Claire Gao

Dolly Alderton made her way into the 20-something collective consciousness with her landmark 2018 book Everything I Know About Love. In it, she says, ‘Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learnt from my long-term friendships with women.’

Like Alderton, I spent my formative teenage years at an all girls’ school in the South East of England and then went to a co-educational school for the two years of A-Levels. For the first 16 years of my life, my only friendships were my friendships with other girls. A lot of words come to mind when I think of my early school friendships: tumultuous, intense, bitchy, and ‘love’ takes a while to make an appearance. But Alderton’s assertion still stands. Whilst I don’t think my friendships would have been any less intimate or fulfilling had they existed in the background of a mixed school environment (and they likely would have been much healthier), I can credit my all girls’ school for the opportunity to imagine relationships without gender performance.

For all the flack against girls’ schools for their propensity to churn out eating disorders and SSRI prescriptions, the promotion of feminism as the default is one positive mark left on its students.

More important for feminism than the proactive neoliberal ‘She-EO’ initiatives like workshops or speaker events that my high-achieving private school pushed, was the simple fact that femmes were the default role-fulfillers in every social situation. 

School is where many begin to develop their subconscious beliefs about social relations and what it means to be a person with their identity – what behaviours make you more ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’, what makes you attractive, what makes you smart or a good student, what social norms are acceptable. Gender segregation certainly emotionally stunts you in some of those respects, but I think that the girls’ school shields its students from developing their beliefs solely around male norms. 

The most important takeaway for me was the ability to form my beliefs about identity somewhat protected from the gender essentialism pervasive in society. I never formed the subconscious beliefs that boys are inherently funnier or better at maths or more interested in certain things like sports than girls, because the only people who I knew that were funny, good at maths, or sporty were girls and femmes. 

Many proponents of girls’ school cite the 2014 meta-analysis finding that girls perform better both academically and in terms of confidence at single-sex schools, whereas boys perform better at co-ed schools. The conclusion is often drawn that it’s the presence of those naturally boisterous boys that makes the difference. But that’s a misleading interpretation of the data – my school wasn’t a covenant devoid of class clowns and boisterous and difficult students, these roles were just filled by girls.

These stereotypically masculine character traits – and with them the domineering ideas that men are funnier, smarter, more assertive than women – are socialised and not innate and natural. I spoke to another girl who had moved to a mixed school for sixth form about her experience who immediately noted that “you could tell who went to an all girls’ school and who didn’t” by their increased assertiveness and willingness to stand up for themselves against the boys in the school.

This discussion might seem redundant at a place like Cambridge, which The Telegraph never misses a chance to describe as ‘woke’, where toxic masculinity and views about the subordinate role of women can be dismissed as archaic, issues of a less-enlightened society. But we are not immune to egregious displays of gender, carrying with us the social roles we learnt to slip into at school.

I can’t speak for others’ experiences but I can compare my own, going from a comprehensive mixed primary to a private girls’ secondary to a comprehensive mixed sixth form. Class and age are major factors in the disparities, of course: at a private school, classes are smaller and people are more likely to speak up in class regardless of gender. In primary school I didn’t even bother to try to make friends with boys for fear of germs. But even at that age, there were blatant performances of gender learnt from society. Boys were the loud ones and girls were the ones who laughed at their jokes, boys chased the girls in ‘kiss chase’, you were a ‘gaylord’ for having long hair or a lesbian for wearing trousers (which was bad). Awareness and enforcement of stereotypical gender relations didn’t disappear at my secondary school, but they were noticed less – there was no other binary to compare stereotypically ‘boy-ish’ behaviours to. 

I’m glad I went to a mixed sixth form, if only to realise that there was no need for all the fuss about it. But I did notice the outward displays of personality were more reserved in girls, and that the loudest people in the room were always boys. Especially for a trait like being funny, the class-clown roles were always filled by girls at my girls’ school. But the manosphere-perpetuated idea (albeit the internet is nowhere near as influential on real life as it would have you believe) that ‘women aren’t funny’ is based on false beliefs perpetuated by gender socialisation. 

Being in an environment like school where the only publicly funny or loud people are boys, femmes can become comfortable with the pattern where this is something that belongs to masculinity. Olga Khazan cites in her article for The Atlantic, Plight of the Funny Female, a 2011 study that found that ‘men make more attempts at humor, so they are successful more of the time.’ Women are not less funny in the content of their humour, they just make less jokes in front of men. Women are also socialised to laugh more at men’s jokes out of politeness, as Jordan Theresa describes in this recent YouTube video, furthering the idea that men are funnier. Manosphere men like to point out individual examples of women attempting to be funny, like Amy Schumer, as definitive proof that women are less funny than men, without acknowledging the plethora of unfunny men. Brent Rivera or cringey TikTok pick-up artists do not represent all men.

Even in fairly integrated mixed gender friend groups at school and in university groups sometimes too, there is still often an unspoken role-fulfilment in friendships with men. The men made jokes, the women laughed. The men play-fought and performed physical comedy, the women brought them down to earth, and brought balance to the group. You are a girl first and a friend second. Donna Tartt’s protagonist in The Secret History, Richard Papen, describes Camilla, the only girl in their friendship group:

“Being the only female in what was basically a boys’ club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn’t compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature one would have her seem.”

Although meant as a compliment, it highlights the social significance of being a girl. She is a ‘fragile creature’ and not ‘hard’. She is still ‘slight’ and ‘lovely’. To be less attractive, ‘hard’ or ‘quarrelsome’, would be trying too hard to be one of the boys. And that’s gauche, cringe, overly sincere. 

I don’t think that gender segregation is an ideal solution to the patriarchy, but I think that going to an all girls’ school allowed me to develop my personality somewhat protected from gender expectations, and I’ve brought this into my friendships at uni. It may have promoted gender essentialism in other ways, by creating an echo-chamber that formed a strict aesthetic standard for femininity, and promoting boys as this mystical ‘other’, not to be approached like girls. I’d like to think that I’ve grown out of this, that two years of sixth form was enough to demythologise. I don’t know what the answer is, but in this non-ideal world, girls’ schools shouldn’t be derogated; they have at least this value.