Oct 11

Today is the Day! International Day of the Girl

Today, Thursday 11th October 2012, is the very first International Day of the Girl, and it is most definitely worth celebrating.

How this came about was in part because of extensive lobbying of the United Nations by Plan UK (part of Plan International), the charity which we have been supporting in school over the past 2 years, and it makes complete sense to have a day that focuses solely on girls across the world. Although it is easy for us to forget this, girls across the world face double discrimination due to their gender and their age, and are the most marginalised and discriminated group across the globe. We mustn’t forget that 75 million girls in the world are denied an education.

Girls supporting girls can make a real difference: thanks to the work girls in my school have been doing, and the work that has gone on in other girls’ schools since we also made Plan the GSA charity, when I was President last year, we have together raised over £103,000, which will be used to send no fewer than 1072 girls to school in Liberia who otherwise would not have been able to go. This is a tangible difference, and a cause for celebration in its own right.

This new world day of the Girl will help to prioritise girls’ rights as the salient issue in the coming decades – as the Plan Chief Executive Officer said, “By designating October 11th as Day of the Girl we are all agreeing to put a special focus on the rights of girls throughout the world. We know that in many countries girls get left behind in all areas of life from school to work and many are prevented from fulfilling their true potential by severe discrimination and prejudice.”

Let’s not forget the facts, and some of these are not reserved for the developing world. We still have some way to go in the whole world to get things right for girls and women. Take illiteracy, for example – by 2015, females will make up 64% of the world’s (adult) population who are illiterate and who cannot read. This needs to be tackled in schools, with girls’ access to education. But only 30% of girls in the world are enrolled in secondary school.

Part of the reason for this is forced and early marriage, against which Plan has been campaigning. One in seven girls in developing countries is married off before age 15, and 1 in 3 by the age of 18. But it is happening here in the UK too – the Forced and Early Marriage Unit of the Home Office dealt with almost 1500 cases in the UK in 2011.

Violence against girls is a real issue. In the US one in five high school girls has been physically or sexually abused by a boyfriend. Worldwide, estimates have as many as 1.2 million children being trafficked every year. These are shocking figures.

I could write more – and at length – about the objectification of women, and the pressures placed on girls which are not placed on boys, to look, act and appear in certain ways, but I would run out of space here. Suffice it to say that globally, we need to look after girls more, and not at all at the expense of looking after boys. This isn’t about being better, it is about being fairer. Girls across the world need our help.

So – let’s remember this today. Let’s help to make the world a fairer, better, more harmonious place. Play your part on this fine October day.

 

Oct 08

“This was never just about Jimmy Savile.” What we are realising about the perception of women in TV over the past few decades.

Today’s Daily Mail contains a thoughtful but hard-hitting piece by Janet Street-Porter about the rumours and revelations surrounding the late Jimmy Savile’s alleged sexual activities involving young girls. Whether true or not – and the evidence, it has to be said, appears to be mounting – these reports leave an unsavoury impression not just of a man whom many regarded to be a great role model in his charitable work, but also of a culture in television and radio which appears to have dominated in the sixties, seventies and eighties, and which appears to have persisted into the nineties and up to the present day.

More and more high profile women have been speaking out about the sexual harassment they have experienced in the profession during their careers – Liz Kershaw and Sandi Toksvig are the latest to do so. In describing their experiences, these women are exposing practices which have not only discomforted them and other women, but which have also denigrated them: the use of male sexual power to prevent women from achieving the work environment to which they are entitled, and for which we have all worked hard as a society – men as well as women – for well over a century. These practices are wrong; what is especially wrong, however, is that however isolated, they have been allowed to go on unchecked and unquestioned, because this is revelatory about the underpinning assumptions of the culture in which they occurred.

