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DOI: 10.1177/0959353509349601

2010 20: 73Feminism & Psychology Katherine Hodgetts and Amanda Lecouteur

Education of BoysGender and Disadvantage in the Australian Parliamentary Inquiry into the

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Katherine HODGETTS and Amanda LECOUTEUR

Gender and Disadvantage in the Australian Parliamentary

Inquiry into the Education of Boys

This article offers a discursive analysis of accounts of boys’ underachievement produced

during the Australian Parliamentary Inquiry into Boys’ Education (2002). Analysis focuses

on two interpretative repertoires through which boys’ positioning as ‘educationally dis-

advantaged’ was accomplished. Both repertoires depicted current curricula and assess-

ment as ‘favouring’ female students. One repertoire established boys’ ‘disadvantaged’

status within accounts that made no mention of historical barriers to girls’ attainment. By

contrast, a repertoire of ‘curricular feminization’ established male disadvantage in terms

of explicit reference to the historical context of gendered achievement patterns. Within this

second repertoire, reference to past impediments to girls’ academic success repeatedly

served to refute the contemporary relevance of concern about female students’ educational performance. We argue that both of these repertoires were produced within – and served

to reproduce – a framework of ‘presumptive gender equality’. This framework served to

reduce questions of equity from an analysis of academic access, participation and post-

school implications to a simplistic comparison of performance outcomes. We explore

how such rhetorical positioning was repeatedly achieved in one institutional public

policy context, demonstrating in particular how a discourse of ‘gender equity’ served to

legitimate an intensified national focus on the educational interests of boys.

Key Words: discourse analysis, educational equity, male privilege

INTRODUCTION

Over the last 15 years, the apparent underachievement of boys has been the focus

of enduring concern within the Australian education system. Dominant media

accounts of this issue have portrayed boys as lagging behind girls in school

retention and literacy (Lingard, 2003), and as over-represented in programs for

students with learning difficulties and behaviour problems (Gilbert and Gilbert,

1998). In particular, there has been pervasive public reporting of Australian

Feminism & Psychology © 2010 SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore andWashington DC) http://fap.sagepub.com, Vol. 20(1): 73–93; 0959-3535DOI: 10.1177/0959353509349601

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74 Feminism & Psychology 20(1)

Tertiary Entrance Rank (TER) data (e.g., DEST 2005) indicating that girls have

outperformed boys over at least the last ten years on the basis of mean TER scores,

and that boys are over-represented in the lower ranges of TER score distributions.

Similar concerns have been identified throughout much of the English-speakingworld (in Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA), as well as in Scandinavia,

Europe and Japan (Connell, 1996; Connolly, 2004; Skelton and Francis, 2009).

Indeed, as Mahony (1997: 1) argues, anxiety about boys’ academic performance

may be seen to have reached ‘epidemic proportions when viewed from an inter-

national perspective’.

Although cross-cultural constructions of the issue have varied in orientation

and emphasis, commonalities in the conceptual framing of the boys’ education

‘crisis’ have been identified across nation-states. In particular, commentators have

noted two pervasive assumptions within accounts of the ‘problem’: (1) the notionthat girls are now ‘outperforming’ male students in the classroom (Griffin, 2000),

and (2) the view that girls’ improved academic achievement has come ‘at the

expense’ of that of boys (Francis and Skelton, 2005). Through essentialized com-

parisons of gendered achievement, abstracted from discussion about the social

and political location of schooling, dominant accounts have served to depict boys

as the ‘new disadvantaged’ within education systems worldwide (Lingard and

Douglas, 1999).

In response to such broad-brush, homogenizing claims, many feminist scholars

have argued the need for more nuanced and politically accountable readings of

‘who wins at school’. A considerable literature has critiqued the ‘competing vic-

tims’ framework (Cox, 1995) through which male and female students have been

depicted as homogenous groups with disparate levels of attainment, pitted against

each other in a struggle for limited educational resources (Epstein, Elwood, Hey

and Maw, 1998; Griffin 2000). At one level, constructions of (all) boys being

outperformed by (all) girls have been rejected on the grounds that achievement

differences within gender groups are invariably greater than those between them

(Vickers, 2005). More broadly, such constructions are argued to involve sim-

plistic, decontextualized comparisons of male and female success that fail to

address inequalities (pertaining particularly to race and class) that are far stronger predictors of underachievement than gender (Mills, Martino and Lingard, 2007;

Griffin, 2000). Equally importantly, simplistic comparisons of this kind have been

shown to ignore ongoing differentials between male and female power beyond

the schooling context – and the failure of improved female retention and aca-

demic achievement to convert into post-school opportunities and financial reward

(Collins, Kenway and McLeod, 2000; Lingard and Douglas, 1999).

In response to claims that boys have ‘replaced’ girls as the educationally dis-

advantaged gender, critical educationalists have interrogated the pedagogical and

policy implications of such a framework of accounting. At the level of teachereducation, constructions of male ‘disadvantage’, and of the need for ‘boy-friendly’

interventions to remedy this ‘imbalance’, have been argued to reinforce limiting

and inequitable gender regimes in the classroom (Martino, Lingard and Mills,







HODGETTS and LECOUTEUR: The Education of Boys 75

2004). In the policy context, Keddie (2005) explains that such constructions have

had similar effects. Indeed, she argues that the Australian Government’s 19.4

million dollar Success for Boys program, framed as a response to government

claims that ‘boys are not achieving as well as girls across a range of educationaland social measures’ (DEST, 2005), will serve at best ‘to re-inscribe the broader

social systems and structures that privilege “the masculine”’ (p. 98) and, at worst,

to undermine gains made over the last two decades in the education of girls.

In general terms, then, critiques such as those described above have focused

on the explanatory themes that are typically mobilized to support boys’ ‘dis-

advantaged’ status, and upon the educational and political significance of this

mobilization. Less critical attention has been paid to the specific ways in which

these dominant accounts are formulated in institutional and ordinary discourse. It

is this finer-grained focus that constitutes the analytic aim of the current paper: toexamine the detail of some ways in which claims about boys’ educational disad-

vantage are commonly worked up in the context of debate about gender issues in

the Australian education system.

