle gossip,
but rather to be understood as singularly important in that it allows the
girls to work toward making sense of themselves along with features of the
world around them and the adults who are positioned there. We would
also hope that adults who work with adolescent girls might be inclined to
register their continual preoccupation with bodies, looks, and style as pro-
duced by the negative messages that surround them rather than dismissing
200 J. GILL ET AL.
them as typical teenage narcissism. This recognition would enable parents

and teachers to respond to the challenge of building the girls’ confidence
in themselves as active and engaged citizens. From an educationist per-
spective, this sort of understanding is essential for effective and productive
teaching and learning.
We also believe that high school classrooms would benefit from more
open discussions about gender and sexuality, not just about sexual repro-
duction but also the whole panoply of feelings and relationships, includ-
ing the historical, economic, social, and cultural factors that have played
into the reality of a gender divided world. We have shown in Chap. 4
that elements of this knowledge can very easily go ‘beneath the radar’ or
are dismissed as ‘just the way things are’. Without adequate knowledge
of the gender order as it currently plays out, adolescent girls are vulner-
able as seen by consistent survey results cited in Chaps. 1 and 2 and the
girls themselves in Chap. 4. Schooling could surely provide considerable
educational benefit to students in these areas and promote a clearer under-
standing of a good deal of the students’ learning in history, literature, art,
and virtually all educational endeavors.
Having an adult to talk with about gender is also a personal matter for
us as researchers. While we are constantly mindful of the confidentiality
guarantees that pertained to our data gathering, we are enormously grate-
ful to the girls we interviewed for their willing sharing of perspectives and
the insights we obtained about the world of school they inhabited. At the
same time, we had the distinct impression that the girls were more than
happy to engage with us in these conversations as they felt that they were
being heard—a particularly important issue for adolescents at school who
are desperate to feel their opinions matter. And for girls, whose narratives
often identified degrees of feeling powerless, the opportunity to talk about
what it means to be girls was clearly appealing and productive—for the
girls themselves as well as for us as researchers.
At an official level, we would hope that curriculum policy makers and
school leaders who read this book might be motivated to reflect on the
current curriculum structures and perhaps even make some changes to the
competitive ranking that occurs at the end of school and, in our account,
can impact negatively on girl students. We would urge schools to stick
to their educational vision which might mean being less determined to
participate in the competition for high scores. It appears that the schools
consciously work to organize the highest scores possible for each stu-
dent, even when those strategies might go against the student exploring
different areas in which she might not get so high a score but achieve a
broader grasp of key disciplines. Ideally, our educational vision would have
schools graduating students with a sound general education upon which
they could build specialist areas of study. However, so long as schools are
complicit in the university required ranking their educational offerings will
be compromised.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
In summary, we have argued that there are aspects of the current approach
to schooling across the English-speaking world that require accommoda-
tions by successful girls and can deliver negative outcomes for many girls.
At one level, we recognize that the school provides an important site for
girls to engage in the identity work of peer group interaction whereby they
come to understand and interact with the sociocultural features of being a
girl in today’s world. However, there are related problems with schooling
as currently enacted.
First, the curriculum structure that promotes individualized learners
and interpersonal competition places the girls in conflict with the more
collective orientation they have come to understand is expected of girls—a
legible femininity that includes being nice, caring, and concerned for oth-
ers. Remembering the warning (Beck and Beck Gernsheim 2009) quoted
in Chap. 2 that the traditional structures with clearly defined gender roles
have been replaced by wider social institutions, we here recognize the
school‘s participation in the re-enactment of gender rules, albeit unof-
ficially. Simply by providing the site where girls get together in groups
and powerfully reassert a concept of conventional femininity, the school is
involved in the development of gendered identities. But at the same time,
schools initiate girls into a different world designed around competition
and ranking which can cause compromise and conflict. Certainly, while
this conflict may not be the experience of all girls, we argue on the basis
of our studies that it is a common experience. And, without making claims
about the range of masculinities available in most schools and classrooms,
we argue that the sorts of contradictions described here are unique to
female experience of gender in current times.
Second, we have demonstrated the negative effect of requiring girls to
nominate a career pathway before they have engaged seriously with iden-
tity questions such as who they are and who they want to be. This absence
was perhaps most evident in the comment from a girl who had completed
202 J. GILL ET AL.
a computer-based assessment of what she should do in life and to her sur-