The media is extremely powerful in our country. It is the means by which we hear most of what happens in the world, and it is by default the filtering mechanism for our values and perceptions of what is happening and why. No news outlet can claim to be truly ‘neutral’, for no such position can possibly exist – the choices that producers make about which stories to highlight in themselves speak of choices and values. Open any newspaper, analyse the layout, the pictures and the stories themselves, and you will find yourself awash with shared values. We have invested the media and those who run it with this power; this power should be used with great responsibility.

Many of these values are ones with which we all feel comfortable: values which are testament to a sound, liberal, healthy society; but on the matter of how women and girls are perceived in this society, they are manifestly not. Ms Street-Porter, exploring the history of women’s employment in the media, gives several examples of this unhealthy culture; quite apart from the tales of direct sexual assault on her colleagues and other women and girls, she emphasises the pervasiveness of a set of expectations about how women should behave which treated women as little other than sexual objects: “The Sixties saw women used as set dressing to add sexual spice to primetime shows. From Benny Hill to Freddie Starr to Larry Grayson, the BBC and ITV bosses (all male) saw nothing wrong in using semi-naked women to chase better ratings”. Worryingly – but unsurprisingly – she does not feel that these days are entirely past, and her conclusion is one that should prey on our minds: “Talent contests and reality TV have replaced the pop programmes and variety shows of yesteryear – but there is still the nagging suspicion that men in powerful positions can abuse the very young and needy. I’m not at all confident that the BBC and ITV can be sure attitudes have changed for the better. All that’s happened is that powerful men in the entertainment industry have got better at hiding their secrets”.

I really, really hope that she is wrong. But we can’t afford to assume that she is. We do not want to turn this into a McCarthy-ist witch hunt, but we do want to make sure that abuse, harassment and sexual objectification of girls and women just stop. For good. Let’s make sure that we don’t let this slip from our attentive gaze.

 

Oct 05

Why teacher-pupil relationships are never right

In the aftermath of the Jeremy Forrest affair – not that there can ever really be an end point, given the huge fractures which have cut across the lives not just of the girl involved and her teachers, but of their respective families and communities – it has been instructive to watch and read how people have responded. In the fallout, an array of similar stories have emerged, like this one; tales of affairs that seemed like romantic fairy tales, but which ended in disappointment and betrayal. Commentators have discussed how teenagers are always likely to fall in love with their teachers, how age gaps should not matter, how it is somehow better because he didn’t actually teach her directly – all sorts of opinions have circulated.

Underlying these opinions is a sense that it probably wasn’t really the right thing to do (hence, one assumes, the disapproving public reaction to Anne Diamond’s dismissal of the story as “a bit of so-what-ish”), but it has been quite remarkable how few people in the public eye have been prepared to commit themselves to saying that this relationship was always, and still is, wrong. Dani Garavelli, writing in the Scotsman, offered perhaps the most sensible comment on why this is so: “Pupils are off limits … always remember: where someone is in a position of trust, the age of consent rises to 18. Just as rape is rape is rape, when it comes to their relationship with teachers, children are children are children.”

And this is absolutely right. A teacher is a significant person in the life of school children of any age – up to and including (arguably beyond) the time at which they leave school. A teacher is in a position of authority – a position of power, even – and this brings with it a moral duty to respect the boundaries of relationships in much the same way as a parent respects the boundaries of relationships with his or her own children. It can never be an equal relationship. Teachers should of course be engaged – very closely engaged – in the lives of their pupils, for they should care deeply about what happens to them, but (as the vast, vast majority of teachers know and understand entirely) they cannot and should not become more significant than this. They should not become their lovers or their partners. I say again – it can never be an equal relationship, and it is incumbent upon the adult to ensure that it never develops in a way where this may be called into question.

So – there is no “moral dilemma”, as Jeremy Forrest is reputed to have said. Teacher-pupil relationships are never right.

 

Oct 02

How long does it really take to “master motherhood”?