The data for this analysis are Hansard transcripts (the official written record)

of the Australian Inquiry into Boys’ Education. This Inquiry was initiated in

2000, and continued in 2002 as the re-elected Howard Government’s initial

phase of action on the issue of ‘boys’ underachievement’. Based upon hearings,

submissions and school visits, the Inquiry’s final report ( Boys: Getting it Right ,

House of Representatives Standing Committee on Education and Training, 2002)

functioned to legitimate ongoing concern about male students’ scholastic achieve-

ment, concluding that ‘there is justification for many concerns expressed about

boys’ education’ and that ‘these concerns are not being adequately addressed

within the current policy framework’ (p. 6). Moreover, the findings of the Inquiry

underpinned recommendations with regard to educational resource allocation and

a raft of initiatives designed to remedy the ‘problem with boys’.

Our goal is to contribute a close examination of talk produced in the context

of Inquiry hearings expressly designed to define the nature of (and solutions to)

boys’ underachievement ‘problem’. The analysis focuses on discursive practices

and rhetorical functions in and through which accounts of boys’ disadvantagewere repeatedly accomplished. In turn, it explores some ways in which such

accounts may be seen to achieve robustness and persuasive power, and how they

function in practice to counter alternative representations of the intersection of

gender and education. Our approach thus aims to draw attention to some common

means by which constructions of boys as the ‘new disadvantaged’ produce and

regulate knowledge about educational in/equality – and to the likely effects of this

regulation upon educational practice and policy.

Empirical investigation of how constructions of gender difference are built in

talk and text is an important focus for feminist research and critical inquiry. It isby virtue of such constructions that particular institutional arrangements are legit-

imated and supported (West and Fenstermaker, 2002). In this sense, such work

has significant implications for understanding (and countering) the way sexism








is practically accomplished (Silverman, 2001; Stokoe, 2006). Close examina-

tion of the way discursive realities are regularly and systematically put together,

defended and legitimized also has practical application for feminists engaged in

the important work of education and policy-making.In the next section we provide a brief context for our analysis by outlining a

key feature of the broader discursive environment in which talk at the Inquiry

into Boys’ Education was produced and received: a popular concern that male

‘underachievement’ may be traced to the ‘feminization’ of Australian school

curricula.

Boys and ‘Disadvantage’: Critiques of Curricular ‘Feminization’

A dominant explanatory framework within the contemporary boys’ educationdebate in Australia is the notion that male ‘underperformance’ can be traced to

a ‘feminization’ of curriculum and assessment argued to have occurred over the

last two decades (Francis and Skelton, 2005). Claims as to the ‘feminized’ nature

of curriculum content and assessment practices have served within mainstream

narratives to depict boys as the ‘victims’ of educational priorities that are ‘skewed

against’ their needs and capacities (Swann, 1998). In such accounts, boys’ declin-

ing achievement standards have been presented as a direct result of ‘girl-oriented’

educational shifts increasingly emphasizing literacy and continuous assessment

(as opposed to ‘one-off’ exams) – academic areas in which boys are held to be

‘naturally weak’ (e.g., Sommers, 2000). In turn, boys’ poor performance has been

depicted as ‘beyond their own control’ and positioned as the result of an educa-

tional inequity that must be remedied in policy and practice (Hey et al., 1998).

In addressing claims about curricular feminization, critics have questioned

the notion that a focus on literacy and ongoing assessment is representative of

‘feminized’ educational priorities. Indeed, it has been argued that the ‘communi-

cative competence’ emphasized within literacy-rich curricula has become central

to the employability of all students given the decline in manufacturing jobs and

the growth of service-sector opportunities (Mahony, 1998). Moreover, such com-

petence is argued to build and support students’ capacity to engage in criticalcitizenship (Teese et al., 1995).

More significantly, questions have been raised as to the positioning of allegedly

‘feminized’ content and testing as an educational inequity of the same magnitude

as that experienced by girls prior to the 1980s, and as a problem requiring similar

targeted reform. Yates (1997: 342), for example, has argued that boys’ current

underachievement does not reflect a ‘disadvantage’ comparable to that endured

by female students, explaining that:

Textbooks today are not full of women and silent about men, the ‘reproductive’aspects of society … are still a minor and low-status element of the curricu-lum; and pedagogies which benefit girls have not made boys invisible to theteachers.









Critical claims that contemporary curricular and assessment practices maintain

a distinctly masculine flavour, despite shifts towards literacy-rich learning and

ongoing assessment, have also countered constructions of a female-friendly

educational ‘culture’. Gilbert and Gilbert (1998) have argued that contemporarylearning epistemologies continue to emphasize technical knowledge and solutions

to problems justified in abstract, rather than personal, terms – characteristics of

a ‘masculinist’ learning orientation. They argue that this is evident even in

humanities and social science subjects, where teachers appeal to ‘masculine’

knowledge values through their selection of action and science fiction novels, and

texts emphasizing the history of war.

It has been on the basis of such critiques of ‘feminization’ accounts that sug-

gestions about alternative ways of addressing boys’ underachievement have been

raised. It has been argued, for instance, that interrogating traditional constructionsof masculinity (characterized by avoidance of self-expression and emotional con-

nectedness) may be more fruitful than adopting a ‘boy-friendly’, ‘back-to-basics’

approach to education in which a literacy emphasis is avoided (Martino, 1994).

In line with such a critical perspective, this paper examines contemporary

constructions of boys’ ‘disadvantage’. The analysis will address ways in which

accounts linking boys’ ‘poor performance’ to ‘girl-friendly curricula’ were dis-

cursively accomplished in the institutional context of hearings for the Australian

Parliamentary Inquiry into Boys’ Education. In particular, we will focus on ways

in which these accounts functioned to position curriculum interventions aimed at

raising male achievement as both educational, and moral, imperatives.

