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Answering Back
Answering Back exposes the volatility of gender reform in many different schools and classrooms. It tells stories in close up and from below, allowing everyone to anxious boys, naughty girls, cantankerous teachers, pontificating principals and feisty feminists.
This book challenges many sacred ideas about gender reform in schools and will surprise and unsettle teachers and researchers. It draws on a deep knowledge of gender issues in schools and of feminist theories, policies and practices. It is compelling and provocative reading at the leading edge.
This book challenges many sacred ideas about gender reform in schools and will surprise and unsettle teachers and researchers. It draws on a deep knowledge of gender issues in schools and of feminist theories, policies and practices. It is compelling and provocative reading at the leading edge.
250 pages, Paperback
First published January 29, 1998
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33 people want to read
About the author
Jill Blackmore
32 booksProfessor Jillian Blackmore is the Director of the Centre for Research in Educational Futures and Innovation at Deakin University.
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July 17, 2024
New review
When I read this book last year the thing that stuck with me was that it said that it is almost impossible to get boys and girls to work together in groups right up until virtually the end of high school. They work alone or they work in single sex groups, but if they are working in mixed-sex groups then that probably means they have been forced to. And that is why I’ve come back to this book – to find that quote – and I’ve been through the book now and can’t find it anywhere. Typical, really. The reason I found this so interesting is because the school marketing materials for coeducational schools I’ve been looking at overwhelmingly have images of girls and boys working together in them – another of the little ‘half truths’ one can expect from advertising, I guess.
This is a seriously interesting book. It is based on about five years of research into gender equity provision in Australian high schools. And man, does it make for depressing reading – not least because there are a lot of male teachers out there who really do need a slap.
There is a lovely quote from a little girl at the start of one of the chapters – “Sexual harassment isn’t very much at this school. Oh well, I mean, only in the classroom and the yard.” Page 103 The little girl is wrong, unfortunately, as there is also lots of harassment in the staff room too, but then, she wouldn’t know about that.
This book takes a post-structuralist approach to feminism – which basically means that it focuses on power and the various meanings of power and how these are manifest in schools. When we think of power we generally think of ‘power over’ – that is, power as a coercive force. And, this is worth considering too. However, there is also ‘power in’ – that is, power associated with various roles in society, and also ‘power to’ – that is, feeling empowered to make certain choices and to do certain things. In this way the authors very much mean power in the way that Foucault uses power – as both a subjugating force, but also as a constituting one.
What is particularly interesting here is the critique of earlier feminist notions of ‘power in’ – although this critique is a little understated (I mean, I would have liked the authors to have had more to say about this) the point is made that previous feminisms had very few complains about power structures per se, other than that they were often dominated by males. But if there is a patriarchy, and the patriarchy is systemic, then perhaps the reason why the most powerful positions in that patriarchy are filled with men has something to do with systemic advantages the system itself provides. In this sense ‘fixing’ this problem isn’t just about getting more women in positions of power, but about fundamentally changing the nature of these power relations in the first place. Other feminists complain that power is ‘essentially masculine’ and therefore oppressive. But, as is also made clear here, such a view disempowers females and essentialises biological differences such that women can never be holders of power.
Basically, the problem with a lot of this stuff is that masculine and feminine are taken to be ‘opposites’ – and such binaries are anything but helpful. This is the ‘sugar and spice – rocks and snails’ division of boys and girls. There is a really interesting part of this where the long asserted difference that girls mature earlier than boys and are more emotionally together is discussed. You might think that being more mature and emotionally advanced might be a bit of an advantage. But often this means everyone, including the girls, feel that girls need to be responsible for boys’ behaviour – boys will be boys, after all. That boys get to be excused for their behaviour, is one thing, that girls end up being blamed for it is quite another.
When this was written there was a concerted effort to get girls to take mathematics into the last years of high school. The call was that Maths Multiplies Your Choices. The campaign was so successful that in one school there was a mass exodus out of humanities by girls and into maths and science. So much so that the school could not cope with the influx and tried to talk the girls out of what they had just been talked into. What is seriously amusing about all this is that the advertising campaign to encourage more girls into maths ‘fudged’ the figures. I’m going to quote this in full:
“The figure of ‘400 per cent more choices’, upon which the campaign centres, equates the number of occupations with the number of jobs so that an occupation which offers 30 000 jobs is counted equally with an occupation which offers 300. The campaign also makes no distinction between requiring, say, Year 10 mathematics and the highest levels of mathematics at Year 12. A number of feminist educators tried to get the percentages removed from the advertisements before they went to air in Western Australia, but were informed that they would then ‘lack punch’ because ‘people find figures very persuasive’. Thus mathematics is used to distort, intimidate and mystify.” Pages 72-3
There is also a really nice discussion of the ‘failing boys’ debate – the one that says that gender equity has ‘gone too far’ and now it is the boys who are ‘disadvantaged’. The problem is that because we see masculinity and femininity as eternal opposites, we rarely stop to ask ‘which boys’ or ‘which girls’ are failing or being failed by the school system. Averages are counted and individual circumstances are summed into generalised problems. This is always presented as a kind of seesaw, where any advantage to one group can only ever be at the expense of the other.