An article in last Friday’s Daily Mail made for interesting reading: according to a recent survey by a baby products company, the average time that it takes for new mothers to get on top of the changes that have occurred in their lives is – on average – four months and 23 days. Up to this point, life can be a bit of blur – a mixture of sleep deprivation and of worry about the baby. After this point, various ‘watershed moments’ seem to happen which reassure a mother that all is on track and she is doing not badly really:

Of course, a report like this comes with various caveats, most notably the fact that statistics are dangerous. To begin with, statistics on previous performance are not necessarily a guide to future performance. ‘Mastering motherhood’ is not something that happens simply by waiting around for a magical date – that 4 months, 23 days – to arrive; motherhood comes with a lot of hard work, unconditional love, and help. Statistics that identify ‘averages’ are particularly dangerous: for those who beat the date, there can be an unrealistic sense of euphoria; for those who miss it, there can be an unreasonable sense of failure. Motherhood is not a competition, and yet so many elements of our society seem to encourage us to think of it as such, to the inevitable detriment of the mothers themselves.

Above all, though, motherhood is arguably not something that you can and should ‘master’ (do notice the androcentric language used in this phrase, if nothing else!). Motherhood is a biological, emotional, social, cognitive state of being and of action. It is necessary for the survival of the human race, and it is a hugely important role that many women are able to be, just as many men are able to be fathers, giving both them and their children a deep and fulfilling dimension to their lives. Motherhood is also a process, for life, not a stage to be completed and left behind. Mothers are incredibly important people in our world; we should value them in their roles throughout their lives – we should honour and encourage them, and we should support them.

And this is what really came through for me in the survey reported in the Daily Mail – the sense of loneliness and lack of support for new mothers. 20% of the mothers surveyed said that they didn’t talk to anyone about their fears because they did not want to be thought of as a failure (the curse of our competitive parenting culture striking again), and the result of this was that they must have felt lonelier and more isolated in the very days when they needed most help. 60% felt for a time that they weren’t capable of being a mother. Imagine the loneliness and feelings bordering on despair that will have descended at those times.

Women have been having babies for millennia. As a human race, we know a huge amount about having babies; more so now than ever before, with advances in technology, psychology and medicine, to name but a few. Mothers today should feel empowered, supported and surrounded by understanding. That they don’t is a failing in our society. It is society that is preventing mothers from feeling supported and cared for: a lack of extended families with wise women who have gone before, a cut-throat ‘winner takes all’ culture, and – although I hesitate to say it – a residual, often subconscious, but very real sense that motherhood keeps women in a socially inferior place.

So – plenty to do, still. And we can start by ignoring surveys that tell us how long it takes to “master motherhood”.

 

Sep 29

What do you call a collection of 5 Headmistresses?

Thursday this week marked a momentous occasion – the hosting in school of a meeting and lunch for no fewer than five Headmistresses of St Mary’s Calne: past, present and future. Their tenure spanned a period of over 40 years, from Joyce Walters (now Joyce Lynn) (1972-1985) through Delscey Burns (1985-1996) and Carolyn Shaw (1996-2003) to myself (2003-present) and Felicia Kirk, my successor, who takes up her post in January. All the past Headmistresses have completed pretty decent stints in post, from 7 to 13 years; it will not be often that it is possible to have so many long-serving Heads of the same school together at the same time in the same place. The photo of all five of us in a chronologically correct line in front of the school crest will be one for the history books; the only other existing photograph in the school archive of more than two Headmistresses together is a picture taken in 1985, as Delscey Burns took up her post, and it shows Delscey Burns, Joyce Walters and the great Elizabeth Gibbins (now sadly deceased).

It felt like a moment in history, and it was indeed a special occasion. What struck me was how different the Heads were, but how we all related to the same sense of what was special about the school. Each of us has seen through, or will see through, different eras of social history, and each of us has different approaches to leadership, guiding the school in uniquely different ways … but the essence of the school itself is deeply embedded and self-perpetuating, and runs through all of our time and our actions. Our role as Heads is as guardians and stewards of this essence, as much as it is as leaders of the people who make up the school at any given moment. I say often that my role at school is to ensure that the heart of the school lives and beats.

