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Teaching Girls to SpeakOut: The Female Voice inPublic ContextsJ.A. BaxterPublished online: 29 Mar 2010.
To cite this article: J.A. Baxter (1999) Teaching Girls to Speak Out: TheFemale Voice in Public Contexts, Language and Education, 13:2, 81-98, DOI:10.1080/09500789908666761
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Teaching Girls to Speak Out: The FemaleVoice in Public Contexts
J.A. BaxterSchool of Education, The University of Reading, Bulmershe Court, Earley,Reading RG6 1HY, UK
This article seeks to understand why it is that many girls (relative to boys) experiencedifficulties when they are required to speak in formal, public or unfamiliar contexts.While girls are recognised to be good at using collaborative talk in small groups, it isstill the public voice that is valorised in the world outside school. Thus, the currentdebate in Britain on underachieving boys is reviewed in the light of the discrepancybetween what constitutes success in school, and what constitutes success in the adultworld. Furthermore, language and gender research has tended to characterise thepredominantly male, public voice as competitive, ego-enhancing and hegemonic. Yetthe new generation of British GCSE syllabuses for English redefines this public voicein ways that might be empowering and enhancing for girls in their future lives. Theissue for educators is how to encourage girls to acquire skills that are culturally codedas ‘masculine’.
Introduction‘I am the King of the World!’
James Cameron, director, Titanic. Oscar Ceremony, 1998
If a female film director were to shout Cameron’s words in self-congratulationto a thousand-strong audience, would it have quite the same public impact, orreceive the same level of social tolerance? Even if the female speaker were toreplace the word, ‘King’, with the more gender-appropriate (but semanticallyderogated) word, ‘Queen’, this would invoke quite comical, or disturbing socialmessages.
Broadly, this article seeks to understand why it is that many females in Britain,including Members of Parliament, acknowledge that they continue to strugglewith forms of public speaking, despite almost 30 years of equal opportunities andeducational reforms. More pertinently, it considers why many girls (relative toboys) tend to be unforthcoming in using talk in public contexts. This is despitethe acknowledged centrality of talk to pupil learning through language in everysubject of the British National Curriculum (DfE, 1995) — and indeed, inter-nationally.
Female difficulties with speaking in public contexts have much to do, Isuggest, with the discrepancy between what constitutes success, or beingeffective in school and what constitutes being successful outside school. Toexplore this further, I intend to review educational research in the field of girls’and boys’ talk in public contexts, and to question where it is leading. It is generallynot within the scope of this article to attempt an overview of the extensiveliterature on adult male and female speech in public contexts (e.g. Coates, 1995;
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0950-0782/99/02 0081-18 $10.00/0 ©1999 J.A. BaxterLANGUAGE AND EDUCATION Vol. 13, No. 2, 1999
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Holmes, 1992, 1995; Tannen, 1995; Kendall & Tannen, 1997) or the current workon masculinities (e.g. Griffin & Lees, 1998; Johnson & Meinhof, 1997).
There will be three predominant themes in the discussion that follows. Thefirst is to critique the ideological provenance of earlier research in the field whichhas generally adopted an ‘essentialist’ approach to language. According to thisresearch, gender is constructed as a fundamental part of a ‘unitary’ individual,and expressed linguistically as a set of features, or a ‘style’, geared towardsparticular speech functions. Also consistent with such research is the tendencyboth to generalise and dichotomise gender in terms of the difference between maleand female speech ‘styles’, or the dominance of male over female talk (for acritique, see Crawford, 1995). Gender is often located as the focus of suchresearch, while other variables constituting speech behaviour such as class, ‘race’or age, are often marginalised or rendered invisible (Cameron, 1997a). In contrast,this discussion will be theoretically informed both by a social constructionistperspective (Crawford, 1995), which proposes that gender should be investigatedas a social construction realised through social interaction and organised bypower relations; but also by post-structuralist theory (Derrida, 1987; Foucault,1982), which suggests that speakers are constantly having to renegotiate theirsubject identities within multiple and competing discursive practices.
Thus, the second theme is to reassess discursive practices in differentclassroom contexts that may variously position both girls and boys as relativelypowerful or powerless. Research literature that has focused on whole classinteraction has tended to note how boys dominate the opportunities for using a‘public voice’, while more recent studies on collaborative talk in small groupshave shown that girls feel empowered by the opportunities for using aninterpersonal ‘private voice’ (Coates, 1995; Corson, 1997; Holmes, 1992, 1995;Reay, 1991; Tannen, 1995). This is usually constituted in feminist discourse as oneof the ways in which schools privilege the gendered discursive practices of males,because most conventional schools have ‘their historical roots in the competitivevalues of dominant males more than a century ago’ (Corson, 1997). However,recent educational discourse in Britain has foregrounded two trends that appearto challenge girls’ status in feminist discourse as the underprivileged sex. Thefirst is the assimilation of a model of speaking and listening into mainstreamEnglish teaching in British schools inspired by the National Oracy Project(NCC/NOP, 1991). This placed a high educational value on collaborative talk insmall groups said to favour the conversational styles of girls (Swann & Graddol,1995). The second more recent trend is the prevailing ‘moral panic’ about girls’comparative academic achievements in British schools, and boys’ relative‘failure’. According to this ‘hot’ media topic, girls are now the success story inBritish education, while boys have increasingly become the innocent victims of‘girl power’, equal opportunities policies in schools, and mainstream socialacceptance of feminism. Unsurprisingly, in a meta-discursive twist, this domi-nant discourse is itself currently the subject of feminist critique (Epstein et al.,1998; Griffin, 1998; Skelton, 1998).