Empirical analysis of the discursive practices through which particular con-

structions of gender are worked up and put to use in this setting is important and

interesting from a feminist psychological perspective. Contributors to the Inquiry

– educators and parents, together with politicians and policy-makers – are in a

powerful position to define expectations about gender in contemporary educa-

tional practice. Their formulations of what boys and girls ‘are like’, involving

descriptions of contrasting ‘dispositions’, ‘skills’ and ‘needs’ are, as Seymour-

Smith, Wetherell and Phoenix (2002: 254) point out ‘deeply implicated in the

formation and continuation of the “reality”’ of gendered difference and inequal-ity. Our aim is to contribute to the systematic identification and explication of

discursive practices that form the taken-for-granted ‘back cloth’ (Wetherell, 1998)

for the realization of policies and practices around gender in a range of institu-

tional settings.

DATA AND METHOD

The Australian Parliamentary Inquiry into Boys’ Education, Boys: Getting it Right was initiated in March 2000, when the Minister for Education, Training and

Youth Affairs requested the Employment, Education and Workplace Relations

Committee to:









inquire into and report on the social, cultural and educational factors affectingthe education of boys in Australian schools, particularly in relation to their liter-acy needs and socialization skills in the early and middle years of schooling; andthe strategies which schools have adopted to help address these factors, those

strategies which have been successful and scope for their broader implementa-tion or increased effectiveness. (House of Representatives Standing Committeeon Education and Training, 2002)

In addition to receiving 231 written submissions from 202 parties, and conducting

forums and inspections at 16 schools, the Committee held public hearings across

all Australian states and territories. At the public hearings and school forums

combined, 359 witnesses appeared and 1,338 pages of evidence were generated.

These transcripts of verbal submissions constitute the data corpus from which

extracts are presented here for detailed analysis. Our choice to focus on verbal(rather than written) submissions is grounded in our interest in the ways in which

explanatory accounts of boys’ academic performance are accomplished and

reproduced in interactive talk.

In analyzing Inquiry transcripts, we employ a discursive approach that empha-

sizes both the local formulation of accounts of boys’ disadvantage, and the

broader socio-political implications of these representations. Such an approach

to discourse analysis, drawing together insights from the rhetorical and post-

structuralist traditions, has been productively applied in analyses of gender rela-

tions across a variety of settings (e.g., Riley, 2002; Seymour-Smith, 2008; Willott

and Griffin, 1997). At one level, this framework treats language as occasioned

within interaction to perform specific functions – for example to blame, to justify

or to build the factual nature of particular accounts. In addition, this approach

permits the examination of accounts with regard to the ‘versions’ of reality they

mobilize, and to the role of these versions in the reproduction of (or resistance

to) wider systems of power (see Wetherell, 1998 for a detailed exposition of the

advantages of this ‘synthetic’ approach to discursive analysis).

Such an approach allowed us to combine an interest in the wider discourse

around boys’ education with examination of the situated ways in which gender

was invoked as a practical accomplishment in talk at Inquiry hearings. Ourfocus here is on how representations of the relationship between curriculum and

educational gender dis/advantage were formulated in this context. This analysis

is part of a broader study of representations of the contemporary crisis in boys’

education. This research has focused on the variety of ways in which representa-

tions of, and attributions of responsibility for, boys’ poor academic performance

are worked up. We argue elsewhere that prevailing accounts contribute to the

reproduction of educational problems for boys, in that they deflect attention from

examination of the relationship between hegemonic constructions of masculinity

and successful engagement with school (Hodgetts, 2008).In this paper, we focus specifically on those accounts in our corpus of materi-

als that linked boys’ relative ‘underachievement’ to the contemporary Australian

curriculum. After establishing a data-set of such accounts, analysis entailed the








identification of recurrent argumentative patterns. These patterns – examples of

explanatory resources that were drawn upon repeatedly to establish boys’ dis-

advantaged positioning – were treated as interpretative repertoires, an analytic

concept referring to ‘culturally familiar and habitual lines of argument comprisedof recognizable themes, common places and tropes’ (Wetherell, 1998: 400).

Interpretative repertoires are the culturally familiar building blocks with which

people develop accounts of objects and events; they are ‘what everyone knows’

(Seymour-Smith, et al., 2002). Wetherell (1998) describes the identification of

interpretative repertoires as requiring researchers to ‘trace through the argument-

ative threads displayed in participants’ orientations’ in order to ‘interrogate the

content or the nature of members’ methods for sense-making in more depth’

(p.404). She argues that such a focus on participants’ orientations can also be

revealing about the formation of subject positions. We also draw on the analyticnotion of subject positioning (Davies and Harré, 1990) by examining the ways in

which male and female students were constructed as groups possessing particular

gendered characteristics, obligations and rights.

Our analysis of the interpretative repertoires through which participants in the

Inquiry constructed their representations of boys’ education focuses, at one level,

on the rhetorical strategies that were used to position aspects of the curriculum

as the cause of boys’ educational ‘disadvantage’. At another level, we address the

implications of these representations, attending to the means by which dominant

accounts limit the range of remedial options that are relevant (or even meaning-

ful) in addressing ‘the boys issue’, and the effect of these limits in shaping the

landscape of educational practice and provision. Further analysis focuses on

elaborating the positioning these repertoires afforded boys and girls. Finally, we

also address absences in these repertoires, taking up Billig’s (1991) point that

what is routinely not said about an issue is as significant as what is routinely

present in accounts. In focusing, here, on two repertoires that were pervasive

in the Inquiry talk, we offer an intensive analysis of selected extracts that were

chosen as representative of these dominant analytic themes.

