Jul 05

Listen out for Malala

Next week, on Friday 12 July – her 16th birthday – Malala Yousafzai will talk to the United Nations, and we should all listen.

Most people know Malala’s story: it began when she started to write a blog in 2009 for the BBC Urdu channel about life in Pakistan’s Swat Valley. At the time, private schools in the area had been ordered to close in a Taliban edict banning girls’ education. Militants seeking to impose their austere interpretation of Sharia law had destroyed about 150 schools in the past year, and Malala and her friends were afraid, yet rebellious – they wanted an education and believed that they had a right to be educated.

In her blog, Malala wrote about the challenges she faced, and the threats which she and her family endured. Although initially anonymous, she came out from behind the shadows to start to speak more openly, including to CNN and other news channels. In a 2011 interview with CNN, she said: “I have the right of education … I have the right to play. I have the right to sing. I have the right to talk. I have the right to go to market. I have the right to speak up.”

These words caused her to become the focus of attention for the Taliban, who were behind the attack in October 2012 on her life; masked men boarded the bus in which she was travelling home, demanded to know which one of the girls was Malala, and then shot her at point-blank range. When news spread of this, the world was rightly horrified.

Although critically injured, Malala survived, and after several operations in Pakistan and then in the UK, she went back to school – a girls’ school in Birmingham, in the UK – and has continued to raise awareness (and now money) for girls’ education.

Her story is the story of a childhood which disappeared under threats of oppression and discrimination, but which, incredibly, she has turned into a force for good. Whether or not she ever intended for this to be the case, she has become a symbol for the power of educating women, and a reminder to us all that anything – everything – is possible if we only put our minds to it.

Listen to Malala next Friday. We honour her and recognise the value of her cause as we do so..

Jun 29

Nelson Mandela and the education of girls

Nelson Mandela is a truly great man, and much has been, and will be written, I am sure, in the coming weeks and months, about his many achievements in his home country of South Africa, and throughout Africa and the world. In and amongst all of these tributes, we should not forget his deep-rooted commitment to education, and to the education of girls. In a video message to the launch in Berlin in 2005 of the United Nations’ Schools for Africa campaign, he said: “My dream is for all children of Africa to go to school. We must be unrelenting in our efforts to educate our children. There can be no excuse for not creating an enabling environment where all children throughout Africa can reach their full potential”. In 2007, aged 88, he spoke at the opening of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, and said: “It is my hope that this school will become the dream of every South African girl and they will study hard and qualify for the school one day”.

There is much more work to be done in South Africa. In a recent UNICEF report, it was noted that while South Africa spends a bigger share of its gross domestic product on education than any other country in Africa, and primary schooling is compulsory for children aged 7 to 15, with strategies in place to encourage poor, orphaned, disabled and vulnerable children to school, “performance levels are lower than in many other countries in the region. High levels of school attendance, gender parity in both primary and secondary education and pro-poor school policies are achievements that contrast with the poor quality of education”.

Much of this, according to the report, is related to the social and infrastructure difficulties experienced by children: “Many children experience a broken journey through school, interrupted by irregular attendance, absent teachers, teenage pregnancy and school-related abuse and violence. Around 27 per cent of public schools do not have running water, 78 per cent are without libraries and 78 per cent do not have computers. There is limited provision for preschool and special education.”

Nelson Mandela has made an enormous difference and left a great legacy. But it is far from accomplished; in his memory and in his honour, others must now take up the baton.

 

Jun 22

“Devious” girls? How the misuse of statistics undermines our girls.

My attention was caught earlier this week by an article in the Australian Daily Telegraph: in the print edition the headline read Study reveals devious girls lead way in tormenting kids; online, the headline read AIFS bullying study shows girls are more devious. The leading paragraph supported both these titles: “Girls are more devious than boys at tormenting classmates, Australia’s biggest childhood study reveals.” Devious … tormenting … what mean girls! Study shows girls are mean … Girls are mean! I would guess that this thought process and conclusion would not surprise most readers; we have been programmed over the years to believe that girls are significantly somehow more mean and more unkind than boys. Most people would not have given the article a second glance; it reinforced their world view.