Despite such apparent trends, I shall nonetheless argue that British schoolscontinue to prepare boys better for speaking in the public sphere than girls, andthat what girls are good at (supportive interaction in small groups), though
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increasingly valorised in school settings, is not necessarily what will help themoutside school. This issue is of particular pertinence given the new generation ofBritish General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) syllabuses for English(1998), which have never before been so specific about the requirements forpupils to be able to talk effectively in public contexts.
Thirdly, I shall call for a research path that aims to revalorise the notion of the‘public voice’ . Much language and gender research has constituted the male,public voice as competitive, disruptive, interrupting, disagreeing, ego-enhancingand therefore ‘bad’; while conversely characterising the female, ‘private voice’ ascooperative, facilitative, supportive, solidarity-enhancing, undervalued andtherefore ‘good’ (e.g. Cheshire & Jenkins, 1991; Coates, 1989a, 1996; Holmes, 1992;1995). While I accept that such a perspective has been a necessary antidote to theandrocentric bias of early researchers such as Lakoff (1975), there needs in myview to be a reassessment of the possible definitions and educational value ofthis public voice, especially for girls in British secondary schools. Such areassessment is not intended to lead to an endorsement of the normative voiceof public authority, career confidence and success, so frequently identified infeminist discourse as valorising masculine or patriarchal values. Crawford (1995)has rightly argued that such a logic creates ‘bandwagons’ (assertiveness trainingor sensitivity training for male–female miscommuniciation), which ultimatelytreat women as victims or token males. Rather, it is to argue for the view that girlsmay be personally, socially, educationally and professionally empowered in theirlives if they learn to speak out — to have the agency to speak persuasively andpowerfully in a range of unfamiliar, formal and public contexts. In order to realisethis agency, both girls and boys will also need to have the means to negotiate andcritique the dominant discursive practices that continue to constitute the ‘publicvoice’ as essentially male.
Previous Classroom ResearchMuch previous research connecting classroom talk with gender has demon-
strated that boys dominate the public arena of the classroom, especially inteacher-directed interactions with the class. These studies, mainly conducted inBritain and the USA, generally adopt a ‘dominance’ perspective (e.g. Sadker &Sadker, 1985; Spender, 1980, 1982; Swann, 1988): the classroom is viewed as amicro-political version of the outside world in which talk forms an importantarena for the reproduction of gender inequalities in human relations and socialinteraction. According to this, both boys and girls are born into an unequalrelationship to interactional power, and by school age, they ‘bring to theclassroom the understanding that it is males who should have the floor andfemales who should be dutiful and attentive listeners’ (Spender, 1980b: 149).Thus, schooling continues the pattern of rewarding boys and girls in both subtleand blatant ways for conforming to the norms of social interaction and speechbehaviour.
In most ‘dominance’ studies, power in the classroom is conceptualised interms of an ‘access ideology’: that is, who has access to and can make use of itsinteractional resources. Such ‘resources’ may include the power to speak (or toallocate that power to other speakers) in the classroom, to whom, and for how
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long; the power to set or change the norms of conversational interaction; and tonegotiate access to the ‘verbal space’ with other speakers As Swann (1988) alsopoints out, these ‘interactional resources’ are not simply verbal: non-verbalcommunication such as eye gaze, gesture and posture may be utilised verypowerfully by both teachers and pupils to secure speaking rights, as may seatingarrangements, positioning of pupils and the use of equipment.
Much of this research has a double edge: it seeks both to discover whethergender differences and inequalities found in adult male and female talk are beingreflected in the microcosm of classroom practice, and also whether thesedifferences are being systematically reproduced, maintained and reinforced fromthe pre-school stage upwards. The ‘dominance’ perspective largely constructs itsunderstanding of experience through metaphors of weights, measures, balanceand symmetry: in any speech context it seems that there is a notional sum ofinteractional power which, if human relationships were equal in terms of suchfactors as age, status, race, gender, class, and so on, would be shared equallyamong its participants. So, for example, in a classroom, each individual, whethera teacher or pupil, boy or girl, working or middle class, would have an equalshare of the interactional cake. Given this quantitative perception of the workingsof power, it is hardly surprising that the majority of studies on classroominteractions have used quantitative measures to assess who does the talking andhow. Another interesting feature of this perspective is the direct correlation oftalk with power: those who have access to speech opportunities are morepowerful than those who have no access. More bluntly, the ability to speak inpublic has an ‘in your face’ impact which the ability to listen does not. Clearlythe skill of good listening, so valued in the rubric of the British NationalCurriculum for English (DfE, 1995), has little part to play in the business ofempowering pupils according to these ‘dominance’ research studies. In addition,because power is described through quantitative metaphors, it is clear thatpowerful talk is judged less by the quality or persuasiveness of its content orrhetorical style, and more by the length of time the speaker holds the floor.
Many classic and more recent international research studies in this area(Bousted, 1989; Bjerrum Nielsen & Davies, 1997; French & French, 1984; Ohrn,1991; Sadker & Sadker, 1985; Spender, 1980, 1982; Swann, 1988, Swann &Graddol, 1988; Whyte, 1984) have clearly shown that boys dominate the moreformal and public contexts of classroom talk such as teacher-directed, whole-class discussion, question-and-answer sessions and class debates. Such studieshave shown that, at all schooling levels, boys have far more speaking turns thangirls do, and that their speaking turns last longer (Bousted, 1989; French & French,1984; Kelly, 1991). Clearly there are also other variables at work here which manysuch studies do not expressly consider, such as class and culture. For example,the kind of relationships that minority children may experience when interactingwith their teachers may be very similar for both boys and girls, but it is differentfrom that of majority culture children (Corson, 1998).