prise she came up with the announcement ‘I’ve got ten [options]!’. While
we could enjoy her delight in the sense that she had emerged as flexible
and resilient, it was painfully obvious that she was not ready to engage
with the question of ‘what shall I be?’ in a serious and informed way. In
saying this, we mean no criticism of the girl in question but rather that her
life to that point had not really prepared her to confront the difficult task
of choosing a career direction.
Given the ongoing turbulence in the job market and the much publi-
cized mismatch between qualifications and jobs it seems that any decision
about career direction should not be taken lightly. Nor should it be taken
too soon, before the student has had sufficient time to reflect and gather
relevant information. Surely too the education agenda should include re-
entry programs whereby students could return to study following change
of mind about future plans. Any or all of such measures could work to min-
imize student stress currently associated with decision making. Students
could then plot alternate routes to achieve the desired ends rather than
feeling as though they were continually facing one-shot selection.
The solutions to these ongoing problems are likely to be neither easy
nor quickly achieved. Commentators have repeatedly suggested that
the whole world of work needs rethinking, most particularly in terms of
educational pathways (Rodgers, 2015; Wyn 2015). In the face of deep
changes in the labor force post-2008 there is a widespread sense that work
has undergone irrevocable change and that the time of secure permanent
employment has passed. Currently new jobs tend to be part time and
short term indicating a mobile population of job seekers and employers
with fluctuating needs. Such concerns are well beyond the ambit of this
book. But we do see the ever increasing necessity of providing girls with
an education that will allow them to assess the possibilities that lie ahead,
to think for themselves as well as their group, and to express themselves
clearly and positively with a good sense of their own power and potential.
REFERENCES
Baker, J. (2010). Great expectations and post-feminist accountability: Young
women living up to the ‘successful girls’ discourse. Gender and Education,
22(1), 1–15.
Beck, U., & Beck Gernsheim, E. (2009). Losing the traditional: Individualization
and precarious freedoms. London: Sage.
Byatt, A. S. (2002). A whistling woman. New York: Random House.

Charania, M. M. (2010). Reading the body: The rhetoric of sex, identity and dis-
Education, 23(3), 305–330.
Collins, C. (2000). Understanding the relationship between schooling, gender and
labour market entry. Paper presented at the conference of the Educational
Attainment and Labour Market Outcomes, Department of Education, Training
and Youth Affairs, Melbourne.
Collins, C., Kenway, J., & McLeod, J. (2000). Factors influencing educational
performance of males and females in school and their initial destinations after
leaving school. Available at http://www.dest.gov.au
De Meyer, A. (2010). Collaborative leadership: New perspectives in leadership devel-
opment. Cambridge: Cambridge Judge Business School, University of
Cambridge.
Icon Books.
Gill, R. (2008). Culture and subjectivity in neoliberal and postfeminist times.
Subjectivity, 25, 432–445.
Jackson, C. (2006). ‘Lads’ and ‘ladettes’ in school: Gender and a fear of failure.
Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Matthews, A. (2015, April 23). Sexual harassment rife in medical profession,
senior surgeon Dr Gabrielle McMullin says. ABC News. Available at www.abc.
net.au
McRobbie, A. (2007). Top girls? Young women and the post-feminist sexual con-
tract. Cultural Studies, 21(4–5), 718–737.
McRobbie, A. (2009). The aftermath of feminism: Gender, culture and social
change. London: Sage.
Mills, J., Franzway, S., Gill, J., & Sharp, R. (2014). Challenging knowledge, sex and
power: Women, work and engineering. New York: Routledge.
OECD. (2015). Skills outlook 2015: Youth skills and employability. Paris: OECD
Publishing.
Rodgers, S. (2015, June 20). Millions fall through the gap between school and
work. The Australian.
Scharff, C. (2012). Repudiating feminism: Young women in a neoliberal world.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Schetzer, A. (2015, August 4). Young women feeling most stress at modern life:
Study. The Age.
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Weis, L. (2004). Gender, masculinity and the new economy. Australian

