failing boys is ushered into the dialogue by a psychologist quoted as imploring the
government to take action with boys:‘Ministers must take note of thesefigures and
do more to support boys at school to stop them falling off the ladder’. The statistics
on the proportion of male primary teachers (13%) are also cited to underscore how
‘many fear the imbalance has left young boys without positive role models’.
Similar headlines in 2010 proclaim:‘Eton head says UK education is failing
boys’, which cites the headmaster warning that the‘...British system of education
is failing to give boys the help they need and has become too focused on girls’. The
headline statement is used to support a political goal of single-sex schools or
classrooms because‘boys require a much more physical and active style of
learning’(Ross in The London Evening Standard, 19 January 2010 ).
Another article, ‘Girls think they are cleverer than boys from age four’
(Shepherd in The Guardian, 1 September 2010 ), from a study on‘Gender expec-
tations and stereotype threat’, warns about the dramatic effects of teachers’poor
expectations of boys, urging and urges teachers to stop using phrases like‘silly
boys’and‘schoolboy pranks’for fear of its negative effects on boys’psyche and
development. Robbie Hartley, the researcher, is quoted as saying‘gender bias’is
normative, and educators have found it‘acceptable to pitch girls against the boys’.
While it seems that Hartley is actually arguing against girl–boy comparisons in
order to resist gender stereotyping, what is clear is that the broadsheet picks up and
runs with the gender dichotomy,‘girls think they are cleverer than boys’, as the
sensational attention—grabbing headline.
These headlines are all examples of how the media works affectively to propel
and renew gender binaries and hierarchies and to whip up anxiety and fear. The
news stories position girls as being successful at the expense of boys—that is by
taking something away something from boys and masculinity (Foster 2000 ). These
binaries create stereotyping tropes that operate to mobilise affect and sentiment—
we are invited to worry over boys as well as perhaps secretly celebrate an apparent
victory for girls. These stories are useful emotively because they attract‘eyeballs’
through familiar repetition and dramatic headlines provoking simplistic postfemi-
nist notions where we see the damage wrought by empowered girls and women.
But these media debates also have a much wider range of policy and practical
effects/affects, which are explored in the next sections.
26.6 Questioning Postfeminist Panics in the Global North
In the period since the mid-1990s, education policy research has explored a terrain
across the Global North that understands‘gender gaps’and sexism to refer almost
solely to the need to help boys catch up to girls in school—with boys positioned as
the new‘disadvantaged’, a formation described by Lingard and his colleagues as a
form of‘recuperative masculinity politics’(Lingard 2003 ; Lingard et al. 2009 ).
Furthermore, a range of naturalised gender differences (like such as the belief that
boys and girls learn differently) are re-asserted. These understandings are framed
392 J. Ringrose and D. Epstein