Mainstream research findings foregrounding gender tend to explain maledominance in two broad and interrelated ways. The first places a premium onthe individual agency of boys to assert confidently their prerogative overclassroom talk; accordingly, boys have evolved systematic ways of procuring and
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maintaining their turn allocations. Sadker and Sadker (1985), suggested that boyshave devised strategies to ask questions or to volunteer information: for example,they ‘literally grab’ the teacher’s attention by waving their arms and calling out,while girls sit more passively with their hands up. Boys are also greater‘risk-takers’: they are more prepared than girls to guess answers to teachers’questions or speculate on ideas or evidence (Hannan, 1995).
The second explanation is that the androcentric bias in our culture towardslegitimating outspoken boys and ostracising outspoken girls is so entrenched inour public consciousness, that teachers, boys and girls ‘collude’, perhapsunwittingly, in allowing boys to dominate classroom talk. Kelly (1988) forexample, in her international review of sex differences in teacher–pupil inter-action, found that in all the countries she studied, teachers simply pay far lessattention to girls. These differences in interaction and perception occur despiteteachers’ assertions that they do not treat nor wish to treat girls and boysdifferently (Corson, 1993). Indeed, even the more dominant girls seem to be lesssalient than boys in their teacher’s perceptual field (Ohrn, 1991). A Scandinavianstudy reported by Bjerrum Nielsen and Davies (1997), suggests that low-achiev-ing girls came out as the group in the classroom talk that gets the least teacherattention, while high-achieving boys got ‘the best of everything’. Baudoux andNoircent (1993), argued that the francophone girls in Quebec deliberately resistclassroom arrangements which privilege boys, by rarely participating in whole-class interactions but alternatively adopting strategies to compensate for thesedifferences of power. Swann and Graddol (1988) noted how boys, girls andteachers all colluded in class discussions to allow the boys more, and longer,speaking turns. In the light of these findings, the supposed ‘agency’ of boys mightalternatively be read as a kind of ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’: an outcome of the waysociety has historically privileged male rights to speech in public contexts.
Typical of the second perspective was Whyte (1984), in her analysis of sciencelessons in Britain, who suggested that girls use a whole range of quite conscious‘evasive techniques’ to avoid receiving the teachers’ attention:
In order to prevent the teacher pressing them for an answer, they wouldpretend [my italics] that they were still working, or else they would busilyturn through the book looking for the answer, but never quite finding it intime to answer the question. (Whyte, 1984: 85)
Interesting here are the metaphors of conspiracy; the assumption that allparties, including the teacher, are ‘colluding’ in a secret plot, has an air of theunderhand, even the criminal. If girls are accomplices in the crime of boys’dominance, what are they gaining for themselves when they are not getting anequal share of the verbal booty?
Answers and explanations vary according to the theoretical perspective of theresearcher. Whyte (1984: 85) adopts an ‘essentialist’, ‘girls and boys are different’view in her conclusion that ‘girls in mixed classes simply feel self-conscious atreceiving any kind of attention, favourable or otherwise, while many boys incontrast, revel in the limelight’. The problem with this commonsense commentis that it fails to provide any critical analysis of girls’ ‘self-consciousness’, in termsof the ways in which boys and girls are differently positioned within the
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discourse of school science. Boys’ confidence and girls’ shyness may bealternatively construed in terms of power: the tradition of training boys tobecome scientists, with its associated high social and economic status, is wellassured through its continuous reconstruction in popular and academic dis-course as a characteristically masculine profession. In contrast, the girls’‘self-consciousness’ might be reconstrued as an attempt to struggle against, andresist the efforts to force them to compete on falsely equal grounds with the boys.Studies of this kind risk suggesting that inequality can be solved by teacherintervention and behaviour modification, thus deflecting attention from theclassroom as a site in which gender-biased discursive practices must bemeta-analysed and contested.
The range of classroom interactionist studies reviewed here generally connoteactivity, volubility and visibility in the classroom with power, whereas passivity,silence and invisibility are connoted with powerlessness. Hence, it follows thatthe perceived passivity of silence is deeply undervalued within society’sdominant discursive practices, both by the participants (in this case, teachers andstudents), and by the observers (the researchers of ‘dominance in whole classinteraction’ studies). In contrast, the activity of speech, particularly in a publiccontext where there is an audience, is perceived as a status-enhancing quality.These valuations of talk suggest powerful ideological forces at work in society atlarge, which are reflected and reproduced on a daily basis in the classroom: so,in this case, the ability to speak effectively in public means power. Thus, the factthat boys can access talk in the classroom more readily and unambiguously thangirls confers on them a power which may later bring social approval and careersuccess. It is not always the case that the most talkative boys are the mostacademically successful (Bousted, 1989). Indeed, some of boys’ talk aimed atattracting and holding the attention of the teacher may be discounted astime-wasting or disruptive (Spender, 1980). Nonetheless this facility may welldevelop boys’ confidence to seize and hold the ‘floor’, to control topics, todevelop discourse strategies which ensures that the flow of talk remains withthem and, obliquely, to prepare them for the skills of competitive, publicspeaking.