And there is more: when St Mary’s Calne was founded in 1873, it was part of the movement which liberated the education of girls and young women and helped set them on track to become equal with their male counterparts. There is still much work to be done in our society in this respect, and girls’ schools have an enormous role to play in freeing girls to become confident, self-assured young people who have an understanding that their potential is limitless, and that they have a distinct and unique role to play in the world. I feel that it is my privilege to help guide them on this journey.

So, what do you call a collection of Headmistresses? I have had many suggestions; my favourite so far, however, is “a vanguard”.

Much to do in life and work. Onwards and upwards …

Sep 26

Live the message, be the message, communicate the message: how to ensure gender equality in the UK

I very much enjoyed my day last Friday at the isbi conference at Woldingham School. As part of the day, I was honoured to be invited to give a keynote address, in which I talked about the importance of communication, and I reflected for a few minutes as I did so on how the message about gender equality really isn’t coming across from our political leaders in the UK. Personally, I fear that despite the incredible amount of ground women have covered in the last 50 years as far as our social history goes, we will still be light years away from true equality as long as our own Prime Minister, David Cameron, seems unable to back the cause he once so publicly espoused – a better platform for women in politics.

It really saddened me to see that of 121 posts in Government – including Minsters and Whips – just 23 are now filled by women following the recent high-profile Cabinet reshuffle – that’s just 19% – whereas Mr Cameron promised us that a third of Government posts would be filled by women by the end of this Parliament.

Ceri Goddard from the Fawcett Society lambasted the Prime Minister for having a “blind spot” and marginalising women’s role in politics, and I agree with her. Even Nick Clegg recently admitted that the Houses of Parliament are especially off-putting to women. It is obvious to all of us involved in the education of girls and young women. And it actually makes me really angry – and more motivated to speak out. How can we respect the Prime Minister’s once much-vaunted promises to increase women’s role in public life when he practises his own form of NIMBY-ism in his own Government?

If quotas have to be introduced into our top institutions in our society, so be it. It is not ideal, but it may be the only way. It remains shocking that one in ten of the UK’s biggest financial firms still have all-male boards while just 16.7% of the FTSE 100 directors are women. We shouldn’t get too self-congratulatory that it looks like we are on target to reach 25% by 2015 – the target was, after all, only 25%!

But if our Prime Minister is giving out the message that it is acceptable not to give women positions of power, then he is giving tacit approval to all those sexist dinosaurs who still rule the roost in those City bastions and steadfastly retain their all-male boards – whether he means to or not. He is undermining his own message. And that begs the question, rightly or wrongly, of whether he really believes it and stands for it in the first place.

We should be holding our political leaders to account. So – time to step up to the mark, Mr Cameron, and show women what you’re made of, because otherwise you lose the respect of the next generation – of women in particular. When a stated vision is not lived out in reality, you may as well give up and go home.

Live the message, be the message, communicate the message … if our Prime Minister did this, it would go a long way towards ensuring that women have genuinely equal representation in this country.

Sep 23

Who does your daughter look up to?

I was very pleased on Thursday night of this week to take part in an ITV Tonight programme about role models for girls and young women, hosted by Penny Marshall: Who does your daughter look up to? This programme looked at the lack of role models for women, and the evidence that suggests that this absence is damaging aspirations for girls. It was an excellent and thought-provoking programme, and I recommend that you find it on ITV Player if you can, for this issue is one of the most important challenges facing girls and young women today if they are to break free of stereotypes and really – genuinely – become in life who they can be.

