as for the economy, into a state that gives power to global corporations and instals
apparatuses and knowledges through which people are reconfigured as productive
economic entrepreneurs of their own lives’. The neo-liberal ethos is, they argue, to
change, transform, adapt, reinvent and self-perfect towards the goal of marketability
and consumption. These tenets, are, however, highly gendered; consider, for
instance, the modern beauty industry and make-over television as an example of
pedagogy around how girls and women (not exclusively but more so than men) are
called upon to make-over their bodies and selves (Skeggs and Wood 2012 ). Thus,
Gill and Scharff ( 2011 : 7) suggest in their work on postfeminist‘new femininities’
that postfeminism works in concert with neo-liberalism in relation to gender,
suggesting that both discourses thrive on a current of individualism, seeing‘free-
dom’(economic, sexual, etc.) as now especially open to girls and women in the
wake of feminist gains—think of the many advertising slogans, promulgated since
the 1990s, about women and girls’‘having it all’which have been promulgated
since the 90s.
In this chapter we discuss how, through ideas about feminine educational suc-
cess, neo-liberal discourses have directly promoted and fed into postfeminist
notions about female empowerment, through ideas about feminine educational
success, with girls positioned as the chief benefactors of increased access and
opportunity to educational—and therefore it is assumed economic—rewards (Harris
2004 ). One of the primary ways this works is through touting girls’academic
successes over boys in schooling.
26.3 Constructing Boys’Educational Underachievement
as a Fact
A widespread common-sense agreement about UK boys’ educational ‘under-
achievement’has continued to dominate contemporary UK policy debates on
gender and education in the nearly 20 years since Epstein et al’s Failing Boys
( 1998 ). Girls have been understood to have overtaken boys in several types of
testing and performance audits that have become normative in neo-liberal schooling
climates. Educational debates in the United Kingdom have been shaped by
undisputed‘facts’of a gender gap, facing boys, a gap that varies little year to year
(Skelton and Francis 2009 ):
- Girls outperform boys at ages 7, 11 and 14 in National Curriculum assessments
in English; achievements in maths and sciences are broadly similar. - Girls are more successful than boys at every level in GCSE.
- Girls are succeeding in‘boys’subjects’such as technology, maths and chemistry
(adapted from Jackson 1998 : 78).
As Arnot and Phipps ( 2003 ) suggested, these claims about statistical patterns of
female performance were touted as one of the most significant transformations in
26 Postfeminist Educational Media Panics, Girl Power... 387