In summary, according to previous research reviewed, the classroom acts asa site for the negotiation and management of complex and often concealed powerrelations, which, as we have seen, are actively produced and maintained by allparticipants.
Swann (1992), has described girls as ‘giving away power’ in the classroomperhaps as a result of their knowledge, conscious or unconscious, that asymetri-cal access to public talk is a ‘normal’ part of being feminine or masculine. Furtherresearch in this field might question the extent to which girls ‘collude’ withoutresistance in such an arrangement. More pertinently, if we accept the post-mod-ernist principle (Derrida, 1987) that within any established power structure liereflexive and ultimately destabilising forces of resistance and change, furtherresearch should seek to consider whether girls find ways of renegotiating andresisting classroom arrangements that systematically privilege the male, publicvoice over the female one.
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Recent ResearchIt is worth speculating whether, if some of the studies reviewed earlier were
to be replicated at the turn of the century, would their findings be comparable?Even if they were, would their observations about the extent to which each sexoccupies the ‘verbal space’ of the classroom have as much relevance for theperformance of British boys and girls today? This question is pertinent in the lightof more recent research which has emphasised two trends in British educationaldiscourse — the feminisation of classroom talk, and the underachievement ofboys — that is purportedly working to the advantage of girls. Thus, if girls arenow in the academic ascendancy, does this imply that they will be moreempowered to speak out both in the classroom and in their future lives?
The feminisation of classroom talkThe first distinctive trend, associated with the National Oracy Project
(NCC/NOP, 1991), has been to promote a model of small group, collaborativetalk which has been particularly influential upon curriculum development in theteaching of English (Howe, 1992; Westgate & Corden, 1993; Wegerif & Mercer,1996; Wilkinson, 1990). This has effectively produced a dominant model ofclassroom talk that values cooperation and consensus through informal, collabo-rative talk in small groups where pupils learn by discussion, by exploring anissue, by sharing ideas and viewpoints, by tackling a problem together, and byactive listening. It is a set of interactional norms seemingly based on thedemocratic principles of rationality, fairness and equality of opportunity tospeak, which officially grants space to multiple, if serially structured, voices atthe expense of a single or dominant voice. It therefore privileges the informalityof small group conversation over public speaking more associated with moreformal, whole class settings. Wilkinson et al. (1990: 76–7) characterised the modelas a set of conversational rules:
Take turns; don’t interrupt; don’t overtalk; share out the talk time; don’tallow silence; don’t speak at too great a length; listen to others; respect theirpoint of view ¼ be cooperative; try to arrive to a mutually satisfyingconclusion.
So it seems that British oracy practices share certain values with feministdiscourse of the ‘difference’ school (e.g. Coates, 1989b, 1996; Holmes, 1992): thatis, the more private, cooperative speech style with its emphasis on sensitivity andreciprocity is valued as ‘good’, while the more public, competitive speech stylewith its associations of gaining and keeping control of the ‘floor’ is considered tobe ‘bad’. Accordingly, the orthodox ‘oracy’ model of what constitutes effectivespeaking skills in English appears to favour the affiliative, cooperative ‘style’associated with girls rather than the competitive, adversarial ‘style’ associatedwith boys. Thus, girls are generally considered to be better at small group talkthan boys are (Aries, 1976; Maltz & Borker, 1982; Coates, 1989a; Jenkins &Cheshire, 1990; Sadker & Sadker, 1994).
If girls’ abilities happen to cohere with current trends within the Englishcurriculum, does this not help to offset the disadvantages past research hasshown they experience within the whole class speech context? Does collaborative
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talk provide an alternative training ground to help girls learn how to speak moreeffectively in public contexts, or does it add little to the training of speaking skillsin public contexts? Here, I think it is necessary to add a note of caution to adiscussion of this kind. Most of the research (see Swann & Graddol, 1995 for areview) has tended to adopt an ‘essentialist’ perspective of boys’ and girls’ speechbehaviour, assuming that speech styles are socially or culturally ascribed andtherefore unreflexive to the powerful variations of discursive positioning. Oftensuch speech styles are presented as generalised stereotypes, and are both looselydefined and idealised. Such studies also fail to recognise that different discursivepractices, (such as orthodox English teaching practices or, indeed, feministlanguage and gender practices) position females and males asymetrically withindifferent versions of reality, which are for each sex, at times empowering and atother times disempowering .
Taking into account such caveats, I consider that it is highly debatable whetherthe privileging of the presumed female speech ‘style’ will prove to be anadvantage to girls, either on its own terms, or as a training for speaking in publiccontexts. The apparent ‘feminisation of classroom talk’ (Swann & Graddol, 1995)is not necessarily a means of empowerment for girls. Jenkins and Cheshire (1990;Cheshire & Jenkins, 1991) conducted one of the most specialised studies ofmixed-sex collaborative talk in the field, by taking as their focus its role insecondary English General Certificate of Education (GCSE) assessment. Theauthors were especially intrigued by the ‘striking ressemblance’ of the Examina-tion Board’s guidelines for assessing the interpersonal skills component of theoral examination with, ‘the features that have been found by researchers to beused more frequently by women than by men’ (Jenkins & Cheshire, 1990: 265).
