Apr 30

Coming to terms with the First World War. Reflections on ANZAC Day

Last week Australia paused on ANZAC Day to consider what that day meant and why it is so important that we recognise it. Fresh in the minds of students across the nation will be their study of the Gallipoli campaign, but the purpose of ANZAC Day goes far beyond the anniversary of that fateful landing on the Gallipoli peninsula, in the Dardanelles Straits, in 1915. On ANZAC Day last week we remembered all Australians who served and died in all wars, all conflicts, and all of the many peacekeeping operations in which our armed forces are involved around the world.

And as we did so, we all remember that we should never forget the horrors of war, the dreadful destruction, and the terrible impact that war has on families and on our world.

I recently read Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain; written in 1933, it is probably the book for which she is best well-known, although she wrote many other works, including poetry, and became a significant feminist and pacifist. What is significant about this book, however, is that it details her autobiographical journey through the First World War, and how this affected not just her, but her entire generation.

Vera Brittain was born in 1893 to a middle class family – comfortable, well-off (although their notions of comfort were of course very different from ours). She went to a private school in the south of England, and she was just coming of age, going up to Oxford University – in an age where women still couldn’t gain degrees – when the war broke out. She volunteered as a nursing orderly as was sent to various parts of Europe to work in hospitals in dreadful conditions. And what she describes in detail – if you have read it, you will know this isn’t a short book, by any means – is nothing less than the ripping apart of a generation.

The First World War was a shock of seismic proportions in our civilisation. We can look back with the wise eyes of history and see how various elements had contributed to it happening, and how so many people died, and think “wasn’t that dreadful?” … but in doing so we miss the huge personal impact that the war had on individuals and families. Each soldier or civilian who died had a family who mourned, who was never, ever the same again.

It is estimated that around 20 million people died in the First World War. EACH ONE of those 20 million people – each one – was a precious life which stopped – there and then – no more successors, no more children, no more grandchildren. We are the lucky ones, because our grandparents, great grandparents and great-great grandparents survived. We are surrounded, even today, by the shadows of those who never existed, because of the First World War.

The First World War shook civilisation because it challenged the values that had underpinned society until that point – values that we have struggled ever since to recover and blend into something more valuable, more precious, more equal, more human.

The spirit of ANZAC lies in its human qualities of courage and sacrifice, and the importance of supporting one another, of being a good ‘mate’. These are central human elements which have real meaning and relevance for how we conduct ourselves today. But let us also commit never to forget what war does. It is within our power to work together to prevent wars. And when we remember what war does, we will do this so much the better.

 

 

Apr 22

The Boston bombings and an outpouring of human warmth

One of the most heartening aspects of the dreadful events that have unfolded in Boston over the past week and a half has been the visibly great strength of the human reaction to other human beings in distress. News stories captured the heroism of individuals who ran towards the blast rather than away, to tend those critically injured; tales abounded of runners who discovered an almost superhuman determination to overcome exhaustion in the last few kilometres so that they could aid the rescue effort. Runners professed that they would not be beaten, and that out of solidarity with those injured they would run even harder in London a week later; and the packed streets of London spoke of this immense force, with human beings standing – figuratively – shoulder-to-shoulder with their distant cousins across the ocean. They were humans together, any difference transcended by the unity they found in opposing a twisted evil.

One of the most moving stories I heard was of the reaction of Bostonians on hearing of the blast, and the subsequent inevitable transport upheaval that followed. More than 4000 local citizens put their names and contact details into an online spreadsheet containing offers of accommodation and transport to help out visitors who had nowhere to stay. In another context, we would have chastised them for placing their privacy at risk; in another context, too, it probably would not even have crossed their minds to do so. But they did so because they were prompted by a basic human instinct to reach out to those in need – to care, to help, to heal.