Educational Researcher, 30(3), 111–129.
Wyn, J. (2014). Pain now, rewards later? Young lives cannot be relived. The
Conversation, University of Melbourne, Melbourne
INDEX
A ATAR. See Australian Tertiary

academic success Admission Rank (ATAR)
‘articulated social anxiety,’ 183 attitudes and values, 2, 37
levels of self-confidence, 47 attribution, differences in
OECD report, 50 ‘fear of success,’ theory of, 48–50
single-sex schools, 99–100, 126 gender awareness, 52
theory of ‘fear of success,’ 49 gender differences, 51–2
affect, role of gender equality, 48–9
affective variables, 47 habitus, Bourdieu’s notion of, 49
attribution (see attribution, intellectual ability, 48
differences in) self-confidence, 48
self-confidence, 47 underestimation of ability, 51
Alice in Wonderland, 181 Australian Tertiary Admission Rank
Allan, A., 50 (ATAR), 131, 137
An Education, 14
appraisals
academic capacity, 139 B
choice making, girls’ responses, balancing act
139–40 adolescent schoolgirls, 101
decision-making, choice of, 141 creating an image, 105–6
parental opinion and advice, 140 gender, 95–8, 106–7 (see also
self-evaluation, 140 gender)
subject-specific capacity, 141 girls and their bodies, 100, 107–8
teacher and parents, 137 Hampden School for Girls, 99

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52487-4
206 INDEX
balancing act (cont.) social class, 84

interpersonal relationships, 95 working-class neighborhoods, 84
Kildare Girls’ High School, 99 The Butterfly Project, 11
middle-class girls, 105–6
my body/myself, 104–5
‘normative femininity,’ 100 C
‘not quite good enough’ body, 102–4 career choice making, 154
reputation, protecting, 106–7 economic security, 157
responsibility and perfectibility, 101 financial independence, 157
self-confidence, 105 idea of university, 158
sense of self and relationships, level of parents’ education, 156
110–112 middle-class consciousness, 159
sexual difference and sexism, 96 mothering and career, 158
social media, impact of, 98, 108 parental support, 156
societal expectations, 97 sense of freedom, 156–7
world and relationships, 120–121 sense of individualization, 155–6
The Battle of the Sexes: Twenty-First- career counseling, provision
Century Style, 20–21 of, 151–2
Beck, U., 42 career directions, 135–7, 155, 166,
body hexis, 41 191, 200
Bourdieu’s theorization, gender career pathway, 192, 194, 199–200
attitudes and values, 37 ‘choice biographies,’ 30–31
gender awareness, 37–8 choice process
‘gender detectives,’ 37 career direction, 137, 139
gender dimension, 37 competitive ranking, 137
habitus, notion of, 36–8 confidence and self-assurance,
origins, 38 137–8
psychology, 36 positioning, 137
reproduction of class differences, profile of girls, 138
36–7 class differences, 36–7, 62, 166, 189,
single-sex schooling to coeducation, 190
38–9 cognitive abilities
social interaction, 39 language development, 46
Boyhood, 15 mathematics ability, 45–6
boys’ education, 182 moral development, 44
advantage or disadvantage, 85–6 psychological testing, 45–6
equity discourse, 85 sex differences, 46
gender difference, 84–5 socialization practices, 44
idea of ‘boy crisis,’ 84 Collins, S., 15
low-skilled manual jobs, 83 Connell, R.W., 32
perception of girls as educational conventional schooling, 190
winners, 82–3 ‘critical mass’ concept, 66, 78, 82
INDEX 207
cultural capital, 190 school completion, 64–5

assumption of responsibility, 147 secondary school age, 7–9
Bourdieu’s notion, 146 staffing patterns, 71–4
features, 154–5 subject choices, 66–7, 193–4
parental opinion and advice, 146–7 teacher education courses, 87
parents’ care and concern, 148 English-speaking societies, 1, 182–3,
problem of identity, 148 197
self-responsibilization, 148 equality, domestic
senior school subjects, 146, 188 gender equality, 171–2
impact on relationships, 172–3
partnerships, 171
D persons of capacity, 173–4
Dale, R.R., 76 ethic of care, Gilligan’s, 195
data-gathering approach, 23, 54–5,
130, 198
decision making, 7, 141, 156, 166, F
200 failing boys, discourse of, 187
The Diary of a Teenage Girl, 14 fear of success, theory of, 48–50
Dobson, A., 43 fee-paying school, 64, 77–8, 127–8,
Dweck, C., 48 141, 188–9
film and television media, 11
forced choice making, process of, 126,
E 141, 150, 152, 191, 193
education Franklin, M., 14
achievement patterns, 68–70 free choices
boys education, 82–4 career satisfaction, 194
classroom treatments, 67–8 education and work, 195
curriculum, 65–6 Gilligan’s ‘ethic of care,’ 195
educational gains and ‘good education,’ 195
discrimination, 87 management theory, 196
experience of schooling, 61 positioning in new knowledge
extra curriculum, 71 economy, 194
female tertiary enrollments, 86 post-school work or study, 196
feminist work, 56 self-promotion, 197
gender inclusion, 86 STEM, 196
gender order, 9 Friends, 16
girls’ education, 74, 87–9
girls’ schooling for girls, 75–6
high school students’ perceptions, 87 G
middle class girls and women, 9–10 gender
movement begins, 62–4 biological sex, 35
resourcing, 70 Bourdieu’s theorization, 36–9
208 INDEX
gender (cont.) ethnic identity, 88