Curriculum and Assessment as ‘Favouring’ Female Students

A dominant means of establishing boys’ ‘disadvantaged’ positioning across

the Hansard transcripts was a repertoire that depicted contemporary curricu-

lum and assessment as serving to ‘favour’ the academic strengths of girls. This

interpretative theme was organized around a repeated positioning of male and

female students as having distinct academic capacities to which certain content

and testing measures may be disproportionately ‘suited’. Extracts One and Two

demonstrate how talk about the curriculum in relation to boys’ underachievement

was routinely constructed in the Inquiry hearings.









Extract 1

Speaker A: Looking at the maths syllabus … what was a simple row of sums yearsago is now much more complicated and there is much more reading in

papers. People show me exam papers and they are huge things. It makesit difficult for boys to negotiate.

Acting Chair: I hear, anecdotally, that they are more verbal, which favours girls ofcourse.

(Sydney, NSW, 348)

Extract 2

Speaker B: When the VCE {Victorian Certificate of Education} was introduced it hada number of compulsory components to it … which I certainly found a lotof pupils, particularly boys, did not like. However, the assessment meth-ods in the Year 12 subjects involved assessments on home based tasks, onmore oral tasks and more written based tasks, which were all things weknew boys were going to do less well at than girls.

(Melbourne, Vic., 56)

As these extracts demonstrate, boys were positioned as ‘disadvantaged’ in an

educational climate consensually characterized by an increasing emphasis on

literacy skills and continuous assessment – areas in which boys were constructed

as ‘naturally less able’. Conversely, girls were routinely positioned as ‘advantaged’

by a contemporary focus on constant evaluation (as opposed to one-off tests orexams) and language-rich content, both of which were widely held to ‘suit’ their

natural capacities. Through constructions of this changed focus as having ‘given

girls their success’, this repertoire served to depict current content and assessment

methods as gender discriminatory, and to position a move towards subject matter

and evaluation that is gender-neutral in consequence as a moral imperative (it’s

‘not right’ to maintain methods and curriculum that ‘favour’ either gender).

Extract 3 provides another example of explanatory accounts that linked boys’

underachievement to the proliferation of literacy across all aspects of curriculum

and assessment. This extract occurred following a question posed to Speaker C

by the Inquiry committee, regarding potential explanations for the recent decline

in boys’ achievement.

Extract 3

Speaker C: It is my perception, having been involved over the past decade in theeducation arena, that there has been a general shift in the content of thecurriculum, a much fuller literacy content. The pedagogy has been muchmore literacy focused. The assessment processes are much more literacyfocused and I think that the emphasis through those three areas has not

advantaged boys and has maintained an advantage for girls where I thinkmost of the evidence that we have seen, and you as the committee haveseen, is that literacy skills, reading skills, concentration skills of girlsoccur earlier, last longer, and can occur, to some extent, irrespective ofthe quality of teaching.









I would repeat the research of Ken Rowe that poor quality teaching hasa much greater effect on boys than girls, but conversely excellent teachinghas a much greater effect on boys than girls, and partly it is the differencebetween the chatter and clatter approaches to schooling. The chatter for

girls: they talk amongst themselves, they get on with their work, they canconcentrate, they can focus. The clatter for the boys, where it is activity,interaction, short sharp bursts, and I do not think the pedagogy differenti-ates. It is a one size fits all way of teaching. One size does not fit all.

(Adelaide, SA, 894)

In Extract 3 we see the unequivocal drawing of correspondence between a decline

in boys’ achievement and curricular shifts that have increasingly emphasized

literacy. Speaker C’s initial claim that ‘there has been a general shift in the

content of the curriculum’ is bolstered through reference to specific examples

of this generalization; a three-part list (Jefferson, 1990) detailing the permeationof literacy into ‘content’, ‘pedagogy’ and ‘assessment’ builds the breadth of this

phenomenon. After establishing this context, Speaker C presents an account

of inherent gendered qualities against which these curricular and assessment

changes appear to be clearly, and completely, skewed. Two three-part lists depict

the extent of girls’ current educational advantage; he explains that the ‘literacy’,

‘reading’ and ‘concentration’ skills now required in all aspects of schooling

‘occur earlier’, ‘last longer’ and manifest in girls ‘irrespective’ of teacher quality.

The depiction of these claims as ‘evidence’ builds the implication that boys are

inherently disadvantaged in a contemporary context where educational prioritiesare so ‘naturally’ weighted against them.

Throughout the talk at the inquiry, constructions of advantage and disadvan-

tage were pervasively established through accounts such as this one, in which cur-

riculum and assessment were imbued with agency and held to have assisted girls

in out-performing their male peers. In Extract 3, this can be seen in the speaker’s

depiction of content and testing as the active change-agents with regard to shifting

patterns of achievement. His statement that the increased emphasis on literacy has

‘maintained an advantage for girls’ functions to locate the cause of boys’ under-

performance within the curriculum rather than in boys themselves, and to portraygirls’ success as something they have been ‘given’ rather than something they

have earned. Further, the depiction of a simplistic, dispositional contrast between

female students’ innate orientation to learning (the ‘chatter approach’) and that

of male students (the ‘clatter approach’) suggests that curricular and assessment

shifts have actively placed male students at an achievement ‘handicap’.

Against the taken-for-granted discursive back-cloth that gendered capacities

remain fixed while curricular priorities are flexible, it follows that it is difficult

to justify the inclusion of content and testing that ‘advantages’ students of either

gender. Unless such an orientation has intrinsic value in terms of learning out-come, the use of ‘gender-biased’ curriculum and evaluation measures may be

read as an unacceptable violation of educational equity. This line of argument

is implicit throughout Extract 3, and centres around a depiction of the prolif-









eration of literacy as an educational ‘shift’. This neutral descriptor positions

the emphasis on literacy as ‘arbitrary’, rather than as a necessary reflection of

professional and social spheres in which communication skills are increasingly

demanded (Mahony, 1998). Speaker C depicts this baseless focus as having hadonly fictional consequences; boys’ failure, like girls’ success, is presented simply

as an artifact of this inbuilt educational ‘bias’. Without reference to any coherent

rationale or academic value, and by emphasizing the discriminatory nature of

the current language focus, the account ultimately presents the ‘literacy push’ as

educationally, and morally, insupportable. In turn, this depiction of content and

testing as actively and unjustifiably biased positions curricular reform aimed at

raising boys’ achievement as necessary for the maintenance of educational gender

equity.