The Boston bombings showed the worst and the best of humanity – wanton disregard for human life and ultimate regard for the same. On a scorecard, the regard and care far outweighed the other, and that is what was so inspiring about the aftermath of the event. Human beings have an amazing capacity to care for each other, and we are hardwired to do so. We do not show it often enough, but the fact that we show it when it matters reminds us of how inter-linked we all are as a human race. It inspired hope for the future of humanity; let us capture these moments and build on them.

 

 

Apr 17

Margaret Thatcher and an interdependent society

After the distasteful scenes leading up to it, Baroness Thatcher’s funeral yesterday was a dignified and noble affair, with the streets of London lined with people who were there, overwhelmingly, to acknowledge her long service to the country, and to mark her life and her passing.

The Bishop of London, in his funeral address, was very clear on this: “There is an important place for debating policies and legacy; for assessing the impact of political decisions on the everyday lives of individuals and communities. Parliament held a frank debate last week … but here and today is neither the time nor the place. This, at Lady Thatcher’s personal request, is a funeral service, not a memorial service with the customary eulogies. And at such a time, the parson should not aspire to the judgments which are proper to the politician; instead, this is a place for ordinary human compassion of the kind that is reconciling. It is also the place for the simple truths which transcend political debate. And above all it is the place for hope.”

The Bishop continued on to explain that Margaret Thatcher was a great servant in her political life, overcoming many hurdles in her belief that she had a role to play to help the country get back on its feet. He exploded the myth that she was not a believer in ‘society’; her widely quoted statement that “there is no such thing as society” referred in her mind, he explained, to “some impersonal entity to which we are tempted to surrender our independence”. Instead, she believed that we needed to work not to be dependent on others, but to live with others and for others, in an ‘other-centred’ way, beyond ourselves. The word Margaret Thatcher used … was “interdependence”.

Life, the Bishop pointed out, “is a struggle to make the right choices and to achieve liberation from dependence, whether material or psychological.” Margaret Thatcher was very aware of this, and she had a strong sense of the essential values needed to make society – this web of inter-relationships – work: “She was very aware that there are prior dispositions which are needed to make market economics and democratic institutions function well: the habits of truth-telling, mutual sympathy, and the capacity to co-operate. These decisions and dispositions are incubated and given power by our relationships. In her words: “The basic ties of the family are at the heart of our society and are the nursery of civic virtue.”

This is enormous good, solid, common sense. It is very easy to think and speak harshly about politicians. What they do has an impact on our lives – which we tolerate easily if it is exactly what we would like, but (as is to be expected) this will not always be the case, and we can be very quick to condemn them. We expect a great deal from our politicians in other ways, too: for them to be paragons of virtue, models of honesty and probity, and statespeople whose wisdom transcends the norm … it is hardly surprising, therefore, that as mere human beings they often fail to live up to these ideals, and that their fall from grace is greater in our eyes.

And yet politicians are there to serve. They have chosen this path – in large part, at least – to try to make a positive difference in the world, and we should sometimes stop our critical tongues and remember this. The oppositional nature of so many of our political structures should of course continue to be a source of irritation and frustration for us, but maybe we should be a little more generous in our appreciation of what our politicians are seeking to do for us.

In this world, we will thrive as a human race when we learn not to live in isolation from one another, nor to live in dependency upon others, but together, interdependent, with a shared and common goal, but bringing to this our unique capacities and insights. If nothing else, we were reminded of this at Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. It was indeed a time for compassion and hope.

 

Apr 13

What we can and should do NOW to make gender equality happen

A really interesting and stimulating report was published a couple of weeks ago by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), which justifiably claims to be the UK’s leading progressive thinktank. Their reports are always worth reading – full, detailed, current and to the point, they are a wealth of information as well as, in the main, offering some very practical forward-thinking solutions. Their latest report, Great Expectations: Exploring the Promises of Gender Equality, is an excellent read – a must-read, even – and I thoroughly recommend it.