Using empirical methods, they indeed found that girls used more ‘supportive’features aimed at developing a discussion but that boys were likely to makecontributions that had the effect of closing a discussion down. But they alsodiscovered that girls’ supportive skills in classroom conversation may disadvan-tage them in terms of assessment. Their study found that girls are expected ‘to playa sustaining role in discussion’ and are penalised if they do not so, andfurthermore, girls’ interpersonal skills were marked by very strict criteria, whichwere not applied so rigidly to the boys. The authors concluded that havingpredicted that girls would be at an advantage in an assessment system apparentlyfavouring girls’ speech styles, they found the opposite to be true: that girls do the‘interactional shitwork’ (Fishman, 1983): they ‘sacrificed their own contributions’for the greater good of the discussion, leaving boys the ultimate victors.
To be fair, there is no statistical evidence in recent years that girls have receivedpoorer examination marks for speaking and listening than boys in British GCSEEnglish exams. Indeed, this is one area where boys and girls perform equally(unlike ‘Reading’ and ‘Writing’ where girls out-perform boys). But it may wellbe that boys are benefiting at the expense of girls, and would receive lesssatisfactory marks if girls were less supportive. Fishman (1983) suggested thatthe supportive role in mixed-sex conversation represents an uneven balance ofpower, creating and maintaining inequality between the sexes. Swann andGraddol (1995) have provided a fascinating development of this view, by linkingthe movement behind the feminisation of classroom talk with ‘widespread
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changes in patterns of communication in the workplace’, described by Fairclough(1993), as a process of ‘conversationalisation’. Moreover, Swann and Graddol(1995: 144) propose that this appropriation by ‘the public domain’ of apparentlyliberal-minded, democratic principles of communication is not what it seems.Rather this process of ‘conversationalisation’ has:
selectively appropriated less powerful styles of communication which canbe used to give the appearance of democratic participation whilst beingdesigned for the manufacture of consensus and consent. (Swann & Graddol,1995)
The authors draw on Fairclough’s (1993) ideas that the adoption of specificdiscourse patterns (such as the use of collaborative talk in employee-run qualitycircles) are not benignly adopted by managers to allow workers to discuss andresolve problems and disputes in an open and democratic manner. Rather heclaims that they are designed for more sinister reasons to position participants(workers, customers, managers) in specific and usually exploitative socialrelations. The democratic surface of ‘conversationalisation’ disguises its deeperideological motives: to manage, control and potentially suppress worker dissentthrough an apparently democratic process. Swann and Graddol (1995) draw aparallel between the ‘concealed power relations’ of workplace discussion groupsand the dynamics of mixed-sex classroom discussion. However, it is at this pointin an otherwise inspiring article that the thinking becomes somewhat hazy. Areboys, like the managers, the covert oppressors? If this is what is meant, then theauthors have misread the operation of quality circles which are usually peopledentirely by workers. Or are the oppressors the patriarchial establishment of theteaching profession which assesses girls differently from boys? If so, there is noanalysis of the motives behind this institutionalised gender bias in school, andno clear metaphorical parallels drawn with the workplace setting. Followingtheir own argument, is it not just as likely that the positioning of boys in schoolis produced by a separate teacher–pupil discourse, which positions them in anequally powerless relationship in the classroom to girls? After all, both boys andgirls are being prepared (albeit in differentiated ways) for their place in theeconomic hierarchy of the workplace, and for this preparation to be guaranteed,both male and female pupils must submit to the school’s authority. The very factthat there is some ‘back-pedalling’ about the continuing educational importanceof the oracy movement as a bulwark against right-wing, reactionary pressures,suggests to me the continuing dominance of this discourse within Englishteaching in Britain, such that the authors were reluctant to push their radical andprobably unpopular conclusions too far.
The real significance of Swann and Graddol’s article is that it raises thequestion of the extent to which a cooperative ‘style’ of interaction can be judgedas empowering for girls, both in school and in the outside world. Girls’ abilitiesmay be consistent with the present ‘status quo’ in secondary English; they may bebetter than boys at listening, supporting and maintaining discussion; theirinteractional skills may, or may not, be fairly recognised and assessed; but whenthey leave school, it is likely that interactional skills alone will not empower themin their dealings with others — be they with men or managers. Their skill at what
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Sheldon (1997) terms ‘double-voice discourse’ will provide girls with the powerto work with other people and manage conflict, particularly in dealing with thesame sex, in a sensitive, diplomatic and reciprocal way; it may enable them tosell things; to make decisions; to negotiate tricky relationships; to resolveproblems; and to handle criticism. But I shall argue later that finely honedinteractional skills alone will not equip girls for the public sphere, where they mayneed to deploy the skills of discussion, argument and persuasion with larger, andunfamiliar groups of people.
Boys and under-achievement
This country has a problem with its boys. (Nicholas Tate, Daily Express,26/10/95)
‘The Future is Female’. (BBC TV Panorama programme, 1995)
The second trend I have identified in British educational discourse — the issueof boys and under-achievement — represents in my view, little more than a ‘redherring’ in terms of my argument that, without access to a public voice, the futurewill not be female. More likely, many girls and women will struggle to play a fulland equal part with men in democratic society, or to enter and work successfullyat their chosen careers. Indeed, I consider that although girls are, according tomuch cited statistics in the British media (OFSTED, 1996), out-performing boysin most subjects in school up to age 16 (though not as yet, beyond), this does notnecessarily mean that school success will translate into success for females in theadult world where sustaining a point of view may be required in a range ofunfamiliar, formal or public contexts. While this must remain in the realm ofspeculation to a certain extent — this is, after all, the first generation of girls whoare ‘officially’ out-performing boys and the consequences of this can only beguessed at — there are a number of reasons why commonsense readings of the‘boys and under-achievement’ issue should be deconstructed and challenged. Itis now vital, I believe, that feminist researchers follow the example of Skelton(1998), Epstein et al. (1998), Raphael Reed (1997), Griffin (1998), among others,and continue to disentangle the ways in which this discourse of ‘moral panic’ hasbeen configurated, because it might well overwhelm current educationalperspectives on any other gender issue, including the topic of this article.
