How to be a feminist father ...

Ha Ha Buffy, I thought you hadn't read it, but noticed you still commented on it :-)

Getting a bit behind here. Re providing rationale for the head teacher of a boys school; it would be desirable but difficult (because of a large number of confounding factors) to research the effects on boys / men of reducing sexism in their schools. Ideally that would be provided through large, long term longitudinal studies looking at endpoints such as quality of relationships with women, marriage survival, quality of family life etc. I also don't think anything exists at present.

There was a lot of pre and post amble to the actual study, but I thought the results were very interesting.

It was notable that in boys schools almost all examples of sexism were initiated by the teachers in contrast to other settings, that only 17% (Caroline Criado-Perez did mention something about 17% !) of the staff was female and that all examples came from male teachers.

In the co-ed schools, if gender domination (asking boys over girls, letting boys dominate conversations) was reduced, they would be doing fairly well. Gender reinforcement and embedded discrimination, described in the appendix, were not as problematic here as at single sex schools. It seems as if it would be reasonably easy to raise awareness of gender domination, probably something that escapes most of us (I don't know if this is part of teachers' training or not).

The point about boys schools becoming coed with a sizeable minority of girls and the problems this produces for the girls is something I hadn't considered before but I am currently seeing this in action.

Buffy I don't think the age of the study necessarily invalidates it as it has been well conducted according to methods and in the absence of any significant interventions (perhaps other than social media) since it has been produced it is still likely to be relevant. Also the people this system has produced are now in positions of influence to society.

Married that paragraph is interesting. I know my school (co-ed)was of the spoon feeding type and it is interesting to see that the male schools in this study encouraged more debate and challenge. I think most women would be up for that as long as it is not done in a humiliating or bullying way.

And some women like to beat others (I do) so I find it offensive when people say women like to be all agreeable and never want to beat others. I think that assumption in itself is sexist. It leads to women at women who take charge being called bossy when a man would not.

I seem to have killed this thread with the last link....

Reading and exchanging ideas is good, but is anyone up for some action?

www.umich.edu/~psycours/561/lee_g.htm

Sorry - will try and find link to full free study.

This is one reason I believe it is particularly important to offer education to single sex boys schools although other interventions such as increasing the number of female teachers etc will also be helpful:

www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2112699?uid=3738032&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21104891987813

From reading and personal experience I think we have a lot of progress to make in Catholic boys' schools.

I agree it would be excellent to do a scoping exercise to see what is offered in various schools and work out what should be offered.

In all likelihood, the boys at that school will be in positions of power in the future. So yeah, I think it's worth it.

I remember DS's X school released separate reading list for boys and girls. The girls' list had a balanced mixture of male and female authors and protagonists. The boys' one was, with the exception of one, written by men about boys.

OP, to answer your question, I think if we don't engage boys in this early on, we'll never achieve equality.

PS The rest of the Conway Hall programme looks really interesting too.

Married

I agree primary school age is likely to be too young. Many of the topics are related to unwanted sexual advances and described in detail so more suitable for teenagers. I bought a second copy for my friend's teenagers and even we are struggling over when best to present it to our children.

The book is interesting but I thought Laura was more impressive in person as the written work is a bit catalogue-y.

As she is based in London she seemed up for visiting my daughter's school. On reflection, I think it would be better if she went into my son's school as I regularly hear stories of how girls raise equality issues and are shouted down by the boys in the class (60/40 split boy/girls) and girls sometimes end up in tears. My son has both male and female friends and finds himself being accused of "not supporting me" or "not speaking out" by both genders.

I thought it was an interesting statistic quoted at the discussion (although haven't checked the source) that men consider that 50% of a group are women once 17% of the group are women, so the boys must feel a bit outnumbered with 40% girls :-)