The main premise of the report is that the time has come to move beyond just empowering women to change. Instead, the authors identify key areas in which – structurally – our society effectively prevents real gender equality from becoming embedded, despite all the legal frameworks in place. The authors look in turn at the state of women in work, drawing on personal experiences as well as on official statistics, and then turn their attention to women as carers – “the ‘unpaid economy” – and then women in cultural life.

The report’s conclusion is quite clear: “Overall, we need a gender politics that is less about how women can succeed in a man’s game, and more about how to change the rules of the game.” In order to do this, the authors argue, we need to be asking different questions from those we largely ask at present: “We should ask whether women’s interests are best served by a focus on women’s ability to compete on an equal footing with men, or by raising the status of the jobs that women do. Whether the gender pay gap is better addressed by promoting women in top jobs, or by tackling low pay and insecurity at the bottom. Whether the difficulties faced by working parents are better addressed by defending women’s right to maternity leave, or a transformation of the role of men in the home. And how much of this can be achieved by state capture, and how much requires us to build democratic coalitions for change.”

It is undeniably and demonstrably the case that gender equality has made amazing strides forward in the past century. In 1913, few democracies in the world allowed women to vote, to earn money for themselves, or to own property. The world has changed. But it is has also reached a sticking point, and we can’t let this progress stagnate. We need to devote creative thinking power to the issue, and we need to do this now. And as this report so powerfully concludes, we need to do this together. Together we are stronger; together we can explore, collectively, how to dismantle the fossilised structures which are preventing women and men from working and living on an equal footing, and together we can build new and empowering structures which just make it all work.

What a great goal … and if we set our minds to it, I truly believe that it is in sight.

 

Apr 05

Georgia Willson-Pemberton. RIP.

Early on Friday morning I received a distressing message on Twitter from a former member of staff at one of my previous schools, alerting me to the news that was splashed all over the UK press, and on the front page of the Daily Mail: the inquest into the death of Georgia Willson-Pemberton. The coroner established that Georgia, aged just 26, had died of multiple organ failure in December after a battle with anorexia that had culminated in her taking an overdose of laxatives. This had caused “irreparable damage” to her digestive organs; her body could take no more, and she collapsed and died.

Our time at Heathfield School in Ascot – she as pupil, I as Headmistress – coincided. At school, Georgia was a perfectly normal girl – mostly happy (in the way that teenagers only ever are ‘mostly’ happy – a necessary part of this period of transition) and very accomplished on the sports field and ski slopes. I knew her during her early to mid teens, and I developed a soft spot for her – largely because, as most entrepreneurial thinkers are, she was always in one scrape or another, and so ended up spending plenty of time explaining herself to me and promising never to do it again. She earned the praise and friendship of her peers, and was made Head Girl (after my time). By all accounts, she ended her school years on a high.

Georgia possessed a strong strain of self-doubt, however, as achievers in this society – especially girls and women – often do, and this, combined with her innate determination to succeed, will not have helped her as in later years she developed the mental illness that is anorexia. The coroner noted that this had happened in 2008, while she was studying for a degree in international marketing at the European Business School in London, and from this point onwards, her life – and that of her family – became consumed by the disease. People underestimate anorexia – they dismiss it as faddishness about food, but as the National Eating Disorders Collaboration in Australia explains, “Anorexia Nervosa is a serious and potentially life threatening mental illness. A person with Anorexia Nervosa has not made a ‘lifestyle choice’; they are actually very unwell and need help.”

There are many reasons why people develop anorexia – and in fact, it is usually a complex and very personal mix of genetic pre-disposition, trauma, social factors, and the psychological need to control. There is no doubt, however, that our culture of thinness, and pressure on women to look, act and be in certain ways, can be a contributing factor. This pressure can have devastating consequences. In a case in the West of England last year, the coroner reporting on the suicide of a 14 year old girl, who developed an eating disorder, the coroner was blunt and to the point: “I do ask for magazines that trade in the fashion industry to stop publishing photographs of wafer thin girls. For their vanity families like this suffer.”