There are a number of reasons why the issue of girls out-performing boys isunlikely to mean a corresponding empowerment for girls in their future lives andcareers. First, there are clearly alternative ways of reading an issue that has beenconstituted as ‘hard facts’ (Tate, 1995): one of the more resistant readings hassuggested that it is not that boys are doing worse but that girls are steadily doingbetter (Weiner et al., 1996; Marshall, 1998). Secondly, feminist critiques of theways in which the issue has been configured in media discourse reveal adiscursively constituted panic over ‘lost boys’ as part of ‘a resurgence ofhegemonic masculinity’ or ‘a male backlash’ against feminine success (Griffin,1998; Skelton, 1998). Thirdly, the skills that schools apparently so successfullyinculcate in girls are not necessarily deemed to be those that will make femalessuccessful as citizens and careerists in later life (Tannen, 1995; Marshall, 1998).These three ‘reasons’ will be reviewed briefly in context here, given the
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understanding that they are far more generally explored in research literatureelsewhere.
Alternative readings of ‘the facts’There are various alternative ways of reading the OFSTED statistics (1996)
other than the dominant one that supposedly ‘proves’ girls’ superior academicachievements. For example, Weiner et al. (1996) in their research project fundedby the Equal Opportunities Commission posit that there is no decline in boys’performances, but rather a ‘success story’ for both sexes. They suggest that boysare doing better than ever before in examinations, and girls have simply improvedeven more. Boys’ performances have not declined ‘per se’, they have simply notimproved at the same dramatic rate as girls. Indeed, a reading of a different setof statistics such as GCSE results for 1994 (OFSTED, 1996) casts the issue in arather different light: for example, far more boys than girls are entered for thetraditionally male, career-orientated subjects of physics (33% more), chemistry(22% more), computer studies (30% more) and computer design technology (51%more). If girls are now doing better than boys in these subjects, it is only in themost relative way: they are simply achieving more examination passes thanmight be anticipated by their numbers on entry. This may be because those girlswho are prepared to enter the so-called ‘male’ subjects, are particularly able andmotivated. The British Advanced Level (A Level) examination is still the bastionof male achievement (though girls are improving markedly), and boys areactually increasing their advantage in physics, technology, economics andcomputing. At university, boys continue to gain more ‘firsts’ than girls do,although they also gain more ‘thirds’. Gold (1995) suggests that many boyscontinue to be ‘overachievers’, and Griffin’s (1998) research shows that if there isa ‘problem’ for able boys who under-achieve, it is one of attitude rather thanability or performance. She quotes a boy who explained to her that ‘what boyslearn to do is to show off. Clever boys are not afraid to, in fact they boast aboutit — let everyone know’. Tannen (1995) points out that the apparent male capacityto draw attention to their achievements, however tenuous the basis, preparesthem better for the public sphere than the female tendency to trust the notion thatthe work will ‘speak for itself’, while Judd (1994) argues that many boys believeanyway that ambition rather than formal qualifications are more important inaccessing high-powered jobs.
In summary then, alternative readings of the OFSTED 1996 statistics suggestthat the majority of boys continue to achieve and gain academic success,particularly the more able. The ‘boys and under-achievement’ campaign hasrightly drawn attention to the literacy problem of a minority of male under-achievers, who, in fact, have always existed in schools (Miller, 1996), largelyhighlighted by girls’ increasing academic success relative to boys over the last 20years. The current discourse of ‘moral panic’ rarely refers to the further and higherstages in education, where boys continue to lead in their academic performance.Indeed, even men with poorer qualifications than women may do better.Marshall (1998) refers to a survey conducted by Birkbeck College, London (1998),which revealed that, after only two years of graduating, often with lower degreesand from less prestigious universities than their female contemporaries, menwere already earning more. While we cannot speculate too much about the
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future, there is no guarantee that better qualifications in themselves will enablefemales to access better status and power positions.
Discursive constructionsFeminist researchers have been particularly critical of the ways in which the
boys’ under-achievement debate has been constituted in popular discourse,suggesting that its ideological constructions owe much to a deep, patriarchal fearthat the male hegemony is being seriously challenged for the first time in Britisheducational history. In critiquing the discursive configurations of this issue,Griffin (1998), and quite independently, Baxter (1998) have pointed out threenotable features. The first, as discussed earlier, is the use of a ‘quantitative litany’of statistics which has constituted the issue in terms of ‘hard facts’ (Tate, 1995),thus making the ‘problem’ appear empirically indisputable. The second featureis that media constructions have characterised the issue in narrative form, or as‘causal stories’ (Griffin, 1998), in which girls are cast as villains and boys as theirvictims. In a strange warp of logic, girls’ successes are perceived to be to blamefor boys’ relative failure. Typical of such constructions were the comments of theincumbent Minister of Education, Gillian Shephard (Gold, 1995), who warnedthat although girls’ academic achievements were a cause of pride, ‘there is adanger of going too far’. Judd (1994), education correspondent for the Inde-pendent, also reported on the ‘correlation’ between girls’ success and boys’relative failure:
Recently Demos, the independent think-tank, suggested that the revolutionin girls’ education had a price: the demoralisation of boys. As girls havebecome more optimistic, the report said, boys have become so pessimisticthat their depression is affecting their academic performance.