The situation is not, of course, looking particularly great at the moment. A Girlguiding UK survey earlier this year concluded as follows: ” … girls and young women are increasingly looking to those outside their immediate circles, strangers who they will never meet, to offer a blueprint for their lives. This in itself is not new: celebrities from the world of film or music have always appeared as aspirational figures with glossy, picture-perfect lifestyles that act as a counterpoint to the humdrum world of school and adolescence. The difference now appears to be that girls are looking to these stars to provide ever more detailed direction on a widening list of topics and themes. These include how to conduct themselves in their most intimate relationships, what to aspire to in their future careers and how to define themselves physically. And the girls most likely to seek this detailed direction are those at the most vulnerable stage of their adolescence, the early years of secondary school. This becomes more of a concern in the light of our research finding that girls are drawing their role models from an ever-narrowing pool of celebrities. Chiefly, these are women who have found fame within the fields of film, television and music.”

This was borne out convincingly in the ITV Tonight programme when 3 girls were interviewed before and after spending time with inspirational women who did not fit the model to which these girls had become used – women who trade on their appearance and (rather vacuous) celebrity status, reinforcing the notion of ‘fame for fame’s sake’. Before they spent three days with these alternative role models, the three girls all stressed how they wanted to be famous, appear on television or find someone rich to marry. In a sense, they were objectifying themselves, valuing appearance over substance; hardly surprising, of course, given the culture in which they live. After the three days working in very different contexts, the girls were visibly different – energised, less focused on their own appearance, and lit up from inside with a vision of a different future. It was incredibly motivating and inspiring to experience – we could see, in far better definition, the real people behind the masks of make-up and hair extensions, and we sensed that this glimpse into the world of work and success had made a huge impact on them.

If this can happen in three days, then think what would happen if we could expose our girls and young women to opportunities for a week, or a month, or more of their lives? We owe it to them to try – and we owe it to them too to make sure that the world which surrounds them does not seek to swallow them back up into becoming a shadow of the person they are. One of the more shocking segments of the ITV programme was an interview with a representative of a media monitoring agency, which described the media coverage of the Olympic heptathlete, Jessica Ennis. In the weeks since the Olympics, this coverage has not only tailed off, but has changed in nature; conclusion: for her to maintain her media profile, she needs to focus on her appearance and relationships, not her achievements. This is wrong, and it is our fault. We need to stop demanding trivia of our female role models, and start celebrating real achievement and success.

Our daughters deserve nothing less.

 

Sep 20

We must put more women on screen

The new Director-General of the BBC, George Entwistle, has just gone on record as saying that the BBC has to do more to promote women in “serious” roles, or as newsreaders, in its programmes. In an interview reported in the Daily Mail on Wednesday, he said this: “We have made real progress in actively looking for, and finding, great female experts to front our big factual shows, but it’s not enough.” Quite rightly, he then recognised the role that the BBC has to play, as national broadcasters with a responsibility to lead the way on issues of social equality: “… the world will always be profoundly demanding of the BBC on this question, and it should be”.

Turn the page in the same print edition of the Daily Mail, and you will find this comment piece by Miriam O’Reilly, the Countryfile presenter who won her case against the BBC on the grounds of ageism and sexism when her contract was terminated because – as she knew and it was later acknowledged – she was, as a woman, too “old” (synonymous for “no longer socially attractive enough”) to present the programme. Ms O’Reilly’s piece refers in turn to an interview in the Reader’s Digest given by Fiona Bruce, the BBC1 newsreader, in which she admits that it is harder for a woman to succeed in broadcasting than it is for a man: “I know it’s not always going to be like this. There comes a point – especially if you’re a woman – when your career just falls off a cliff.”

As Miriam O’Reilly says, this situation is “utterly disheartening”. Take a broad brush look at the news presenters on TV, and the women mainly fall into a uniform mould – young, styled – which does not match the far wider range of images projected by men, both in terms of age and of appearance. This is hardly a surprise – we have become so used to seeing pictures of women who are both young and styled around us, from billboards to the pages of magazines, that it can seem rather odd when women who do not fit this mould appear in front of us, in the public eye.

And yet we have to push the boundaries. Mr Entwistle is right. Ms O’Reilly is right to speak out. And so is Ms Bruce. We need our newsreaders to send the message to young people – and especially young women, who lack a range of positive female role models – that women and men are equals on screen as they should be in life. The BBC has a real and important responsibility. We must put more women on screen as the equals of men.

