Still not able to properly think this through

[shermarama]

Is there such a thing as a consulting feminist? Because I feel like I need to talk to one, on how I got to where I am, and where indeed I actually am, on gender issues. I don't spend a lot of time reading around the topic, and I'm not likely to either, but things come up where I find my experiences of being female, and of being a female that does

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[aphroditemf]

"When did I learn about the boxes?"

The boxes are, to some extent, there from birth, instilled by parents and reinforced by advertising (Paul is already talking about how our unborn son will play for West Ham, but I suppose he might get the same shock that my own father did when my brother grew up preferring reading books and writing stories to playing sports). But, speaking as someone who's worked with kids from birth to late teens, I can attest that children will utterly ignore these boxes for quite some time, probably until junior school. Go into any pre-school where there is a range of toys available, and the boys will play with prams whilst the girls play with building blocks and trucks, and vice versa. They don't really care at that age. My (male) cousin has a five-year-old son, and he frequently expresses his distress that his son adores playing with a dolls' house, maintaining that "There is something wrong" with him. His son continues to happily play with the dolls' house regardless of his dad's concern. Scarlett, on the other hand, at seven years old spends more time playing football and video games than she does playing with dolls. Last week I gave her a digital camera and she immediately found how to shoot videos on it, and started making what appeared to be some sort of kung-fu zombie film with the two boys I childmind.

So the point at which children start to cave in to the pressure to conform to traditional norms of gender identity comes much later, around the time that they start going through puberty. Then they are faced with the problem of their own changing bodies and recognition that there are distinct physical differences between boys and girls, and find themselves segregated at school along gender lines.

And at secondary school they find themselves steered in a certain direction by teachers. I recall learning basics of computer game programming in the second or third year of secondary school, but then when it came to choosing options it was almost all boys that chose IT, and the girls chose Office Applications. Now, if I'd been made aware by the teacher "Hey, if you study IT, you could work for a video games company some day!" then I would have jumped at the chance to do so, but (at the time) teachers weren't really interested in steering girls towards non-traditional careers. Combine that with the fact that the wealthiest women in my family work as legal secretaries or accountants, and it made more sense to me (as a thirteen-year-old) to study those subjects (what I discovered later was that offices are the Seventh Level of Hell, and I would rather be broke than work in one). Now, if we'd had proper career guidance and been given more information on what vocational qualifications we could study after leaving school, then perhaps I'd have chosen differently. At the time, it seemed that the school was primarily interested in their own statistics - they wanted to send as many students as possible to university, regardless of what those students ended up studying, or how useful it was to them in the long run when it came to long-term career prospects. So I suppose it was more convenient to the school to just lump the pupils into boxes according to gender than it was to take the time to really make them aware of the scope of options available.

Of course, I'm talking about fifteen years ago, so I suppose it is possible that a younger generation of teachers and changes in gender politics and the curriculum have resulted in attempts to eradicate this problem. I hope so, because Scarlett's going into junior school now, and I'm growing ever aware of the fact that she'll be in secondary school before I know it. My instinct right now is that she'd be better off in an all-girls school, where teachers can't herd boys towards one type of career and girls towards another, because there won't be any boys to herd.

[shermarama]

This is interesting stuff. I was a pretty late starter on the puberty thing, so while a lot of my peers were at a stage of messing around with boys and make-up, it all felt kind of irrelevant to me... and then by the time it became relevant I couldn't buy women's clothes anyway, so maybe there's stages I just never really passed through along the way.

I'd be inclined to avoid an all-girls school myself, but then there's a large range of opinions about that. I know women that went to all-girl schools who say their confidence in technical subjects came from there, from never having to fight assumptions that the best people in the science classes would be the boys, and from never having the excuse to let their own standards drop. Then again I've met people who went to all-girl schools who then spent too much of university working out how to deal with to these strange new boy creatures they were having to be around, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. I went to somewhere sort of inbetween, a school that had been girls-only that was in the process of becoming mixed, and I much preferred it mixed; that school was shit enough without also missing out on learning how to socialise with half the population.

I doubt careers advice is better purely for somewhere being single-sex - I suspect it's going to depend more on whether there's anyone there who gives a toss about it, or has any understanding of the world outside of teaching. All the female teachers from the female-only bit of my school were quite traditional, had studied nice lady-like things like English or languages and then gone into their acceptably lady-like teaching careers, and so they just didn't know what else there was to tell us about. It was clear I was good at science and should carry on doing something science-related, but beyond picking which of the three standard sciences I liked most or maybe doing medicine, that was about it. If only any of them had even known what engineering was, someone might have been able to tell me about its existence.