But people rarely look at why girls may need to do better at school than boys. The fact boys have many more ‘non-academic’ options – in trades, for instance – and that this might demotivate them from taking school as seriously as girls who, even if they do well, will probably still be refused economic benefits once they leave school, is all too rarely mentioned in any of these debates. Australia now has the largest pay gap between males and females in the workforce since records began being kept. That girls do better at school doesn’t seem to have rocked too many boats.
The simplicity of the binary nature of gender imposes remarkable restrictions of people – boys as well as girls. Boys are constricted by the idea that being male means certain things – mostly involving sport and being aggressive, just as much as being female means other and opposite things – being caring and worrying about relationships, mostly. Another book I read recently about Physical Education in schools (which I haven’t reviewed, but ought to) also mentioned the problem that girls tend to be excluded from playing sport very early on and that this means their relationship with their body becomes a problem – at least in the sense that they often don’t get to feel what it is like to move in particular ways (particular ‘non-feminine’ ways). This is also discussed here – but in ways that, as with the rest of Australian culture, at least, defines female sport as something of a joke.
Previous review
This was really a very interesting book. Oh, disclaimer - one of the authors is one of my associate supervisors - all the same, it is still a very interesting book.
It is increasingly striking me as very strange that issues such as equal opportunity and feminism are seen as 'women's issues'. The problem with this is that it leaves the 'solutions' to these issues in the hands of those least powerful to be able to make the changes that are necessary. There is a really lovely bit at the very end of this book where one of the teachers says that in the past we made changes by changing the laws. But changing the laws, telling people 'you can't do that anymore', not only built resentment, it encouraged subversive attacks until the rules were turned back. What is called for here is much more difficult to say quickly or in a short review, this is really about a fundamental change in how we engage with each other. But not in a way in which the rules have already been defined and agreed to by people smarter than us. Rather, what is called for is less explicitly to do with rules but rather with greater empathy. This is a 'what works' and 'what doesn't work' book, in many ways.
There is an early chapter where the authors discuss moves by governments to increase female participation in mathematics - maths multiplies your options - except it is really interesting how this discourse was constructed. Firstly, it was formed around a narrative of fear - if you don't do maths you will spend your life in some crap job and everyone will hate you. Now, oddly enough, as a young man this was precisely the narrative I bought at high school - one that made me give up subjects I really did love to do straight sciences, because that was what boys did. The consequences of this narrative of fear is that lots and lots of girls forced themselves into maths and sciences, so much so that schools struggled to accommodate them. This also meant that other, otherwise more popular, subjects were often cancelled in schools due to a lack of students. Schools tried to convince students not to over-react, but the ads had been very clear and so teachers were seen as trying to damage their students futures. It gets worse, then many girls decided after the first term that they would do better in a subject they liked and in one they would pass, rather than in one they didn't like and were unlikely to do well in. But the big shift to maths subjects meant there often weren't other subjects to move to.
The funniest part of this rather tragic story is that a lot of the statistics used to justify the 'multiply your options' narrative were basically crap. How 'options' had been counted had been on the basis of the number of types of jobs having maths would give access to, rather than how many people actually get to do those jobs. For example, maths is a really useful skill if you are going to be Federal Treasurer - but there is only one of those at a time and they generally don't ask to see your high school maths results when you get offered the job. There is a curious notion that is particularly prevalent under capitalism that there is always infinite demand. That is you increase supply, demand tends to follow. Odd idea. It is certainly not clear that doubling the number of people studying subjects requiring maths would create a doubling of the jobs in the labour market requiring maths to suddenly appear.
The other issue is that often it isn't that girls choose to do 'easier' subjects, but rather that their choices are constrained and that once they move into a profession in large enough numbers we redefine that profession as pink collar and discount it accordingly. There is no point having goal posts if you can't move them occasionally.