We should not leave it there, however. Consider the following observations on this specific article:

  1. The study was a study on the experience of bullying by 10-11 year old children. It distinguished by gender those being bullied, not those doing the bullying. It does not say that girls are more likely to bully in a particular way; it says that girls are more likely to be bullied in a particular way. You can read it yourself here. The premise of the title of the Daily Telegraph article is wrong.
  2. A reading of the statistics suggests that the difference between the types of bullying experienced by boys and girls is not vastly different. The article states that “Four in every 10 girls had been excluded from a group, compared to one in three boys”; a hasty non-mathematical reading would assume that the difference was great, but of course ‘one in three’ is the equivalent of 3.33 in every ten, ie not so very different. If 46.5% of boys have experienced name-calling, and 40.2% of girls have experienced this, then again the difference is not enormous – in every group of 10 girls aged 10-11, about 4 of them will have experienced name-calling, while about 4 and a half boys will have had the same experience. There are gender differences, but these are not as black and white as the title and opening paragraph suggested.
  3. “devious” and “tormenting” are very negative values-laden word choices. By bringing them into the public domain and associating them with girls, connections are made in the public’s mind. As writers – or, more specifically in this case, I would guess, as sub-editors – , we have a responsibility to think through the effect of what it is that we write, and whether or not this reinforces existing stereotypes.
  4. As readers, we are often far too quick to jump, uncritically, to conclusions that accord with our world view. We have a responsibility to challenge ourselves not to accept at face value what we encounter in the media.

Those who bring news items and activity to the public attention will always face an ethical dilemma in positioning their pieces; striking and polarising headlines draw comment and sell papers, after all. And to what extent can they comfortably be change agents, seeking to alter public perceptions? But writers and editors have a real opportunity – and, arguably, a responsibility – to challenge our negative status quo as regards the portrayal of women and girls in our society. This negativity is holding us back as a civilisation. At the very least, their – and our – moral conscience should lead them to consider this.

 

Jun 14

Girls, girls, girls … how girls are changing the world

Yesterday turned into somewhat of a celebration at Ascham of how girls and women have changed and are changing our world, together with a reminder of what needs to be done still to make this world a fairer, more equal and more harmonious place. To a certain extent, every day in a girls’ school is both a celebration along these lines, and a reminder, but yesterday was especially pointed in this respect, and it was a heartening day.

The theme for the excellent Year 6 School assembly was Human Rights, with a particular focus on Women’s Rights, and we were taken on a whirlwind but highly effective tour through the ages from 1895, when women were first given the vote in Australia, right through to 2013, when (as the girls pointed out), there are still issues of gender balance on boards and in leadership roles. The girls’ amazement and incredulity on learning that until 1966, women were obliged to resign from their posts in public office when they married, was hugely encouraging; that they could not envisage a society in which married women were prohibited from working simply because they were married was worth a celebration in its own right.

Later the same day, the Senior School welcomed a guest speaker to its assembly – Jenny Orchard, who represented Room to Read, a very effective organisation working to raise literacy and education levels of children, and especially girls, in several countries in the world. She showed us an extract from the film ˜Half the Sky“, which reflects the aim of the eponymous movement (and book), to “turn oppression into opportunity” for women worldwide. The audience – a theatre full of girls – was reminded that when a girl is educated, a village is educated too.

This Sunday (or Monday, depending where you are in the world), CNN are showing a powerful film which critics have praised for its focus on the importance of girls’ education: ˜Girl Rising“. “Watch it if you can; watch ˜Half the Sky” if you can. While inequality and gender discrimination exist, we cannot afford not to remind ourselves, and to prompt ourselves to do something to make change happen.

We are surrounded by louder and louder voices that tell us what we have always known deep down: that educating girls makes a difference, that educating girls is the right thing to do, and that educating girls is what we should all take as a major focus in our lives, right now. The girls at my school know that they have a great education. They know too that they have a responsibility to effect change. And they are ready for the challenge.

Bring on the girls.

 

Jun 07

Floundering … or Fulfilling? Different Perspectives on Mothering.

Last weekend I flew from Sydney up to Dubbo, on my way to a schools’ riding expo at Coonabarabran; it was not a long flight, but there was enough time on the way there and the way back to read, cover to cover, Melbourne writer Romy Ash’s first novel, Floundering. This novel is worth a read – it has been shortlisted for the 2013 Miles Franklin award, a prize given to the “Novel for the year which is of the highest literary merit and which must present Australian Life in any of its phases”; moreover, it is powerful and intense, gripping the reader in a fear for the young narrator and his brother as they leave with their estranged mother (now returned) on a trip away from their normal, daily life. The presence of love but the absence of mothering makes for a subtly nerve-wracking journey by the reader; you will be unsettled by the novel and by the loneliness it contains … and for precisely this reason you should nonetheless read it.