 

Sep 17

Don’t let us forget that Parliament can be very female-unfriendly

An interesting set of statistics highlighted by last week’s Sunday Times revealed that, after David Cameron’s latest reshuffle, almost a third of female ministers are “divorced or unattached”, and 40% of the female Shadow ministers on the Labour benches are in exactly the same position. The numbers are small – a rather damning comment still on the state of play in our Parliament in its own right, with the survey looking at the only 16 female Coalition ministers (17%) and the (better, but still not gender-equal) 46 Labour Shadow ministers (40%), out of the 219 total ministers and Shadow ministers. But what is really interesting is the percentage difference when compared to the male equivalents: of the 76 male Coalition ministers, 65 (91%) are married, which means that only 9% fall into the category of “divorced or unattached”. (The numbers aren’t reported for the Labour benches.)

The statistical difference is significant and we have to work out why. What is it about Parliament that makes it so hard to either attract or retain women who have relationships and families? This concern is not a new one – it is a debate which has been simmering for some time, and which has resulted in some changes in how Parliament works, including supposedly more ‘family-friendly’ hours. Perhaps these changes will filter through into more women choosing to come forward to serve as MPs, but it would be foolish to rely on this. It might be more revealing and more pertinent to look closely at how welcoming the ethos in the Houses of Parliament is to women, or to what extent the same latent prejudices about women and their role as carers in the family still persist. Natasha Engel, the Labour MP, is quoted in the same article as pointing out the differences in how men and women are treated in politics: “Women are in the spotlight in the cabinet. There is always a spotlight on a woman who is up for a top job like that. The fact that she has children will always be a matter for comment which is not the case for a man.”

While women are still in the minority, there will always be a spotlight of some kind on them; while we are still seeking as a society to change the opportunities available to women, then there will be a spotlight too. What we have to make sure is that this spotlight is prompted by the real desire to make a positive difference in equalising representation for women in our political offices, and not – however unintentionally or subconsciously – by a resistance to this forward movement. We need more women in politics; we need a better and more equal representation amongst our leaders. We know, too, that we need to work hard in order to achieve it, and we need to keep thinking of creative solutions to help make the path into politics more straightforward and welcoming.

What we mustn’t do is forget that there is still quite some way to go.

 

Sep 14

Children “too embarrassed” to read

A very worrying report was published last week by the National Literacy Trust and reported in the Daily Telegraph. The survey, of 21,000 children in primary and secondary education over the past few years, revealed a steady and concerning drop in the number of pupils reading in their spare time – from 38.1% in 2005 to 37.7 per cent in 2007, 32.2 per cent in 2009 and 30.8 per cent in 2011. Reasons given included an increasing lack of ability on the part of children to sustain focus, and children being worried that they would be labelled a “geek” if they were seen to read. Given that research also shows that children who read at home on a daily basis are 13 times more likely to perform above the level expected for their age in literacy, these statistics are extremely worrying.

Above all, these children who are not reading are missing out hugely – quite apart from the blow to their academic achievement, there is a whole world of imagination and fantastical happenings to which they are being denied access. Reading adds richness to young lives – to the lives of all of us, in fact.

Why is this trend occurring? A number of reasons spring to mind – the prevalence of the seductively passive ‘entertainment’ that is television; the distraction of other technologies such as computers, smartphones, X-boxes and the like; a lack of role models who read and are seen to be enjoying reading (when did you last see a picture of a ‘celebrity’ immersed in a book?); and not enough books in not enough homes – books are no longer seen, universally, as precious gateways to knowledge and understanding.

Whatever the reasons, the results of this research suggest a real poverty in our country – a poverty of creativity and imagination. We must do something about it, so … pick up a book today and show a child that you enjoy reading. Undertake to read for a few minutes a day with your son/daughter/nephew/niece/grandchild.

Reading matters. Do it.