The disconnect is simple: at a school like St Paul’s (or Queenswood, or Sunny Hill where I was a pupil, or at most girls’ schools I’m aware of), girls learn an instinctive, fundamental confidence that far from being girl specific, has nothing to do with their gender. As one alumna wrote in a survey carried out amongst the 25–35-year-olds who had been to St Paul’s, ‘We commanded respect in our very nature.’ Note that masculine-sounding word ‘commanded’ which she uses without self-consciousness. Paulinas, along with other girls’ school-educated young women, assume that their opinions are of intrinsic interest, and are even happy to revise those opinions, as one inspection report memorably suggested, ‘if convincing evidence is put before them’. They take themselves seriously in the best way: they have never been taught to ‘play nicely’ because they are girls, to assume they will be less talented at science and maths, to defer to male opinion because it is more loudly expressed, or to assume they are being educated to be the wives of top men. If they are articulate, confident and full of opinions (as they tend to be) they do not expect to be treated as if this were unusual and slightly unfeminine, or actually rather admirable, given they are only girls. They enjoy sport, but generally prefer to play it rather than be WAGs on the touchline, watching their brothers and boyfriends play rugby. If the school play is Macbeth, they assume it is not beyond the talents of one of them to play the main part – in fact to play all the parts. In short, they think they can do pretty well anything, because at school, they can.
When they emerge into a workplace and a wider society which rather lags behind in that everything is still pretty much weighted in favour of men, where organisations work according to male tastes, behaviours and preferences, they just don’t get it. One former head girl, who visited St Paul’s to address the students about her career in the decade since leaving, put it this way: ‘I just had no idea that it would be so much more challenging making your career as a woman – at school, it never occurred to us – everything seemed possible.’
Everything seemed possible because it was. Despite some progress, the realities in the so-called ‘wider world’ of unequal pay, unequal promotion prospects and unequal opportunities generally are a continuing concern to everyone who would wish to see society benefiting – equally – from the talents of both men and women. Girls go out into the workplace, full of confidence and capability, and come up against a very different culture: at one extreme, they may be subjected to active prejudice or harassment: being excluded from the Friday afternoon game of football or being pursued by the older boss. But equally disturbing is that experience that some women describe of becoming invisible – their views going unheard or ignored. This was a new idea to me until comparatively recently; I experienced it for the first time myself when attending the conference of a traditionally male-dominated professional organisation. It was a very odd feeling standing in a circle at a drinks reception and feeling like a pane of glass – I could easily have disappeared without anyone noticing. Ah, so this is what they talk about, I thought.
Change is afoot in some quarters, stimulated by the more recent opening up of the question of gender identity. A case in point was the decision in summer 2017 by the then newly appointed (female) artistic director of the Globe Theatre, Michelle Terry, to commit to ‘gender-blind’ casting and a 50/50 split of male and female roles – presumably because, otherwise, men would be getting the lion’s share of the great Shakespearean parts, as they always have done. This is great, but I reflected that in girls’ schools, gender-sighted – rather than gender-blind – casting in drama productions has always ensured that women win not just half, but all the most significant roles, producing generations of practised Macbeths, Hamlets and Henry Vs. It was with some satisfaction that I thought how well prepared these girls’ school-educated actors would be for the new and more empowering approach to casting at the Globe. That even-handedness and neutrality is of course emphasised further when we also see men playing female roles with great brilliance: who can forget Mark Rylance as Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, for example. Twice as many actors to choose from, twice as many roles to audition for, and it becomes about talent and skill, not about the limitations of gender.
This is all very well, say the detractors of single-sex schools, but the real world is mixed – what’s the point of pretending otherwise? Girls just have to get used to it (which usually means playing nicely to get what they want), so they might as well start at school. Of course education must prepare young people for reality, for society as it is. But it must and can do more: inform and drive the values by which that society is shaped. When all things are equal – my former head girl and I agreed – there may be no further need for single-gender schools. But it seems that despite some excellent work going on to change things (spearheaded by men as well as women) we are still very far from that point. Until then, St Paul’s and its fellow girls’ schools have a vital and influential role to play in ensuring the continued disruption of social norms, so long established that no one even thinks of them as norms. The impetus towards genuine equality cannot be assumed but must be actively led by the talented and confident young women emerging from our gates. Whether girls are wired differently or not really does not matter in the end. Either way, what we’re dealing with is a society that has deep-rooted, often subconscious expectations about women and structures which still limit the contribution they can make. While this is so, we need to educate girls themselves to change that. The case for girls’ schools is as much about preparation for what is to come, as it is about the experience of the here and now.
So what do girls’ schools do differently? Many things. By freeing girls to be themselves so they don’t feel the pressure to conform to predetermined patterns of behaviour, girls’ schools make them more aware of how the media seeks to manipulate them. They train a lens on the problem to make girls think critically. In doing so, they give a framework to evaluate the image of girls in today’s media. Is that the image we want for ourselves? What is the image of female attractiveness to which young women are taught to aspire, for example? Who is shaping it? The insidious encouragement to conform to an absurd idea of beauty embodied by emaciated fashion models has, for example, caused great damage to many young women’s self-esteem and health. We want them to pay attention to this and develop the resilience to reject it, because nobody else is going to in an industry that is making money out of controlling them in this way. When the then editor of Vogue, Alexandra Shulman (a Paulina herself) came to talk to the girls at St Paul’s about her career in fashion journalism, as part of the weekly Friday lecture programme, this highly intelligent, unexpectedly normal-looking woman – chic in a reassuringly rumpled way – was asked by one of the girls what she was doing about the fact that Vogue’s models looked ‘emaciated’. Her magazine was still implicitly promoting the idea that size zero should be every girl’s dream. Her reply was that she saw the problem but this was down to the designers: with clothes being created for tiny figures, fashion editors could only provide tiny models to wear them. I looked at the faces of her difficult-to-impress audience and saw politeness warring with scepticism. Surely this was an issue on which a female-run magazine like Vogue should be making more of a stand? As so often, it was in the post-lecture informal conversations that the most interesting thinking emerged; here about the tension between principles and commercial imperatives – an example of how a girls’ school can give time to foregrounding a subject of special significance for women and enable untrammelled discussion.
Girls’ schools don’t just concentrate on protecting their pupils: they also empower them, confidently promoting a positive ‘can-do’ philosophy. There are no barriers, real or perceived. In terms of academic life, for example, girls do not face unspoken prejudices about subject choices. No one is particularly amazed that you like physics. An enormous amount has been written about why physics is seen as a male subject: more boys take it at A level and beyond so it is seen as inhospitable to girls; it is associated with ‘hard’ skills, such as making circuits, which are typically perceived as isolated and not involved with other people, and hence also ‘unfeminine’. Textbooks also tend to employ traditionally boy-friendly examples, such as car construction. All this is changing gradually, but physics is still a subject where girls are having to fit in. That said, and somewhat