Thoughts from a Head - Having it all...

Jill Berry talks about the unprecedented amount of pressure facing our daughters to become a “perfect woman” and about preparing girls early on for the challenges and choices they will face later in life. The following is extracted from Jill’s speech given at the GSA Annual Conference in Harrogate in November 2009. Jill Berry is President of the Girls Schools’ Association and Head of Dame Alice Harpur School.

You may have read recently a story about Cambridge female undergraduates posing scantily clad, which led to media stories about ‘bluestockings and bimbos’. Girls can be highly intelligent and interested in being seen to be attractive – the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Caring about physical appearance and fashion and wanting to feel good about how you look doesn’t have to be a betrayal of some feminist ideal. I love new shoes but it doesn’t make me shallow. Girls can have fun and also be taken seriously.

We hope our girls’ education, within the classroom and beyond it, will give them a range of options and a positive self-image so that they stretch and challenge themselves and then feel proud of all they achieve, without expecting to be perfect at everything and feeling guilty if they don’t manage to be Wonderwoman.
A member of my staff gave me a copy of an article from the Independent which listed girls’ and boys’ career aspirations at age 11 and 16 sixty years ago, compared with their aspirations in the early 21st century. Sixty years ago, boys chose as their dream professions jobs such as train driver, racing driver, mechanic, fireman. Girls chose professions such as nurse, air stewardess, hairdresser, ballerina. In the 21st century poll, boys’ top choice was footballer (at age 11) and a job in IT (at 16). Girls’ top choices included fashion designer, lawyer, doctor, optician, physiotherapist, and the top choice, at both ages 11 and 16, was vet.

This was echoed in an article by Alice Thomson in The Times in the summer. She returned to her former school to present the prizes and was taken aback at how girls’ aspirations had developed since she attended the school only as far back as 1980s. She said: ‘When I went back last week prepared to give a stirring speech to the pupils about reaching their potential, I realised they had already exceeded anything I’d ever done. I discovered that many of them already had ten starred As at GCSE, their gold Duke of Edinburgh’s Awards, had set up their own internet businesses, won medals for debating, were competing for Britain in sailing and had grade 8 distinction on the oboe. As they staggered away with their booty, it was clear they were already thinking of becoming editors or economists, brain surgeons or barristers.’ But she then goes on to say, ‘What they hadn’t realised is that while they are probably even more talented than their male contemporaries, their lives will be different, more complicated and maybe also more complete. What I wish I’d known at 18 was that while I could possibly become a chief executive I might also want to be a mother, that I might not want to work flat-out, full-time for 40 years to reach the top, that woman + work is an easy equation to balance, but adding a baby into the sum turns it into a conundrum.’

In addition to their professional aspirations, currently four-fifths of women have children. Sixty per cent of UK mothers return to work within six months of having a child – a very small proportion now stay at home until the child reaches school age – that may be financially driven to some degree, but it’s one of the facts of life for which we have to prepare our girls. We know that generally the girls in our schools want demanding careers rather than just jobs, and given that the vast majority of them will choose to have families, too, they have a challenging future ahead. If they leave us expecting to be perfect wife, perfect mother and perfect Chief Executive, we haven’t prepared them for the reality of this challenging future. But if we give them the confidence to achieve their best and feel proud of that, whatever it might be; not to feel unduly guilty if they cannot be all things to all people; to be able to work in partnership with others and to make full use of the support they have available to them; to have the self-assurance to exercise choice – at certain stages of their lives they will have different priorities and what they choose at one time will not be the same as what they choose at another time – but it should be a choice, and a choice they feel comfortable with.

There was a superb article in The Observer last week written by Gaby Hinsliff, the paper’s political editor, entitled ‘I had it all, but I didn’t have a life’ about her decision to resign in order to spend more time with her two-year-old son. It describes the dilemma many of our girls will face – in fact which many of our high achieving staff, and the heads in our schools face, when they combine a demanding professional life with parenthood. If we manage to educate our girls so that they are capable of dealing with this dilemma when the time comes, then we will have done well by them. It is all about balance. Many of our girls want it all. I think our job is to prepare them as well as we can to cope with the complexities and the challenge of the balancing act they will inevitably face in the future. To an extent we do this in our schools when we offer them a huge range of opportunities and they find even at Junior School age that they can’t do the recorder and netball and choir all during the same lunchtime. They have to learn, with our support, about pacing themselves, about commitment, about being realistic in their expectations of themselves – aim high, but don’t make yourself miserable by trying to do everything and aiming for perfection in everything. We also need to prepare girls who will ultimately become mothers themselves for the responsibility of being positive role models for their own children.

My Sixth Form girls this year had the opportunity to enter an essay competition in which they wrote about who they thought were important female role models in the 21st century. They wrote about politicians, sports stars, pioneers in different fields, but by far the most commonly quoted role model was the individual writer’s mother. Because these were 17/18 year old girls, these were usually working mothers, and the comments the girls made about their admiration for their working mothers reminded me of a comment I read by the daughter of a journalist who’s also a single parent, in the Daily Mail in September. The daughter, Alice Chunn, said, ‘From a young age I have carried with me a fierce sense of pride about my mother’s impressive career. I would be proud to follow in her footsteps. She has had a demanding professional life while raising three children. Not only do I love my mother but I respect her, and not just because she is my mother but because of all she has achieved.’ We need to educate our girls so if they choose to be working mothers they need to get a grip on their guilt. If they choose not to work and to stay at home with their children, at least for a period of time, they shouldn’t feel guilty. If they choose not to have children at all, they shouldn’t feel guilty. If they find they are unable to have children, that’s also something we need to educate them to be able to handle. That’s what I wish for the girls we are responsible for educating.