And yet, this culture surrounds our young people. These messages are reinforced at every street corner, in every magazine, a hundred times over in adverts on TV, or pop-ups online. It is part of the air that they breathe; they are conditioned to think not only that that thin is good, but that without thin there can be no good. These expectations are so pervasive that they are often unchallenged – they are our ‘normal’, and this is intensely dangerous and deeply, deeply wrong. Studies have shown that the body shape typically modelled to young people can only be physically achieved by 5% of our population; the rest will struggle in vain, in an unnecessary battle that if not challenged can only ever lead them to feelings of inadequacy and failure that will debilitate them. Throughout history, people have led happy and successful lives regardless of their shape and size; why – other than for commercial reasons – have we created a body-obsessed society that suggests otherwise?

It is our collective responsibility to dismantle this facade, or at least to place it in the perspective that it warrants. Life is not all about appearance; it is about who we are, and what we contribute. Schools, parents, leading figures in society … we must all take up this cause and seek to make a difference. We cannot all cure mental illness, although thankfully we have professionals in our society who can do this in many cases, even if tragically not in Georgia’s. We can though, all of us, most certainly work towards highlighting and taking apart the pernicious toxic expectations of young people that are currently rarely challenged in our society. Our young people deserve the opportunity to be able to breathe freely, to be able to be themselves, and to be released from the immense pressure that forces them to conform physically, and doubt themselves hugely. We owe it to them to take up this cause.

Georgia Willson-Pemberton. Died but not forgotten.

Apr 01

Why it is important to want to be different

It is a tradition at Ascham that in the run-up to Easter the youngest children make hats out of newspaper, decorate them themselves, and then show off their creations to their parents in a ‘Grand Parade’. Teachers enter into the spirit of the occasion and create their own hats, as well as encouraging their charges to stretch their imagination; the result is an explosion of colours, sparkles, wafting pieces of material, and lots of proud creators. This year’s parade was magnificent – a triumph of ingenuity, with much deserved parental applause.

Sometimes a theme emerges in a class, and such was the case in one particular class whose teacher is to be married over the upcoming vacation. Her hat sported a long veil, and white netting fabric adorned the hats of the majority of the pupils in her class, some of whom took it upon themselves to walk in solemn procession behind their teacher as self-appointed flower girls. As they entered the hall, they explained what they had chosen to do, and clearly felt the weight of responsibility on them to ensure that their teacher’s ‘big day’ was a great success. Service in action, clearly.

One girl from the same class, however, was not bedecked with a veil. Her crowning creation was black, striking, and very different. As she passed me, she piped up cheerfully, as an adjunct to the explanations of service and help given by her peers, with the words: “and I’m Darth Vader”.. Indeed, her headgear did bear a remarkable similarity to Darth Vader’s mask; and, yes, she carried this off remarkably well.

And as a host of bridesmaids paraded around the hall, with an encouragingly jolly Darth Vader in their midst, I was struck by how very, very important it is for schools to encourage their children to be different. Team work is essential in life – we will not survive as a human race without it – but of equal importance, sitting in harmony with the need to work together, is also the need to be authentically ourselves. We are all unique and distinctive individuals, and our society most definitely needs too the creativity that comes with exploring and extending this uniqueness and distinctiveness.

Schools have an enormous role to play in balancing and drawing out both teamwork and individuality in the young people they are helping to educate, and the real skill is in enabling this to happen at exactly the moment that is right for each child. Each of Darth Vader’s classmates will have the opportunity to explore her difference at some point; each will have multiple opportunities during her school years to extend her capacity to be able to be more ‘different’ and more ‘same’; and each will learn that we must all value this difference as much as we value this sameness.

When schools get to work, it is a great sight. And we all benefit.