One of the most interesting parts of this book is the discussion of male privilege and how it is constructed so that even where it seems like men are being put down, even there there are clear advantages. For example, the idea that all men are constantly obsessed with sex - particularly during their teen years - is a constant theme, but this means that it is hardly surprising they will sexually harass girls (see how that worked?) and so such harassment should be more or less ignored. Or that boys are much less mature than girls, so it is up to girls to keep them in check. Like white privilege, male privilege is mostly invisible, even to those who suffer from its consequences. There are interesting examples of boys and male teachers reacting badly about schools having special activities for girls - a whole 'what about the boys' series of complaints seems almost inevitable as does the 'we have gone too far in favour of girls'. Such narratives never seem to ask, 'which boys' or 'which girls' - with poor boys and certain races being much more at risk that others - but also fail to notice that the success of girls isn't and shouldn't be a zero sum game which automatically means less for boys. The fact girls sometimes get to have special girls only activities at schools seems to be incredibly obvious, but that there are already highly valued all-male activities in these same schools generally passes without notice. Nevertheless, the fact that the girls often feel uncomfortable with these all-female activities should not be passed over as a kind of 'false consciousness'. It is not just a matter of them feeling that all boys are being unfairly grouped together and made to be responsible for certain boys' behaviour, but also that they recognise that change rarely comes from activities that encourage resentment in those who are privileged. Like I said, this book doesn't offer simple solutions, rather, it is much better at pointing out the complications.
A further issue is within the whole notion of a fixed binary between male and female - if such a binary view clearly doesn't work in the interests of many girls, it also, although not so immediately obviously, doesn't work in the interests of all boys. The masculinity constructed by this binary could be summed up as 'uncaring, sports mad, meathead with a permanent erection' masculinity. Now, admittedly, there are lots of males that fit this definition rather snuggly, but the many who don't fit it are likewise devalued by a system that constructs such narrow confines to what it means to be male. So, not only do such constructions of gender not work terribly well for the half of the population silly enough to have been born female, but they are also problematic for perhaps half of those who got to be born 'male' too. There is some discussion here of homosexual boys, but one doesn't need to be gay to be human and certainly one can be male and not be required to be either a moron or an arsehole - I know, hard to believe, but true nonetheless. This is part of the problem with binaries - if girls are sugar/spice/nice then boys must be...
This stuff has real consequences - consequences that directly impact on people's lives. There are - to create a bit of a binary myself - two things schools do. One is to engage in social reproduction. Such a view says, "look, this is the way it has always been, so get used to it. Show me your genitals, right, go off and kick this football". The other is about giving kids the tools they need to work out what makes them happy and to give them what it takes to have the courage to chase after that. As a society we don't really get to choose one of these ways of schooling while ignoring the other - but far too often the first of these is available to the majority of us, while a minority of us gets to bask in the benefits that come from the other - anything that addresses that imbalance is probably a good thing.
When I read this book last year the thing that stuck with me was that it said that it is almost impossible to get boys and girls to work together in groups right up until virtually the end of high school. They work alone or they work in single sex groups, but if they are working in mixed-sex groups then that probably means they have been forced to. And that is why I’ve come back to this book – to find that quote – and I’ve been through the book now and can’t find it anywhere. Typical, really. The reason I found this so interesting is because the school marketing materials for coeducational schools I’ve been looking at overwhelmingly have images of girls and boys working together in them – another of the little ‘half truths’ one can expect from advertising, I guess.
This is a seriously interesting book. It is based on about five years of research into gender equity provision in Australian high schools. And man, does it make for depressing reading – not least because there are a lot of male teachers out there who really do need a slap.
There is a lovely quote from a little girl at the start of one of the chapters – “Sexual harassment isn’t very much at this school. Oh well, I mean, only in the classroom and the yard.” Page 103 The little girl is wrong, unfortunately, as there is also lots of harassment in the staff room too, but then, she wouldn’t know about that.
This book takes a post-structuralist approach to feminism – which basically means that it focuses on power and the various meanings of power and how these are manifest in schools. When we think of power we generally think of ‘power over’ – that is, power as a coercive force. And, this is worth considering too. However, there is also ‘power in’ – that is, power associated with various roles in society, and also ‘power to’ – that is, feeling empowered to make certain choices and to do certain things. In this way the authors very much mean power in the way that Foucault uses power – as both a subjugating force, but also as a constituting one.