Extract 4 provides a further example of the use of an interpretative repertoire ofcurriculum and assessment as ‘favouring girls’. It involves a section of talk from

a teacher, Speaker D, which follows a direct question by a Committee Member

regarding the nature of changes over the last 20 years that might explain the

development of a gendered achievement differential.

Extract 4

Speaker B: Perhaps it is to do with the way in which we have changed our assessmentprocedures as well. They have changed dramatically over the last 20 years

and at the TEE level there is now much more of a focus on school-basedassessment and continual assessment than, say, when I was doing mytertiary admissions exams. What we found in the science information thatwe have collected is that, where there is a process of group work withstudents working through a problem together and then going away anddo some questions independently, the girls did better on the questions thatresulted or followed from the group work than the boys did. It seemed likethat emphasis on collaborative learning and talking in small groups actu-ally did not provide the same level of benefit to the boys as it did to thegirls in the subsequent activity that followed from that. That is one indica-tion that I think is worth exploring further—that the kinds of processes

that we regard as being good teaching practice now do not necessarily suitall kids and perhaps have a gender bias in them themselves.

(Perth, WA, 965)

The account of assessment as ‘at odds’ with boys’ innate preferences and

capacities does important attributional work in Extract 4, serving to define learn-

ing/evaluation methods as a ‘cause’ of boys’ underperformance. This may be seen

most explicitly where Speaker D cites empirical evidence (‘What we found in the

science information that we have collected’). Here, the description that ‘the girls

did better on the questions that resulted or followed from the group work than the

boys did’ is given as evidence that this method ‘actually did not provide the same

level of benefit to the boys as it did to the girls’. The claim that current assess-

ment bestows unequal gender ‘benefits’ brings with it clear connotations of the

(unfair) advantage girls currently experience. As in Extract 3 where the metaphor








invoked was that of ‘fit’, it is argued here that current methods do not ‘suit’ all

children. Once again, agency is ascribed to the current testing conventions held to

be ‘providing’ disproportionate learning assistance to male and female students,

and thereby ‘handing’ girls their success. This line of argument presents assess-ment reform as necessary, not only to avoid gender discrimination (in the form of

inequitable, gendered ‘benefits’) but so as to get the results right (girls’ success,

resulting from an inbuilt ‘head-start’, may be seen to be inauthentic).

Through the evaluative framework developed in Extract 4, the current peda-

gogic focus on continual/collaborative assessment is positioned as insupportable

on two related grounds. Firstly, this emphasis is constructed as having no intrinsic

value to warrant its maintenance; it is simply one of a range of potential assess-

ment orientations. Once this arbitrariness is established, there appears to be little

justification for retaining methods that provide gender-discriminatory educational‘benefits’. Secondly, the contemporary assessment focus is called into question

on the grounds that methods resulting in unequal gendered outcomes necessar-

ily represent ‘bad educational practice’. The final statement that ‘the kinds of

processes that we regard as being good teaching practice now do not necessarily

suit all kids and perhaps have a gender bias in them themselves’ clearly conflates

‘good educational and assessment practice’ with that which is gender-neutral in

consequence. Once again, this claim is grounded in the construction of the cur-

rent assessment focus as arbitrary, equality of outcomes taking precedence over

specific quality of outcomes as a measure of educational efficacy.

Establishing Criteria for Claims of Dis/advantage

In the accounts of boys’ curricular ‘disadvantage’ presented so far, there was no

reference to the broader educational and social context in which ‘feminized’ cur-

ricula may be seen to be located.

The idea, for example, that boys’ (relatively) poor performance in literacy might

suggest a need for increased focus in this area was not forthcoming. No mention

was made of the inherent value of language skills which, as outlined earlier, are

deemed increasingly important in globalized workforce environments (Mahony,1998). There was no consideration of the ways in which valuing of stereotypical

masculine behaviours may encourage boys to disengage from expressive and lan-

guage-rich educational tasks (McLean, 1996). Perhaps most significantly, these

accounts emphasized relative achievement, absenting reference to evidence that

boys have continued to progress in absolute terms on most educational indices,

including literacy, albeit at a less marked rate than girls (Australian Council of

State Schools, 2000).

In these accounts, then, the absence of reference to the broader social loca-

tion of education ultimately served to construct a rhetorically powerful versionof ‘discriminatory’ curriculum and assessment. Against this particular construc-

tion, content and methods held to result in disparate gendered achievement were

positioned as necessarily intolerable when judged against the only criterion made








relevant: equality of gendered outcomes. Part of the power of the extracts dis-

cussed so far may be seen, therefore, to lie in the ‘ontological gerrymandering’

of the argumentative terrain; ‘in what they fail to describe, what is ignored or left

out’ (Potter, 1996: 186). Versions such as these that present ‘equality of outcome’as the primary means of defining morally-just education serve, amongst other

things, to sideline potentially relevant alternative criteria.

Within an interpretative repertoire of curriculum and assessment as ‘favouring’

female students, gerrymandering of this kind was a pervasive feature. Accounts

foregrounding intolerance of this ‘gender discrimination’ deflected attention from

the socio-historical location of this issue, and of education more generally. As will

be seen below, however, other repertoires of explanation identified in the Inquiry

corpus comprised arguments that did draw on aspects of the broader social and

historical context of boys’ current educational ‘underachievement’. Examples ofsuch accounts will constitute the focus of the remainder of this paper.

The ‘Feminization’ of the Curriculum

A second repertoire identified in the Inquiry talk involved formulations of a

‘feminization of the curriculum’ that was argued to have taken place over the last

two decades. In the extract below, the focus is on ways in which both content and

assessment have been altered to make them more ‘appropriate’ for girls.