 

Mar 25

Being Australian

One of the pleasures in coming to a new country is experiencing for the first time events that long-time citizens of that country take for granted. It is refreshing and stimulating to encounter such events, especially when they have at their heart strong and positive elements which lift the spirits.

Such was the case last week, when I experienced my first ‘Harmony Day’. As the Government website devoted to Harmony Day puts it, Harmony Day “is a day of cultural respect for everyone who calls Australia home – from the traditional owners of this land to those who have come from many countries around the world. By participating in Harmony Day activities, we can learn and understand how all Australians from diverse backgrounds equally belong to this nation and enrich it.”

Although the leading Labor party chose about that same day to implode in in-fighting, knocking most of the national Harmony Day activities off the news (politicians, it would seem, are the same all over the world), it is clear that Harmony Day was taken seriously across this vast country. Festivals were held, awards were given, and orange – the colour chosen to represent Harmony Day – was worn all over the country. Schools had a particular role to play in highlighting the importance of the day, and at Ascham I attended two great assemblies, at each of which we sang the beautiful song (written by The Seekers) – new to me, but clearly a powerful and well-known hymn to the power of diversity – ‘I am Australian’.

The Year 2 class who were leading one of the assemblies I attended had made up a third verse about themselves:

We came from New Zealand, from Greece and Italy,

From India & China, from England, Germany,

We came to find a new life in the Great Southern Land,

As immigrants together, we became Australian.

As I heard it, it struck me powerfully how special this country is, in its amalgamation of peoples from around the world – people still coming to seek a new life, from every country on earth. This blending of cultures makes for an uplifting mix, and while immigration is never without its challenges, I have marvelled at the essential connectedness of the Australians. Almost every single Australian you meet will tell tales of connections with countries far and wide, often several of them. In a world where travel is easy and yet where fundamental misunderstandings between races and national groups can lead to terrible wars and atrocities against fellow human beings, we need the robust openness that these connections and sense of belonging to multiple cultures bring.

At its best, Australia provides a model for unity and harmony, and Harmony Day reminded us all of this, very explicitly. We should all become Australian.

 

Mar 18

Parents and schools: a partnership from birth

I recently read Paul Tough’s excellent book, ‘Whatever It Takes’, the story of Geoffrey Canada, the pioneering Harlem principal who created the Harlem Children’s Zone, which has revolutionised the life chances of thousands of some of New York’s poorest and most disadvantaged children. It is an absolutely fascinating – and inspiring – read, which demonstrates how with determination and an uncompromising vision, almost anything is possible, and I thoroughly recommend it. What particularly struck me, however, was how Geoffrey Canada realised at an early stage that in order for his plan to work, he needed to engage with parents and their children at the very earliest stage of their lives. Parenting is really important, he realised, but parents could not necessarily be expected to parent all on their own.

The Harlem Children’s Zone came about in part because of the influence of research such as that done by Hart and Risley in the early 1980’s. They conducted ethnographic linguistic studies of the interactions in 42 families with newborn babies in Kansas City and were able to make a sharp distinction between the size of the vocabularies employed in families with professional parents and those with parents on welfare. By the age of 3, children in families with professional parents had a vocabulary of around 1,100 words, while children in families with parents on welfare had a vocabulary of only around 525 words. The IQs of these children corresponded very closely to these vocabularies: the average IQ of children in professional families was 117, while the children in families on welfare had an average IQ of only 79. The researchers were able to go further, and identify that the children’s vocabularies were directly related to the number and type of utterances to which they were exposed in their families.

Geoffrey Canada needed the parents of children in Harlem to know that they could increase the IQ – and life chances – of their children by talking to them more often, and in different ways, and so he set up Baby College, sending out staff to recruit parents (or parents-to-be), to get them to hear what they needed to do. He recognised that parents cannot be expected to know everything; they need other people – society, if you will – to help share with them the experience and knowledge that we are gaining all the time about how to help our children.