child’s developing awareness, 28 physical education, 89
differences, 61, 69–70 psychoanalytic theory, 88
in education, 56 recent studies, 87–9
masculine or feminine, distinguish research studies, 87–8
colors, 28 schooling process, 89
pink with girls, 28 ‘girls in education’ movement, 186
qualitative approaches, 53–4 girls’ schooling for girls
quantitative approaches, 52–3 academic outcomes, 76–8
researching, 52–5 advantages, 80–81
role of affect, 47–52 coeducational or boys schools, 77,
sex differences, 35 79–80
and sexuality, 198 fee-paying schools, 77–8
socialization and cultural practices, female scholarship, 79
36 female tertiary institutions, 79
theorizing, 31–5 low-paid jobs, 78–9
gender-appropriate behavior, 4–5 middle-class client community, 75–6
‘gender detectives,’ 28 subject choice, 78
gender, doing ‘successful girls discourse,’ 83
definition, 96 teaching and learning styles, 75
notion of normalization, 97 as ‘winning team,’ 82
power relations, 97 globalization, 185
relational theory, 96 ‘good education,’ 195
self-surveillance and self-correction,
97
gendered identities, 23, 182, 199 H
gendered positioning, 186 habitus, Bourdieu’s notion of, 36–9,
gendered thinking, 56, 155 47, 50, 67, 127, 184, 189
gender formation, 54–5 heterosexual coupling, 1–2
gender order, 27, 74 How to build a Girl, 13
academic achievements, 193 Hunger Games, 15–16
confidence and optimism, 184
‘female appropriate’ jobs, 192
gender division, 9 I
gender equality, 192 identity
generations of folklore, 1 and choice, 6
Giddens, A., 29 different orders, 30
Gilligan, C., 40, 195 gender, 23, 135, 184
A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, 14 hybrid, 30
Girls, 16–17 self-discovery, 31
girls’ education subjectivity, 10–11
beneficiaries, 88–9 women’s roles, 29–30
INDEX 209
individualization emerging self, 135–6

care and connection, 44 gendered choices, 144
and choice, 44 girls’ experience as choosers, 145–6
contemporary, 42 girls’ schools, 126–8
PLP, 136–7 knowledge of alternate pathways,
process of choosing, 137 151–2
schooling, collective endeavor, 136 mission of senior school, 126, 129
schooling, individual project, 136 process of choice, 137–9
sense of self, 43 profiling girls and responses, 132–5
and society, 185–6 resources to assist with choice, 141–4
institutionalized education, 41–2, 190 self as learner, individualized
student, 136–7
self-awareness, 125–6
J SES measures, 128–9
Jacklin, C., 45 subject choices, 135
survey data, 129–31
valuation of academic skills, 148–9
K Likert scale, 129–30
knowledge and evidence ‘Little Red Schoolhouse,’ concept of,
Bourdieu’s theorization applied to 62
gender, 36–9 Lohan, L., 15
cognitive abilities, 44–7
connected self, 39–42
explanations of gender, 35–6 M
mixed methods, 55–6 Maccoby, E., 45
researching gender, 52–5 management theory, 196
from sex to gender: the role of McBride, Eimear, 14
affect, 47–52 Mean Girls, 15
theorizing gender, 31–5 media representations
Kohlberg, L., 44 generation of adolescent girls, 17
‘good girl/bad girl’ story, 13
literature and popular texts, 12
L new positions, 13–17
language and behavior, 9, 187–8 prizewinning productions, 14–15
learning identities, formation of semi-autobiographical accounts, 13
academic identity, 150–151 traditional under-representation of
appraisal and its effects (see women, 15
appraisals) TV series, 16–17
class and knowledge, intersections women in leading roles, 14–15
of, 146–8 women’s writing, 14
curriculum, 131–2 Moran, C., 13
educational benefits, 149 My Brilliant Career, 14
210 INDEX
N PLP. See Personal Learning Plan (PLP)