What a contrast, then, to arrive at Coonabarabran and to find mothers (and fathers) working with love and care to look after their own, and each other’s, daughters. Around the campfire, preparing food, encouraging their daughters as they jumped the crosscountry course or prepared for the Polocrosse … these mothers were present for their daughters and giving them the support that they needed. Community, companionship, collaboration – the effect of these on the soul was all the greater for the insight that my reading material had given me into a life devoid of mothering. I was struck by what a difference mothering makes to young people, and I was grateful to be reminded of it in practice.

Mothers are special. They birth their children and they love their children. They feed their children and they nurture their children. They are instrumental in bringing up their children. Not every family has a mother, and many of these families find ways to recreate the love of a mother in alternative ways. When mothering is seen in action, it is wonderful.

To mothers everywhere – thank you.

May 31

Why it is important to talk about values in parenting

We all have values, many of them strongly held values. If you press us on ethical issues, if you test us or challenge us, and if you go deep enough, there will come a point when we reach a point where we will say that we will (or won’t) do something because it is the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ thing to do in that particular context. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that these values are born with us: Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts in the UK, in his excellent essay ‘Twenty-First Century Enlightenment‘, refers to recent research from the Yale University Infant Cognition Center, who discovered that even infants make “rudimentary moral judgements”: “In one experiment babies between six and twelve months old watched a simple coloured geometric shape – for example, a red circle with eyes – try to climb a slope. When other shapes intervened, apparently either helping or blocking the circle, the children’s responses showed a clear preference for the helping shapes.”

And yet we shy away from talking about our values. In part this is because the media of our times do not deal well with the complexity that an honest discussion on values would entail. Open any newspaper and you will tend to find judgements that are polarised into one view (right) or an opposing view (wrong). A wise person would smile at such simplicity of judgement; human life is far more complex. In a contrary but understandable juxtaposition, we have grown nervous of absolutes – two world wars in the twentieth century left their mark in this respect – and this has had the effect of making us fearful of anything other than moral relativity. We have taken tolerance to such an extreme that we are often afraid of questioning the values of others, no matter how appalling we may find them.

The circle of debate closes down when we are faced with such conflicting messages; it becomes too hard to explore our values and to test them out safely and in meaningful philosophical debate. No wonder that we give up and that the vast majority of visible and audible debate in our society revolves around the superficial … not that this makes the world any safer or better. Absence of strong and positive values translates very quickly into the pernicious and the amoral. Values are there for a reason – they are the framework on which we base our lives – lives that I believe we want to be in large part good, valuable and meaningful.

We need to talk about values, and we need to find a space to engage with this discussion particularly as it relates to our children. Our children may be born with values, but the nurturing of these values is down to us as parents, and to the society around them. If we as parents do not spend time delving deeper into our own values, and finding ways in which to discuss and explore them in the context of the world in which we live, then we will find it harder to guide our children. Our children need our guidance – more so now than ever before, given this superficial backdrop to the world in which they are growing up.

So … we need to start a debate. Not a confrontational debate, where we seek to squeeze our understandings about values into an ‘either’ or an ‘or’. Not a debate in which we seek to justify our own understandings at the expense of the understandings of others. Not a debate which seeks instant solutions. Instead, we need a debate where we create spaces for parents especially to be able to reflect on the advice, guidance and wisdom about the world that they and others possess. Throughout the ages, human beings have sought enlightenment, and we know by now that this will not come in the shape of a blinding light or a ‘quick fix’ answer. Our enlightenment will come through openness, exploration, inquisitiveness and honesty.

This is one of the main reasons why I wrote my book. And we all owe it to our children to engage with our values.

 

May 25

The academic benefits of team sport

The results of a fascinating US study into 9,700 high-school students aged 14-18 are reported in this week’s Times Educational Supplement in the UK: according to research conducted by academics from the University of South Carolina and Pennsylvania State University, participation in team sports during adolescence makes a “significant and consistent difference to students’ academic grades”. In fact, they report that teams sport is the only extra-curricular activity that consistently has this effect, and while those of us in schools can attest to the fact that many other extra-curricular activities can have a similar effect on individuals we have known, this finding is really interesting.