It is very easy in today’s world to victimise parents and blame them for all their children’s ills. But parenting is a hard enough skill – if not a way of life – without the added pressure of constant blame. Parents do not need more pressure. What they do need is help, support, guidance, and a sense that we are all in this together. We have a collective responsibility to bring up our children, and we all need to work to make this happen.

Geoffrey Canada understood this, and has transformed the lives of poor children in Harlem as a result. It is an inspiring story, and we can all learn from it. Together – schools and parents – we are stronger – and our children cannot fail but to benefit from this.

 

Mar 11

Investing in women is the smart thing to do

With the celebrations and messages of International Women’s Day last week still reverberating, I thought I would devote this blog to reminding us why it is so important that we devote time, energy and resources to developing opportunities for women throughout the world. Justine Greening, the UK Government Secretary of State for International Development recently gave a speech in which she covered, eloquently, all bases, and I quote from it below. The whole speech can be read here; I leave her words below to speak for themselves.

And I wish you an ongoing Happy International Women’s Day. Here’s to a brighter, fairer future for all women throughout the world.

Investing in girls and women is the smart thing to do.

By unleashing their potential, we see incredible returns for girls and women themselves, for their families and communities, and for their economies and countries.

Some people have called it the Girl Effect:

In education, we know that getting girls through primary and secondary school works.

An extra year of primary schooling for girls increases their wages by up to 20% and for secondary school it’s even higher.

More time in education means that girls face a lower risk of sexual violence, they marry later, have fewer children, and have better health outcomes for the children they do have.

It’s better for them and their families and communities.

We know that when a woman generates her own income she re-invests 90% of it in her family and community.

And it’s better for their economies and countries.

In India, the states with more women in work have seen faster economic growth and the largest reductions in poverty.

In Pakistan, women entering the national parliament on a gender quota were able to work successfully across party lines on legislation relating to honour killing and acid crime control.

Countries with higher civic engagement and stronger attitudes towards equality and fairness towards women have significantly higher levels of per capita income in the long run.

But of course investing in girls and women isn’t only the smart thing to do, but also the right thing to do.

This is a matter of universal, basic human rights. It is about girls’ and women’s right to have control over their own bodies, to have a voice in their community and country; to live a life free of the fear of violence; to choose who to marry and when; it’s about their right to be in education, which gives them a chance of productive work, and a chance to choose how they spend that money they earn.

Locking out women isn’t just bad for an economy, it’s bad for a society. It seems common sense, but it’s still happening.

From the very start girls lose out.

They lose out at school, with less than one in five girls in sub-Saharan Africa making it to secondary school.

They lose out when they are married, with one third of girls in the developing world marrying before the age of 18, some as young as seven years old.

And when they have their first child, in spite of dramatic progress, medical complications from pregnancy and childbirth are still the leading cause of death amongst 15 to 19 year old girls worldwide. 

Women perform two thirds of the world’s work, produce half of the food, but earn only 10% of the income and own only 1% of the property.

More broadly, all too often a women’s place in their community and society is downgraded:

In 11 countries, the testimony of a woman carries less evidentiary weight in a court than that of a man.

And although women make up more than half the population, they represent only 20% of political leaders in the world […]

Perhaps most unacceptably, how women are physically treated is often underpinned by violence.

Around the world one in three girls and women will be beaten or raped in their lifetime. Perhaps this statistic is so shocking that it simply overwhelms us.

But we urgently need irreversible gains in the rights for girls and women and an end to violence against girls and women.

[…] these issues represent the greatest unmet challenges of our time, not some sideline issue. And we cannot turn a blind eye. Nearly one hundred years after women in Britain got the vote, 180 years after the abolition of slavery, gaining the most basic human rights for women around our world right now, remains perhaps the most profound human challenge the world has.