neoliberalism, 42 policing of young women, 5
Australian higher education, 161 policy makers and school leaders,
career aspirations, 163 198–9
freedom of self-expression, 161 positions and professions, high-profile,
gender gap, 162 2
‘good education,’ 160 positions of responsibility, 183
ideology of choice, 160 post-school pathways, 193, 196
philosophy, 30 career choice, 166
positive and negative connotations, contemplating future, 155–9
159–60 decision making, class effect, 166
rejection of feminism, 162 domestic equality, 171–4
TAFE courses, 162–3 future careers, 178
non-traditional career choices, 189 gender difference, 164
normative femininity, 100, 112 girls as units of capacity, 177
Not that kind of girl, 13 leadership position, 163–4
neoliberals, positive and imperative,
159–63
O part-time jobs or vacation jobs, 165
Okeowo, A., 15 pay vs. job satisfaction, 168–71
personal growth and learning,
167–8
P professional women in careers,
paid work, 3–4, 37, 46, 63, 88, 177 retention of, 165
part-time jobs or vacation jobs, 165 work plus children, future of, 174–7
pay vs. job satisfaction
female gender identity, development
of, 170 R
idea of lifestyle, 168–9 Reay, 125, 160
investment in work, 168 Renold, E., 50
monetary reward, 168 resources, choice making
personal pride and continuance, appraisals, 142
170–171 burden of choice making, 143
social justice, 169 career-related subject choices, 141
‘thinking of others’ orientation, 170 institutional resources, 143–4
worker satisfaction and sense of parental opinion and advice, 142
belonging, 178 siblings, advices from, 142–3
PE. See physical education (PE)
personal choice, 29
personality traits, collections of, 22 S
Personal Learning Plan (PLP), 136–7 SAT, 132
physical education (PE), 89, 142 school gender context
INDEX 211
coeducational schools, 81–2 sense of belonging, 38, 145, 178, 181

educators’ attention, 82 sense of freedom, 156–7
girls-only schools, 81 sense of individualization, 155–6
parental choice of schooling, 81, 82 sense of self, 153
schooling care and connection, 40
and achievement, 182 caring person, 110–112
Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, 127 connectedness and social
experience of, 61 membership, 40–41
fee-paying Catholic schools, 127, 128 connected relationships, importance
gender differences, 61 of, 108–9
gendered features, 64 dominant position, gender, 41
gendered institution, staffing forceful self-expression, 116
patterns, 71–4 girls’ self-regulation, 109–10
gender inequity, 61 loud and aggressive, 115–16
gender-segregated schooling, 126 making allowances, 118–19
girls’ education, 63–4 managing sex and power, 119–20
importance of, 190 niceness, 112–13
middle-class students, 62–3, 128 notions of femininity, 117
parental ‘choice,’ concept of, 62 positive emotions and pleasure, 109
position of, 42 relationships, managing, 39–40,
primary, 62 117–18
school completion, 64–5 self-expression and self-assertion,
single-sex schools, 126–7 109
Science, Technology, Engineering, and self-regulation, 114–15
Mathematics (STEM), 46, 196 self-understanding and sense of
self-confidence, 47, 49, 74, 77, 104–5, belonging, 39
120, 155, 196 sensitive and emotionally responsive,
self-harm, 11–12 113–14
self-recognition and understanding, social interactions, 41–2
22–3 socialization, 40
self-responsibilization, 148 student behavior in high school, 40
self-surveillance, 97, 184 sense of self-responsibility, 43
senior school SES measures. See socioeconomic
end of school competition, 188–9 status (SES) measures
fee-paying schools, 188 Sex and the City, 16
girls’ self-confidence, 155 sex differences, 35–6, 44–7, 57, 65,
issue of subject choice making, 197 96, 106, 185
post-school educational pathways, sexuality, 2
188 heteronormative notions, 19–20
process of choice making, 154 heterosexuality, 17
self-knowledge and confidence, incidence of reports, 18
153–4 issues, 18–19
212 INDEX
sexuality (cont.) Technical and Further Education