Nor are the villains of the piece characterised simply as ‘girls’. Miller (1996:142–3) in her analysis of the ideological causes of the male backlash to this wholeissue, pointed out that the narrative of derogating girls’ academic successes hasa long history involving complex class issues:
¼ the threat the is not just femininity, but middle-class and educatedfemininity, perhaps even politicised and articulate femininity, a categorypersonified for many otherwise politically disparate groups by the womanteacher.
The third way in which media discourse is constituting the boys’ under-achievement issue is in terms of a ‘society in class crisis’. Here, I depart slightlyfrom Griffin (1998), who has suggested that the class issues of this latest ‘moralpanic’ about British adolescents have been marginalised or obscured by thetendency for such discourse to foreground issues of gender and masculineidentity. Building on Miller’s case about the intricate relationship between classand gender, I consider that much of the media discourse on this issue has revealedboth explicitly and sub-textually an increasing social fear in Britain that upwardlymobile, educated women (either working or middle class), are effectivelyemasculating working class men. In support of this contention, it is worth notingthat much of the concern about boys has focused not on boys in general, but onan under-class of largely white, working class, non-academic boys. This is
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signified by the headlines of a number of newspaper articles — ‘White workingclass boys are at the bottom of the pile’ (1996) in the Guardian; ‘Hard Times forBritish Lost Boys’ (1995) in New Scientist; ‘Becoming a Class Apart’ (1995) in theDaily Express. More recently the anxiety has resurfaced again. The Sunday Times(1998), in its article, ‘The Trouble with Boys’ quote government ministers assaying that, ‘It is our biggest social problem — a ticking time bomb. If we do notact, this generation will spawn another and we will never break the cycle’. Mixedmetaphors apart, the comment does signify a middle class terror of a future ofuncontrolled breeding from the ‘wrong’ social groups. Discussion in all thesearticles has centred on the difficulties these boys experience in knowing thateducation is preparing them for a world where traditional manufacturing jobshave largely disappeared. It has also focused on constructions of teen-masculin-ity that are not based on hard work, bookishness or forms of employment, buton forms of male, teen-leisure culture that define boys as ‘laddish’ or ‘cool’ . Thereare sub-textual hints of hegemonic tensions in Grant’s (1996) analysis of maleladdishness:
the nineties construction of masculinity, one which is endorsed everywherewe look — including the middle classes who have shaped their own versionof it through lad culture — has hardened into a limited and limitingselection of macho attitudes. ‘He’s well ’ard’, has become the highest praisea boy can earn.
The tension between gender and class is also foregrounded in recent Britishfilms such as The Full Monty (1997) and Secrets and Lies (1996), which both portraythe male characters as depressed, out-of-work, lounging at job-clubs, and sociallyinadequate, while the female characters are shown as upwardly mobile,multi-skilled and powerful: employed and bringing in the money, running thehomes, ogling men as sex objects, and still able to study for GCSE, A Level andOpen University courses. In these films, working class men are ironically beingdefined by their bodies — the ‘full monty’ group only regain self-empowermentand the respect of the female ‘other’, when they learn to convert their bodies fromidle work machines into subversive parodies of strip-tease artists. The women,conversely, are more defined by ‘the word’ — their ability to use their literacyskills for further education and white-collar employment. While both these filmsmight be termed ‘feminist’ — they treat this social phenomenon with compassionand humour and neither sex is especially idealised or demonised — there isnonetheless a powerful sense of social unease in the not-so dystopic notion thatupwardly mobile women are emasculating working-class men. Indeed, block-buster films like The Full Monty are likely to naturalise such a discourse as‘common sense’, thus reinforcing Shephard’s (Gold, 1995) view that girls’academic achievements have gone dangerously ‘too far’. As a social consensushardens on this issue against female success, there may be few guarantees thatgirls’ current performance in school will automatically translate into futureachievements in the world outside school.
The disadvantages of school successThe third reason why the boys and underachievement issue is unlikely to
benefit girls in the long run is because discursive practices also constitute girls’
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school successes in limited and derogatory ways. Feminists such as Walkerdine(1990) have noted how girls’ school success is largely defined in terms of theirearly maturing, diligence and competence in literacy, attributes which aresimultaneously praised and derided in educational discourse. Marshall (1998)has suggested that the very ‘conformist’ feature of girls’ success may ‘actuallyhinder them from succeeding in the world of work’.
I would argue that the skills of literacy in particular may not be to theadvantage of females particularly at senior levels of responsibility in business,industry and the professions, which are still very much dominated by men.Journalists such as Grice et al. (1998) have speculated that literate women (incontrast to semi-literate and working-class men) will be very employable in thefuture, but will fill posts at the lower and middle managerial levels. In short,women will become ‘the word’; paid well for their literacy skills in the‘white-collar’ market place; taking more and more of the jobs in growth areassuch as information technology, the media, design, telecommunications, officeadministration and the liberal professions. Lower down the status scale, womenwill continue to dominate in secretarial and clerical work and office receptionareas. But in my view, while good qualifications in literacy will give females ajob, they will not confer access to power at senior levels of management. Here,literacy is a subordinate or secondary skill, delegated to the ‘support staff’ ofpersonal assistants, technicians and secretaries. At senior levels, the ‘voice’ stillrules, and that voice is not a ‘feminine’ one relying principally on cooperative andfacilitative strategies that build solidarity and support; it is still largely amasculine voice relying on goal-orientated and status-enhancing strategies thatsimultaneously further business functions and ego-needs (Holmes, 1992; Tannen,1995).
