“Brains before ‘beauty’?” High achieving girls, school and gender identities

Abstract

In recent years educational policy on gender and achievement has concentrated on boys' underachievement, frequently comparing it with the academic success of girls. This has encouraged a perception of girls as the “winners” of the educational stakes and assumes that they no longer experience the kinds of gender inequalities identified in earlier studies. However, trying to balance academic achievement with being seen as a “proper girl” presents girls with difficult challenges, particularly in terms of being accepted and approved of by classmates and securing the attention of teachers. This paper explores the views of a group of high achieving 12‐ to 13‐year‐old girls who indicate that being regarded as “clever” continues to be negotiated within acceptable frameworks of femininity.

Keywords:

• gender
• achievement
• girls
• secondary school

Acknowledgement

This study was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (RES062230462) and entitled “The Gendered Subjectivities of High Achieving Pupils.”

Notes

1. For example, even in the subject of English where boys seriously underperform in relation to girls, statistics show that white, middle class boys score more highly than Black‐African, working‐class girls (Skelton, Francis, and Valkanova 2007).

2. South Asian, Chinese, mixed‐race, North African, South American, Turkish and three African‐Caribbean.

3. We are fully cognisant of the difficulties of attempting to locate social class through parental occupation. The occupations of both parents were taken into account and where there was a difference in categorisation of the occupation of parents/guardians, the pupil was allocated to the highest of the class categories.

4. In keeping with the current emphasis in UK educational policy on credentialism, we define “high achievement” in pupils as those who achieved highly across a range of subjects, with evidence to support identification provided via details of pupils' Key Stage 2 SATs results and their recent grades across subject areas. In a number of cases pupils in our sample had been identified as Gifted and Talented at particular subject areas expressed by educational credentials (even though the research team did not subscribe to the view that achievement should be conceived so narrowly).

5. “Popularity” is clearly a complex and slippery concept, both in its actual meaning (those most popular are not necessarily those most liked, as the concept incorporates aspects such as influence and admiration) and in perspective (those most popular with some groups may not be popular with others). We were interested in pupil popularity amongst peers, rather than with teachers, as it is gendered peer‐group power and status relations which are argued in the literature to impact on gender and achievement (Myhill 2002; Jackson 2006). Hence all pupils in identified top stream classes were asked to complete a short survey on popularity in their class and which asked three questions: Which student do you most like in your class? Which student would other people say is most popular? Which student would you most like to be like?

6. This is despite the evidence that indicates the notion of gendered learning styles is highly questionable (Coffield et al. 2004).