What is particularly interesting here is the critique of earlier feminist notions of ‘power in’ – although this critique is a little understated (I mean, I would have liked the authors to have had more to say about this) the point is made that previous feminisms had very few complains about power structures per se, other than that they were often dominated by males. But if there is a patriarchy, and the patriarchy is systemic, then perhaps the reason why the most powerful positions in that patriarchy are filled with men has something to do with systemic advantages the system itself provides. In this sense ‘fixing’ this problem isn’t just about getting more women in positions of power, but about fundamentally changing the nature of these power relations in the first place. Other feminists complain that power is ‘essentially masculine’ and therefore oppressive. But, as is also made clear here, such a view disempowers females and essentialises biological differences such that women can never be holders of power.
Basically, the problem with a lot of this stuff is that masculine and feminine are taken to be ‘opposites’ – and such binaries are anything but helpful. This is the ‘sugar and spice – rocks and snails’ division of boys and girls. There is a really interesting part of this where the long asserted difference that girls mature earlier than boys and are more emotionally together is discussed. You might think that being more mature and emotionally advanced might be a bit of an advantage. But often this means everyone, including the girls, feel that girls need to be responsible for boys’ behaviour – boys will be boys, after all. That boys get to be excused for their behaviour, is one thing, that girls end up being blamed for it is quite another.
When this was written there was a concerted effort to get girls to take mathematics into the last years of high school. The call was that Maths Multiplies Your Choices. The campaign was so successful that in one school there was a mass exodus out of humanities by girls and into maths and science. So much so that the school could not cope with the influx and tried to talk the girls out of what they had just been talked into. What is seriously amusing about all this is that the advertising campaign to encourage more girls into maths ‘fudged’ the figures. I’m going to quote this in full:
“The figure of ‘400 per cent more choices’, upon which the campaign centres, equates the number of occupations with the number of jobs so that an occupation which offers 30 000 jobs is counted equally with an occupation which offers 300. The campaign also makes no distinction between requiring, say, Year 10 mathematics and the highest levels of mathematics at Year 12. A number of feminist educators tried to get the percentages removed from the advertisements before they went to air in Western Australia, but were informed that they would then ‘lack punch’ because ‘people find figures very persuasive’. Thus mathematics is used to distort, intimidate and mystify.” Pages 72-3
There is also a really nice discussion of the ‘failing boys’ debate – the one that says that gender equity has ‘gone too far’ and now it is the boys who are ‘disadvantaged’. The problem is that because we see masculinity and femininity as eternal opposites, we rarely stop to ask ‘which boys’ or ‘which girls’ are failing or being failed by the school system. Averages are counted and individual circumstances are summed into generalised problems. This is always presented as a kind of seesaw, where any advantage to one group can only ever be at the expense of the other.
But people rarely look at why girls may need to do better at school than boys. The fact boys have many more ‘non-academic’ options – in trades, for instance – and that this might demotivate them from taking school as seriously as girls who, even if they do well, will probably still be refused economic benefits once they leave school, is all too rarely mentioned in any of these debates. Australia now has the largest pay gap between males and females in the workforce since records began being kept. That girls do better at school doesn’t seem to have rocked too many boats.
The simplicity of the binary nature of gender imposes remarkable restrictions of people – boys as well as girls. Boys are constricted by the idea that being male means certain things – mostly involving sport and being aggressive, just as much as being female means other and opposite things – being caring and worrying about relationships, mostly. Another book I read recently about Physical Education in schools (which I haven’t reviewed, but ought to) also mentioned the problem that girls tend to be excluded from playing sport very early on and that this means their relationship with their body becomes a problem – at least in the sense that they often don’t get to feel what it is like to move in particular ways (particular ‘non-feminine’ ways). This is also discussed here – but in ways that, as with the rest of Australian culture, at least, defines female sport as something of a joke.
Previous review
This was really a very interesting book. Oh, disclaimer - one of the authors is one of my associate supervisors - all the same, it is still a very interesting book.
It is increasingly striking me as very strange that issues such as equal opportunity and feminism are seen as 'women's issues'. The problem with this is that it leaves the 'solutions' to these issues in the hands of those least powerful to be able to make the changes that are necessary. There is a really lovely bit at the very end of this book where one of the teachers says that in the past we made changes by changing the laws. But changing the laws, telling people 'you can't do that anymore', not only built resentment, it encouraged subversive attacks until the rules were turned back. What is called for here is much more difficult to say quickly or in a short review, this is really about a fundamental change in how we engage with each other. But not in a way in which the rules have already been defined and agreed to by people smarter than us. Rather, what is called for is less explicitly to do with rules but rather with greater empathy. This is a 'what works' and 'what doesn't work' book, in many ways.