Concluding DiscussionMy contention has been that males will continue to succeed in the ‘corridors
of power’ because they are the dominant ‘voice’ — both literally, in terms of theirpublic-speaking skills coded ‘superior’ in dominant discourse, and ideologically,because they are advantageously positioned (with their continuing monopolyover senior job roles) to exert control over the discursive practices that constructand preserve male power. This point is illustrated in Tannen’s (1995) explorationof the linguistic patterns of men and women at work, which, while at pains topoint out that one code of speech is not ‘better’ than another, has theorised thatmale ‘codes’ of speech are often more ‘effective’ in larger, formal settings thanfemale ones. She observes that all those aspects of speech that males are supposedto favour — arguing, persuading, problem-solving, confronting — proveinvaluable in public forums. This is despite very welcome trends within botheducational and commercial discourse practices internationally in the last twodecades to introduce cooperative interaction in ‘flattened’ workplace structures,and to ‘feminise’ the interactional style of managers in training (e.g. Coates, 1995;Crawford, 1995; Kendall & Tannen, 1997).
Clearly, opinions of what constitutes an ‘effective’ public voice are highlydebateable; Tannen (1995) for example, can easily be criticised for adopting anandrocentric, hegemonic standpoint. In contrast, certain feminist research
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literature (e.g. Coates, 1995; Holmes, 1995; Schick Case, 1988) has construed the‘public voice’ as one that is largely negative because it is male — a voice that, inorder to achieve its goals, competes, disagrees, interrupts, challenges, asserts, anddisrupts. But is this really the sole preserve of the male voice? Goodwin (1988;1992), has shown that girls are perfectly able to switch to the more assertive andconfrontational mode in discursive contexts such as arguing with boys instreetplay or family arguments, but choose not to with female peers when theirgoal is the preservation of egalitarian and non-conflictual relationships. (Con-versely, Cameron (1997b), in attacking the ‘monolithic’ constructs of male andfemale ‘styles’, has demonstrated that a group of male friends may opt to use allthe features of cooperative speech, if their goals are to engage in a ‘solidarity andcollaborative enterprise’.)
Thus, I propose that the ‘public voice’ is one that feminist educators shouldstop derogating, and aim to reconstrue as personally and professionallylife-enhancing for both sexes. The ‘public voice’ should be reconceptualised lessin terms of discourse coded ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, and more in terms of areflexive and pluralist understanding of what constitutes ‘effectiveness’ in publicsettings. ‘Effectiveness’ need not simply connote the normative, male voice ofpublic authority, confidence and success. Nor need it connote the more‘disagree/able’ qualities listed earlier above. Rather it could imply the agency toutilise a spectrum of discursive positions according to context, which can drawupon multiple and perhaps competing ways of talking, whether conventionallycoded ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. In a variety of unfamiliar, formal or publicsettings, this agency would empower both girls and boys to assert their right tospeak and be heard; to talk in a sustained and convincing way; to confront people;to make complaints appropriately; to persuade people to their point of view; tomake an impact on public opinion; to hold the floor in a discussion; to speakentertainingly and dynamically in public; to speak to people with authority andassurance; and to be persuasive and credible in meetings, gatherings andinterviews.
A positive and invigorating definition of the ‘public voice’ is now given in thenew generation of British GCSE syllabuses for English (1998), which are no longerprivileging informal, collaborative talk as the orthodox version of Speaking andListening, and are now promoting the skills of powerful talk in public contexts.Drawing on their own phraseology (for Grade A*), the ‘voice’ is one that is ableto make ‘thought-provoking contributions’, make a persuasive case, ‘uselanguage in a dynamic and influential way’ and make a public impact ‘throughpowerful expression and command of the situation’. This would be an empow-ering voice for both girls and boys in their personal, social and professional lives.
However, for feminist educators there is a real challenge. We need to have abetter understanding of how we can enable boys and girls to access this publicvoice. Furthermore, following Goodwin (1988), we might ask whether there issomething about the school context that deters girls using ways of talking thatthey are apparently capable of using outside. Clearly this recalls questions (raisedearlier) about dominant social discourses that continue to privilege male accessto speech in public contexts at the expense of female ones. Clearly, there areobvious limits to the extent to which educators can intervene in gendered
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linguistic practices: Crawford (1995) and Cameron (1997a) among others havepointed out the dangers of focusing on linguistic deficiencies and problems asagents of female subordination without keeping the broader economic andpolitical picture in view. But feminist critical pedagogy (e.g. Middleton, 1993;Kirsch, 1997), claims that until girls and boys are encouraged, not simply to resistbut to meta-analyse and contest the dominant educational and social discoursesin which their speech behaviour is continuously positioned, they are unlikely toexperiment with less gender-specific ways of talking. It is obvious that not all ourstudents are situated equally in the classroom. Quite apart from gender, factorssuch as race, class, religion, nationality and ability can determine who speaks, towhom and how much. Thus, it requires a commitment from teachers to intervenewhen conversational patterns and interactions reproduce hierarchies or preju-dices; and furthermore to foreground these differences as a subject for learningand reflection in its own right.
CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to J.A. Baxter, School of Education,
The University of Reading, Bulmershe Court, Earley, Reading RG6 1HY([email protected]).
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