Mar 04

Stop telling girls untruths about Maths

Many international brows are beaten on a regular basis about why girls do not seem to choose to study Mathematics with the same enthusiasm or to the same level as boys, and the most recent manifestation of this was on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald. A recent Australian study has shown that the number of girls eligible for an ATAR (the ranking, derived from the Higher School Certificate, which permits entry to Australian universities) who have not studied Maths as part of their final two year course at school has risen from 7.5% in 2001 to 21.5% in 2011. In other words, over a fifth of girls in Australia are not studying Maths to university entrance level. Similar stories abound across the globe.

There is no doubt that the study of Maths is important. Maths teaches us about relationships between space and time. It reveals patterns and helps us to understand designs and configurations. It helps us to appreciate the world around us. It is a beautiful subject.

Moreover, Maths opens the door to careers which are important and growing now, and will be even more significant in the future; as we rely ever more heavily on technology, and as we seek solutions to ever more complex problems around population growth, disease, food security and climate change, Maths and Science-related jobs are going to be where the action is. Although we will always need great liberal thinkers, historians and linguists, among many, many other disciplines, for a well-balanced and well-oiled society, there is no doubt that Maths will underpin many of our practical needs for the next few decades. A recent report by the Royal Academy of Engineering highlighted the steep increase in need for engineers over the next decade; the fact that on current reckonings, only a fraction of this percentage will be trained is therefore really concerning, and the additional fact that statistics are showing that girls – half of the population – seem reluctant to take to Maths is even more deeply concerning as a result.

What can we do about this? How do we ensure that girls choose to take Maths? Of course, in many countries in the world girls are still prevented – by poverty, cultural expectations or religious fundamentalism – from having an education at all, so a discussion about how to encourage girls to take up Maths may in this context seem a luxury, but the question in a wider world context is still undeniably an important one.

The answer is actually very, very simple: we have to stop telling girls that beauty is more important than brawn or brains.

We don’t as a culture think that we do this, of course. But tune in to any group of adoring adults around a little baby girl, and you will hear exclamations of praise for her beauty that you will not hear in a group clustering around a little baby boy. Words like ‘pretty’, ‘sweet’ and ‘cute’ associate themselves with girls ahead of boys and no matter how linguistically aware you are, or how committed to gender equality, you will – if you are honest – recognise this association. This focus on girls’ appearance, started young, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and translates into gender specific toys through childhood, rackloads of pink and frilly clothes in department stores, and teenage magazines where girls are taught how to preen and prettify themselves, at the expense of their self-esteem and their focus on doing and thinking rather than just appearing.

There are perfectly understandable reasons for this – until quite recently in our history, being pretty most definitely mattered to girls and to their life chances. Praising beauty was the right thing to do for girl babies; teaching them how to be successful wives or courtesans was important. Generations – hundreds and thousands of generations – of girls have grown up with these messages. Now, of course, we believe that girls should have the same access as boys to happiness and status; we believe fervently in equal opportunities, and in moving on from the past to a better, more harmonious future. Where we fall down is that the old messages are so embedded that they have become assumptions, unchallenged and therefore harder to shift without critical awareness and thought. Hidden prejudice is always so much harder to dismantle.

It is of course possible to change cultural perceptions of girls and women – and indeed, when you enter forward-thinking girls’ schools, who are explicit in countering this cultural perception of girls, you will find the hard statistics that show how many more girls take Maths to a higher level than the national or international average would indicate. Equality is the key; as demonstrated in a 2011 University of Wisconsin study of 86 countries, quoted in the UK’s Daily Telegraph last year, girls do better in Maths when raised in countries where females have better equality. (In fact, gender equality also boosts boys’ performance in Maths – a win-win situation for all.)

Real equality – not just the legislative frameworks, but the changing of hearts and minds – takes work. The first step is a real and continued effort to expose hidden assumptions and gently but firmly move our power-brokers, the media and the average person in the street through to a position where we can all remove these pressures on girls so that they can release their inner mathematician. If we want these engineers of the future, it is up to us all to make it happen.