The study was a wide-ranging one, looking at correlations between a variety of extra-curricular activities and the success in other areas of school life enjoyed by teenagers who participate in them. It looked too at the likelihood of progress on to tertiary education. It can be hard to identify trends that are meaningful when dealing with students from different socio-economic backgrounds, different geographical locations, and different genders and ethnicity; moreover, every individual is precisely that – an individual – and will have his or her own motivations and triggers for success. The fact, therefore, that these researchers have found a consistent correlation is really important.

Why should team sport have such an effect on grades? There are many reasons, ranging from fitness (healthy body, healthy mind) to the discipline and focus needed to train and prepare. Skills learned in one sphere of life can transfer to another; we all understand this – sport is no different in this respect. And the benefits of team sport go further – team sport teaches awareness of others, leadership, the ability to co-operate … it also encourages mentorship and the setting of one’s sights high. All of these are essential characteristics for success in the world of work.

We probably didn’t need this research to tell us that team sport is an essential part of the education of young people; it does, however, give a boost to all those teenagers currently engaged in team sport. Well done to them for making such a great choice!

 

May 17

Redefining ‘richness’ in working motherhood

Lat month I attended an all day festival at the Sydney Opera House entitled ‘All About Women‘. A number of speakers spoke about their various opinions about women’s role in the world today, and the day was supplemented by a number of ‘conversations’ – panel discussions which tackled some of the issues facing women in the workplace or around whether or not, for example, to have children, and so on: some deliberately provocative subjects. It was an interesting day and a pause for thought, in the presence of hundreds of other engaged and questioning women – the fact of their presence on a Sunday, of course, being proof enough that these issues are far from being resolved in our society.

During one of the talks, by Liza Mundy, the American journalist, who was talking about the ideas in her latest book, “The Richer Sex”, an incident occurred which caused me to reflect and which I have been thinking about ever since. Ms Mundy was describing how women now have an unprecedented opportunity to “out-earn” their husbands, for all sorts of reasons, and what this might mean for them. She looked back at the (very recent) history of women effectively having to surrender any money or income they had to their husbands, and described how this still played out in the world today, with suspicion and unease towards women who earn more than their husbands – often by and among the women themselves, who are nervous about pairing with a man who will earn less than them, as if, deep down, this is somehow against the natural order.

Ms Mundy went on, then, to talk about what it would mean for women who did earn more than their husbands and become the main breadwinners, and although she stressed the positive, she also said, almost in a throwaway line, that women with children who were in this position might need to grow used to becoming the more distant parent. At this point, a woman sitting a few seats away burst into tears and had to be consoled by her companions. I don’t think many people noticed – it is a big venue, after all, and we were sitting in the dark – but the impact of these words was clearly significant for this participant.

Of course, there could have been many reasons why she burst into tears, many of them unconnected with the words of the speaker; I certainly didn’t pry, and it would have been inappropriate afterwards to question her. She was clearly emotional, however, and the coincidence of her dissolving into tears at that precise moment in the speaker’s talk made it likely that there was some connection and some personal impact on her life. It made me reflect again on what it means to be a working mother, or a working parent.

As I did so, I grew increasingly cross. The truth is, of course, is that we have all been set up to fail in our expectations of parenthood. We will never feel good enough. As parents, we are biologically and emotionally attuned to want and need to be there for our children, but we also need to be realistic about what we need to do to support our children well. Moreover, bringing up children is hard. Advertising for baby products, meanwhile – to use only a small example of the pressures on women – emphasises the beautiful moments of mother-baby (less often, father-baby) interaction, played again and again on screen or in the pages of magazines for us as if there for eternity, and as if this is what having a baby is always all about. If we don’t experience this constantly, we are effectively told, we are failures as parents. Our logical brain may tell us that playing with a happy baby is only a part of the parenting experience and process, but our emotional brain cannot help but to be influenced by what it overwhelmingly sees and experiences around it – and besides, it is easy to want to be influenced by this essential beauty.

In truth, there will always be separation by some parent at some point even from their baby, and for the baby to grow in experience, this will be essential at various stages. Most significantly, for parents to be able to afford to bring up their baby, one or other of them is going to have to work. This is not to suggest, however, that the status quo in our society is by any means good enough. It simply isn’t, and I came to the conclusion in my reflections that Liza Mundy was wrong in her too-causal assumption that the new, ‘richer’ working mother would simply replace what working fathers have had to endure for too long.

Instead, we need to rethink society’s relationship with parents. We don’t value parenthood enough. We don’t support our parents enough. We need to think through all our workplace structures to make sure that we can allow all parents to be fully engaged in bringing up their – our – children, while still contributing effectively to the work and activity of our world.