knowledge gained from internet, 19 (TAFE) courses, 162
psychology/self-help genre, 21 teenage narcissism, 198
rise of pop bands, 17–18 teenage romance genre, 12–13
self-awareness, development of, 20 theorizing gender
sex education classes, 20 biological sex, 31
youthful, 18 Bourdieu’s (see Bourdieu’s
single-sex schools, 126–7 theorization, gender)
social changes, 5, 19, 21–2, 29 coeducational schooling, 34
social science approaches, 21 dress and style, 33
socioeconomic status (SES) measures, gender division, 32
63, 83–4, 87, 128, 131, 159 individual sense of self, taste, and
SPSS. See Statistical Package for the style, 31
Social Sciences (SPSS) institutionalizing gender difference,
staffing patterns 31–2
elementary schools, 72 language and symbolism, 33
gender and power differences, 72–3 masculinity and femininity, 31
gender disparity, 71 oppositional stances, 34
gendered power relations, 72–3 secret knowledge, 32
masculinity and leadership, 73–4 sex differences, 57
school leaders and principals, 72 social interactions, 32
Statistical Package for the Social world of preschool, 34
Sciences (SPSS), 130 Touching the Future, 154
STEM. See Science, Technology, traditional girlhood, 2
Engineering, and Mathematics
(STEM)
Sterling, F., 6 W
stress levels, 22, 43, 98, 171, 175, work plus children, future of
191, 193, 200 childcare, traditional, 177, 178
fathers, role and importance of, 177
girls’ stress about choices, 175
T men’s roles in childcare, 177
TAFE. See Technical and Further traditional ideal of marriage, 174–5
Education (TAFE) courses working mother, admiration, 175–6

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Palgrave Studies

in Gender and Education

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Gender and Education

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016943496

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

This Series aims to provide a comprehensive space for an increasingly

intersectional focus. In addressing varied conceptual and methodological

1 Who Are Girls in Current Times and Is There a Problem?1

2 How We Know What We Know:

3 See How Far We’ve Come! Girls’ Education in Recent

4 The Balancing Act95

5 Girls at School: The Formation of Learning Identities125

6 Post-school Pathways and Girls’ Imagined Futures155

7 Girls at School: A More Complex Picture183

Judith Gill is a former secondary schoolteacher who has worked in teacher

OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development

Fig. 5.1 Responses in percentages to My parents encourage

Fig. 6.8 Responses in percentages to the question Men and

Who Are Girls in Current Times and Is

A Whistling Woman and a Crowing Hen

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

times, homosexuality was considered to be morally deviant and, in many

differences between nations as well as national boundaries themselves are

It seems as though the significant social changes with respect to gender

These examples of the policing of young women in terms of dress

cities. These studies were consciously designed to investigate the ways

WHO ARE GIRLS?

This initiative is impressive in its broad sweep of potential outcomes for

do not counteract the evident value of developing basic education systems

future possibilities, and so on. In our investigation of the ways in which

AIM AND KEY LINES OF ENQUIRY

GIRLS AS A FOCUS OF PUBLIC CONCERN

…the hegemony of good girl femininity linked to passivity and squelched

Certainly, similar representations of young women and girls in the

What do girls have apart from the scripts of ‘neo-liberalism, individualism,

In other words, how is it possible for girls to choose other ways of

BEYOND THE ROMANTIC DREAM: NEW POSITIONS

A rather different approach comes from literary writer, Eimear McBride,

The Hunger Games: A Fable with Female Leadership? In the plot-

Popular media in the form of TV series has tended to feature slightly

The increasing incidence of reports of sexual violence comprises

escalation of change in terms of the impact of worldviews on the development

This complex situation calls for a more developed recognition and

The Battle of the Sexes: Twenty-First-Century Style Two Australian

Meanwhile, writers in the popular psychology/self-help genre have also

expectations of education and likely futures. From this work, we aim to

How We Know What We Know:

Late afternoon toward the end of another warm Australian summer,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 27

their associated rationale. Thus individuals are drawn to take on board

THE WAYS OF THE WORLD

We do belong to many different groups, in one way or another, and each

Certainly, the girls in our studies understand themselves as daughters,

up as never before. Aided by developments in social media, the range of

Buying a Present A standard exercise over many years with under-

Ultimately, however gender theories are interpreted, ‘getting it right’

Gender Just Happens: But It Is Played Out in Oppositions! In one

In the current investigation of girls in English-speaking countries in

BOURDIEU’S THEORIZATION APPLIED TO GENDER

Narratives of individuals transcending their origins (in terms of class, gen-

THE CONNECTED SELF

1 Who Are Girls in Current Times and Is There a Problem?1

4 The Balancing Act95

5 Girls at School: The Formation of Learning Identities125

6 Post-school Pathways and Girls’ Imagined Futures155

7 Girls at School: A More Complex Picture183

OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development

Fig. 5.1 Responses in percentages to My parents encourage

Fig. 6.8 Responses in percentages to the question Men and