There is an early chapter where the authors discuss moves by governments to increase female participation in mathematics - maths multiplies your options - except it is really interesting how this discourse was constructed. Firstly, it was formed around a narrative of fear - if you don't do maths you will spend your life in some crap job and everyone will hate you. Now, oddly enough, as a young man this was precisely the narrative I bought at high school - one that made me give up subjects I really did love to do straight sciences, because that was what boys did. The consequences of this narrative of fear is that lots and lots of girls forced themselves into maths and sciences, so much so that schools struggled to accommodate them. This also meant that other, otherwise more popular, subjects were often cancelled in schools due to a lack of students. Schools tried to convince students not to over-react, but the ads had been very clear and so teachers were seen as trying to damage their students futures. It gets worse, then many girls decided after the first term that they would do better in a subject they liked and in one they would pass, rather than in one they didn't like and were unlikely to do well in. But the big shift to maths subjects meant there often weren't other subjects to move to.
The funniest part of this rather tragic story is that a lot of the statistics used to justify the 'multiply your options' narrative were basically crap. How 'options' had been counted had been on the basis of the number of types of jobs having maths would give access to, rather than how many people actually get to do those jobs. For example, maths is a really useful skill if you are going to be Federal Treasurer - but there is only one of those at a time and they generally don't ask to see your high school maths results when you get offered the job. There is a curious notion that is particularly prevalent under capitalism that there is always infinite demand. That is you increase supply, demand tends to follow. Odd idea. It is certainly not clear that doubling the number of people studying subjects requiring maths would create a doubling of the jobs in the labour market requiring maths to suddenly appear.
The other issue is that often it isn't that girls choose to do 'easier' subjects, but rather that their choices are constrained and that once they move into a profession in large enough numbers we redefine that profession as pink collar and discount it accordingly. There is no point having goal posts if you can't move them occasionally.
One of the most interesting parts of this book is the discussion of male privilege and how it is constructed so that even where it seems like men are being put down, even there there are clear advantages. For example, the idea that all men are constantly obsessed with sex - particularly during their teen years - is a constant theme, but this means that it is hardly surprising they will sexually harass girls (see how that worked?) and so such harassment should be more or less ignored. Or that boys are much less mature than girls, so it is up to girls to keep them in check. Like white privilege, male privilege is mostly invisible, even to those who suffer from its consequences. There are interesting examples of boys and male teachers reacting badly about schools having special activities for girls - a whole 'what about the boys' series of complaints seems almost inevitable as does the 'we have gone too far in favour of girls'. Such narratives never seem to ask, 'which boys' or 'which girls' - with poor boys and certain races being much more at risk that others - but also fail to notice that the success of girls isn't and shouldn't be a zero sum game which automatically means less for boys. The fact girls sometimes get to have special girls only activities at schools seems to be incredibly obvious, but that there are already highly valued all-male activities in these same schools generally passes without notice. Nevertheless, the fact that the girls often feel uncomfortable with these all-female activities should not be passed over as a kind of 'false consciousness'. It is not just a matter of them feeling that all boys are being unfairly grouped together and made to be responsible for certain boys' behaviour, but also that they recognise that change rarely comes from activities that encourage resentment in those who are privileged. Like I said, this book doesn't offer simple solutions, rather, it is much better at pointing out the complications.
A further issue is within the whole notion of a fixed binary between male and female - if such a binary view clearly doesn't work in the interests of many girls, it also, although not so immediately obviously, doesn't work in the interests of all boys. The masculinity constructed by this binary could be summed up as 'uncaring, sports mad, meathead with a permanent erection' masculinity. Now, admittedly, there are lots of males that fit this definition rather snuggly, but the many who don't fit it are likewise devalued by a system that constructs such narrow confines to what it means to be male. So, not only do such constructions of gender not work terribly well for the half of the population silly enough to have been born female, but they are also problematic for perhaps half of those who got to be born 'male' too. There is some discussion here of homosexual boys, but one doesn't need to be gay to be human and certainly one can be male and not be required to be either a moron or an arsehole - I know, hard to believe, but true nonetheless. This is part of the problem with binaries - if girls are sugar/spice/nice then boys must be...
This stuff has real consequences - consequences that directly impact on people's lives. There are - to create a bit of a binary myself - two things schools do. One is to engage in social reproduction. Such a view says, "look, this is the way it has always been, so get used to it. Show me your genitals, right, go off and kick this football". The other is about giving kids the tools they need to work out what makes them happy and to give them what it takes to have the courage to chase after that. As a society we don't really get to choose one of these ways of schooling while ignoring the other - but far too often the first of these is available to the majority of us, while a minority of us gets to bask in the benefits that come from the other - anything that addresses that imbalance is probably a good thing.
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