Extract 5

Speaker E: [C]ertainly with the senior curriculum it is very language intense. If wego back to, let’s say in South Australia, the physics course, because girlswere seen to be underachieving in physics, the physics exam and thestructure of the physics course was changed to make it more appropriatefor girls. This meant an extended response question was put in, the multi-ple choice questions were taken out; more problem solving, more literacytype skills required in the physics exam. We have seen this shift now. Thegirls are achieving better but the boys are dropping.

(Adelaide, SA, 842)

In Extract 5, this repertoire worked in conjunction with historical accounts in

which it was held that barriers to girls’ academic access and achievement have

been addressed in recent decades through targeted provision and curricular

reform. In turn, the current success of female students may be taken to signal the

success of such feminist efforts and, potentially, to build the implication that a

continued focus on girl-friendly methods (literacy-rich tasks, group work, etc.) is

unfair and anachronistic now that impediments to girls’ achievement have been

effectively removed.









Constructing the 1980s ‘Push’ for Girls

Extract 6 serves as an illustration of accounts in which historical narratives of

gender reform presented the marginalization of female students as a problem that

has been comprehensively addressed, to the extent that boys have become the

‘new disadvantaged’. Here, teacher Speaker F directly attributes current levels

of relative gendered attainment to a curriculum decision that favoured girls: the

mid-80s inclusion of additional verbal components in the Curriculum Standards

Framework (CSF) for the state of Victoria. This extract occurred in response to

a question from the Inquiry Committee as to educational trends that may have

contributed to a shift in gendered rates of achievement.

Extract 6

Speaker F: What has happened with the girls—and I can only speak for Victoria—isthat once the Victorian government, in the mid-1980s, quantified curricu-lum through the CSFs, and with the study designs, which was a deliber-ate attempt to put a more verbal base to mathematics and to science, thatimmediately advantaged girls who previously had for some reason feltdisadvantaged, and probably were disadvantaged. If you looked at theupper end you would have found that the way in which a lot of teachingwas done in the maths and sciences in particular was directed towards theway boys understood things and so on.

(Ringwood, Vic., 230)

In this account, a descriptive balance between vagueness and fine detail plays a

key role in the establishment of a particular historical account of shifting patterns

of gender ‘imbalance’. The excerpt begins with a detailed report of girl-oriented

curricular shifts in which the location, date and site of these changes are all clearly

defined (‘the Victorian government, in the mid-1980s, quantified curriculum

through the CSFs, and with the study designs, which was a deliberate attempt

to put a more verbal base to mathematics and to science’). Yet the specificity

in the description of the action taken on girls’ behalf is in contrast to the vague

presentation of the reasons legitimating such gendered interventions. The speaker

provides a very general gloss on the barriers to girls’ attainment that justified the

shift in emphasis toward more verbal tasks, explaining that such changes were

instated because girls ‘had previously for some reason felt disadvantaged and

probably were disadvantaged’. Where Speaker F does refer to past obstacles to

girls’ success (‘If you looked at the upper end you would have found that the

way in which a lot of teaching was done in the maths and sciences in particular

was directed towards the way boys understood things and so on’), detail is again

omitted, in that she employs the generalized list-completer ‘and so on’ (Jefferson,

1990) rather than making explicit further examples of past impediments to girls’

success.

The contrast between the speaker’s non-specific depiction of the academic

barriers to female students’ success, and her detailed account of changes made to

remove them, serves two primary functions in Extract 6. At one level, this con-









trast suggests that the (limited) disadvantage once experienced by girls has been

comprehensively, if not disproportionately, addressed. It may plausibly be argued

that ‘a deliberate attempt to put a more verbal base to mathematics and to sci-

ence’ by way of adjustments to official curricular frameworks (‘CSFs’) representsan overzealous response to the non-specific disadvantage ‘felt’ by girls and only

‘probably’ substantiated. At another level, Speaker F’s detailed description of

‘what has happened with the girls’ provides sufficient specific evidence to build

the credibility of a more vague central claim: that girls’ disadvantage has been

entirely overcome now that feminist interventions have reversed previous patterns

of gendered achievement.

In contrast to the previous extracts, the construction of boys’ current curricular/

assessment ‘disadvantage’ in Extract 6 is not achieved via an account that absents

the historical context of educational gender inequalities. Rather, the acknow-ledgement of longstanding barriers to girls’ achievement is central to the ver-

sion presented here; facilitating a chronological narrative of gender reform that

appears informed and impartial. Yet this acknowledgement is deployed within a

rhetorical context in which the very mention of past impediments to girls’ success

serves to refute the contemporary relevance of concern about female students’

academic access and performance. Indeed, in Extract 6, reference to the necessity

of 1980s efforts to improve girls’ attainment appears only when the legitimacy of

continued efforts on behalf of girls is denied, and female disadvantage is held to

have been successfully ‘reversed’. As such, the moral salience of the problem of

boys’ current ‘disadvantage’ is still prioritized, in spite of the speaker’s allusion to

the historical discrimination girls have faced, on the grounds that ‘that was then,

and this is now’.

‘Pendulum Accounts’: Metaphors of Symmetry within the Repertoire of

Curricular ‘Feminization’

As was demonstrated above, a repertoire linking boys’ underperformance to cur-

riculum remodelling served to depict ‘girl-friendly methods’ as having overshot

their goal of gender equality to the extent that boys now experience educationalhardship. As was the case in the previous extract, a common feature of such

accounts was the deployment of metaphors of symmetry and im/balance. These

metaphors depicted interventions aimed at improving girls’ results as having

‘tipped the scales’ of achievement by weighting the curriculum in favour of girls’

abilities and preferences.

A particularly salient metaphor in accounts of this kind was that of the

pendulum.

Extract 7

Speaker G: One of the reasons why boys are now being outperformed by girls gener-ally is that there has been over the past 20 years considerable emphasis onthe needs of girls. Your inquiry shows that the pendulum is now swinging








back towards concern for the needs of boys, but I think very successfully,too, there has been addressing of the needs of girls.