Richness comes from engaging fully in life, in all its imperfections, but also challenging what it wrong and making a difference. Our parents need our help to allow them to do exactly this.

 

May 10

Why it is important for girls to blow their own trumpets

A recent initiative at Wimbledon High School for Girls in London has received quite a bit of coverage in the UK – the school encouraged the girls over a number of months to scribble down their thoughts whenever they realised that they were proud of something that they had done and then the school spent a week “trumpeting” these achievements in assembly and drama classes. The purpose, as the Head herself said, was “about the girls recognising their own self-worth and being honest about what they are good at. We want to build their confidence so that they’ll try new things even when they know it might go wrong.”

Inevitably there were mixed responses from commentators in the press and correspondents who felt moved to write in to express their views, many of whom mistook positive affirmation of achievement for boastfulness and arrogance. Quite rightly, we value neither of these latter qualities in our society; equally, it can be difficult to reconcile the messages we give young people constantly in school about the importance of service to others, and of valuing others ahead of themselves, with a focus on the self and on their own personal achievements.

If our young people are to achieve a happy and wise balance in their lives, however, they have to learn to acknowledge and embrace who they are in their entirety. This means accepting the positive and praiseworthy as well as those areas that would benefit from greater attention and improvement. We all have many of these weaknesses hidden within us – we are all imperfect beings – but we all too have many strengths, and we have to learn to live with, and be comfortable with, both. Our strengths are not something that we should hide under a bushel; to do so risks underutilising them and existing merely as a half a person. Finding a way to acknowledge our strengths and our weaknesses is part of our life’s journey towards self-acceptance.

Moreover, learning to recognise and acknowledge strength is arguably a prerequisite for contentment in life and work. The central premise of Sheryl Sandberg’s book, ‘Lean In’, is that girls and women – who have in general been encouraged not to emphasise their strengths to the same extent as boys and men – must learn to accept what they are good at, and say so, “coming to the table” rather than hiding in the corner.

We are all – every single one of us – distinctive and individual human beings. Our uniqueness and specialness depend on the unique combination of attributes that we possess in varying degrees, and once we recognise this and can feel comfortable with this, we will have a platform on which to build further.

Our children learn from the role models around them. Maybe we should all take time this week to blow our own trumpets.

 

May 05

“Equality’s just gone well out the window.”

A quote in the IPPR report about which I wrote in a recent blog caught my eye in particular. Describing how she felt about her equality with me, a 19 year old woman from Manchester said the following:

“It went from empowering women to women are just items again. It’s gotten even worse, because women are just portrayed as if they’re just a piece of meat: it’s dead, it’s cold. We’re not even human beings …it’s just, equality’s just gone well out the window …I’ve been on a date, right, and the guy was trying to practically maul me – just because he’d bought me something to eat, he thought he had the right, do you know what I mean?”

The authors of the report – Great Expectations: Exploring the Promises of Gender Equality – devote an entire chapter to exploring the presentation of women in our cultural life, ie the representations of women that we see around us in mainstream media. They do this, of course, because how women are represented in the media will naturally either reinforce or challenge who we expect women to be. At its best, it will encourage us all to defy traditional and restrictive expectations of women; at its worst, it will trap women into believing that there is a specific cultural norm to which they should adhere, or which they should strive to attain.

As the report points out, the situation is complex – the concept of what it means to be a woman has indeed changed remarkably, and this change has been particularly noticeable since the latter third of the twentieth century. This does not mean, however, that the change has been as empowering for women as the rhetoric around this change would suggest. An analysis of the evidence in fact suggests – just as the 19 year old woman from Manchester notes – that “Over the past few decades, the passive wife, mother and hostess has been replaced across mainstream cultural forums by a more assertive and sexually empowered woman, in control of her own choices. While she can ostensibly be anything she wants, however, critics have noted that her choices appear to be narrowly centred on shopping, self-improvement, marriage and babies.” Girls and women today are subjected, constantly, to a “narrow, unrealistic and sexualised vision of what it is to be a woman”.

Take a moment today to look around you and see how women are portrayed in the media. Pause for a moment to ask yourself if they really have the choices so ostensibly on offer to them, or if their choices are paralysed by critical expectations of their appearance, behaviour and thoughts. As the authors of the report point out, we are fooling ourselves if we think our work on gender equality is done. We have a lot more to do, and every day matters.

Do something today to make a difference. Share your thoughts with someone else. Let us ensure that the national – and international – debate is a loud one.