(Adelaide, SA, 844)

The pendulum image enabled the acknowledgement of historical female

disadvantage, and the warranting of efforts to redress this problem as justifiable.

However, it also facilitated speakers’ definition of the cause of boys’ current

underperformance (overdoing the redress in favour of girls) and suggested a

blueprint for restoring gender ‘equilibrium’ (equivalent boy-friendly interventions).

Just such an argumentative frame is mobilized by teacher Speaker H, in Extract

8, below, an account preceded by discussion about earlier interventions aimed at

addressing barriers to female students’ success.

Extract 8

Speaker H: I am interested in your comment about the feminizing of the curriculumbecause I worked for a long time in a girls’ school where we were strug-gling to get girls to get twenties [the maximum mark a student can achievein a final-year school subject] and get through into engineering and all ofthose sorts of subjects. I guess that was in the eighties, when we brokethrough that kind of barrier that had been perceived to be there to girls. Iguess it would be quite true. I would concur with the view that there hasbeen in the past a push to make girls more successful, and it may haveswung around to the point where it has been done in a way that boys are

not able to feel comfortable with some aspects of the curriculum. (Evanston South, SA, 812)

Extract 8 comprises several elements that combine to build a picture of the cause,

and potential solution, of boys’ underachievement ‘problem’: the notion that

girls were given an initial ‘push’ to accelerate their achievement, the concept that

equilibrium has now been passed (things have ‘swung around’), and the idea that

balance will only be restored when equivalent weight is applied to the current

concerns of boys. Although this logic remains implicit within the description

in Extract 8, the image of a pendulum and its properties provides scope for

inference.

The pendulum metaphor in Extract 8 not only serves to establish the factic-

ity of boys’ disadvantage, but also works qualitatively to define the nature and

cause of this ‘achievement handicap’. Where girls’ current ‘success’ could have

been held to reflect the removal of curricular barriers to their achievement and

the restoration of gender equilibrium, the implication of pendular properties (the

‘push’ for girls has seen patterns of discrimination ‘swing around’) suggests

instead that the point of equality has now been passed . Girls’ achievement, like

boys’ underperformance, is taken simply to be a consequence of the ‘push’ by

feminist educators (‘we were struggling to get girls to get twenties … we brokethrough that kind of barrier’), the momentum of which has shifted the weight-

ing by which each gender is ‘favoured’ by assessment and curriculum. More

significantly, the pendulum image and its connotations of gender symmetry








depicts efforts for girls as having ‘gone too far’ – to the point where boys’ current

‘alienation’ may be seen to mirror that previously experienced by girls. In turn,

the disparate gendered obstacles Speaker H recounts (barriers to girls’ achieve-

ment of ‘twenties’ and access into high-status subjects, as opposed to boys’inability to ‘feel comfortable with some aspects of the curriculum’) are positioned

as equivalent, and methods for the alleviation of girls’ ‘disadvantage’ are posi-

tioned implicitly as a blueprint for addressing that now faced by boys.

As Extract 8 demonstrates, reference to the historical marginalization of female

students provided critical argumentative leverage within ‘pendulum’ accounts.

The construction of boys and girls as competing populations with differing needs,

preferences and capacities positioned efforts for girls (however well warranted)

as having necessarily ‘impeded’ the achievement of boys. Through connota-

tions of symmetry, the pendulum imagery served to locate the (acknowledged)disadvantage of girls securely within the past, boys’ current underperformance

taken as proof that the feminist ‘push’ for girls has replaced female alienation

with (unintentional but) equivalent discrimination against boys. Moreover, these

metaphors worked to represent as ideal an abstracted version of equality (‘equi-

librium’) divorced from the political and social nexus in which questions about

gender disadvantage may be seen to exist. Along a one-dimensional spectrum,

discussion of discrimination was reduced to a question of ‘who has done what

for whom’ in education, and the success of feminist interventions was established

as the precedent governing the appropriate response to boys’ present-day under-

performance.

DISCUSSION

The research presented in this paper is part of a larger study of the ways in

which participants in a Parliamentary Inquiry described and accounted for what

‘boys are like’ as they sought to make sense of the ‘problem’ of male students’

underachievement. In this analysis, we have identified two key repertoires through

which participants repeatedly constructed their representations of boys’ education.Our aim, in this paper, was to shed light on the way these representations served

to legitimate a focus on boys’ interests, and to warrant male-oriented educational

policies, practices and resource allocation initiatives.

In the corpus under analysis, the (essentialized) construction of gendered

capacities worked in tandem with metaphors of curricular fit/non-fit and balance/

imbalance to establish performance differentials as the result of methods that

have placed boys at an ‘achievement handicap’, while ‘giving’ girls their success.

These accounts depicted curricular emphases (in particular, the current literacy

focus) as having no educational justification; a construction that functioned topresent methods ‘favouring’ either gender as unfair, and thus as morally and aca-

demically insupportable. Without such justification, content and testing ‘skewed’

towards girls was held to represent a serious gendered inequity, and to result in








outcomes unrelated to genuine (unaided) attainment. In turn, curricular reform

aimed at redressing boys’ ‘disadvantage’ was established as a means, not only of

correcting an injustice, but of getting the results right .

At a broad level, our findings confirm patterns of sense-making found inprevious research around the contemporary ‘problem’ of boys’ education, world-

wide. Participants in the Australian Inquiry drew on discourses about boys losing

out at school as a direct result of girls’ recent improved academic performance

(e.g., Francis and Skelton, 2005; Griffin, 2000; Lingard and Douglas, 1999;

Swann, 1998). Boys and girls were positioned very differently (e.g., Cox, 1995;

Epstein et al., 1998; Sommers, 2000). Girls were constructed as passive, focused

and able to concentrate, as better readers and writers, and as collaborative.

Boys were positioned, in contrast, as active, and as lacking these specific skills.

Together, this body of qualitative research – and our contribution to it by wayof analysis of the discourses on display in a specific institutional setting – sums

up current ‘common sense’ about the dispositions and needs of boys and girls

in education. It represents what Seymour-Smith et al. (2002) have described

as ‘the pattern of taken-for-granted cultural resources’ (p. 256) that are readily

available to members of society for talking and acting on issues around gender.

Such dominant discourses are powerful in that they ‘set the horizon for what can

be articulated or thought in any relevant context’ (p. 265). We have shown how

they are put to use in parliamentary discussion and in policy formation (see also

Keddie, 2005) and, as other research has demonstrated, they are routinely present

in newspaper depictions (Lingard, 2003; Gilbert and Gilbert, 1998) and everyday

talk.

Two important questions remain to be discussed in this section. The first

concerns the general significance of the findings we have generated in this

analysis. The second concerns the implications of the findings for feminist

psychologists interested in the social and psychological effects of gender and

other inequalities.

Although we have sampled the talk of participants from a particular field

(education) and in an institutional setting that is out of the ordinary (a formal

Parliamentary Inquiry), we would argue that our findings make a contributionto building a more detailed picture of the prevailing ‘discursive environment’

(Seymour-Smith et al., 2002) around gender. The discursive environment created

through formulations of a ‘problem’ in boys’ education sets part of the normative

parameters through which boys and girls can perform their identity in schools,

and through which parents, teachers and educational bureaucrats orient and act in

relation to gender policy formulation and resource allocation. What this research

on repertoires provides is an empirical understanding of the discursive practices

that produce or position boys as victims of bias (sometimes depicted as well-

intentioned bias, and sometimes as interested e.g., involving a ‘feminist push’).We argue that such findings provide important resources that can be put to use in

troubling or challenging the prevailing, taken-for-granted, positioning of boys as

victims in the contemporary educational environment.









The study of such institutional materials as we have examined can provide

insight into the ways in which meanings or ‘realities’ are made in the world – in

this instance, how taken-for-granted understandings about gender in education,

and the dispositions, roles and attributes of male and female students areproduced in talk. As Wiggins and Hepburn (2007: 288) have argued, the power of

this kind of analysis is that it ‘provides a way into the weave of practices’ through

which such things are negotiated and made real. In identifying and explicating

these practices, research can open a window onto the way common-sense

understandings are routinely produced, and the insights obtained can facilitate the

contemplation of possible different versions. The dominant constructions of the

problem with boys’ education that we identified were routinely organized around

the targeting of one gendered group for attention and resource allocation at the

expense of the other. In this sense, we can see identity being constituted throughdiscourse in ways that are deeply relational and inflected by power relations

(Seymour-Smith et al., 2002). The positioning of boys/male students in these

accounts can be seen to reflect and reinforce the culturally hegemonic status of

masculinity. What educators, parents, parliamentarians and other contributors to

the Inquiry routinely depicted as the ‘problem’ was not ‘behaving like a typical

boy’, but the nature of the curriculum or the methods of instruction/ assessment

that are currently employed. Boys’ described behaviours and dispositions were

not presented as problematic; they were not the targets of suggested change

or remediation. Nor were parents described as being unable appropriately to

socialize their male offspring to prepare them for the institutional requirements

of a modern education. Understanding more about such discursive practices is

also relevant to shedding light on what various performances of masculinity

might mean. How is it, for instance, that what might be construed as negative

behaviours (e.g., poor self-discipline, short attention span) are worked up as

positive characteristics (‘naturally’ active, high energy levels) in particular

contexts? As Seymour-Smith et al., (2002: 265) have argued, positive evaluations

of hegemonic masculinity on the part of professionals ‘seem likely to reinforce

and intensify established patterns and make change difficult’.

These considerations have important implications for educators as well as forthose working at the interface of feminism and psychology who are more broadly

concerned with the social and psychological effects of gendered inequality.

Future research into the ways in which gendered realities are constructed across

different institutional settings will allow the explication of commonalities and

differences in routine practices, and may promote further fruitful discussion of

implications for change.

In the specific context of the Australian Inquiry into Boys’ Education, it

seems clear that constructions of ‘feminized’ curriculum as having ‘hindered’

boys’ achievement had significant implications – not the least of which involvednaturalizing the notion that boys and girls have inherent capacities to which

curricular emphases may or may not be ‘suited’. This framework reproduced an

approach to educational reform that positioned male and female students as ‘com-









peting victims’, orienting to the accommodation of gendered needs and capaci-

ties rather than challenging or expanding the options for engagement available

to all students. In turn, this orientation worked to justify curriculum reform that

reproduced as natural the very gendered needs and capacities the Inquiry soughtto ‘address’.

As long as boys’ literacy ‘inability’ is accommodated within academic content

and testing (through the reduction of literacy requirements or the ‘remasculiniza-

tion’ of the methods by which these skills are taught), it seems that constraints

on boys’ options for connection with literacy will be strengthened and main-

tained. Likewise, while dominant educational and policy discourse continues to

foreground within-school ‘disadvantage’ (as opposed to the translation of aca-

demic attainment into tertiary and workplace success), it appears that many of the

grounds on which feminist school reform was mounted will persist. Ultimately,it seems likely that the accounts of boys’ disadvantage produced in the Inquiry

context will compound continuing gendered power differentials with their inten-

sified focus on the interests of boys, justified through a re-appropriated discourse

of ‘gender equity’.

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Katherine HODGETTS is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Centre forStudies in Literacy, Policy and Learning Cultures, a research concentrationwithin the Hawke Research Institute at the University of South Australia. Herresearch applies discursive methods to the analysis of masculinity construction,educational gender equity and teachers’ negotiation of gendered identities.ADDRESS: Hawke Research Institute, University of South Australia, MagillSA, 5072, Australia.[email: [email protected]]

Amanda LECOUTEUR is Associate Professor, Psychology, at The Universityof Adelaide, Australia where she is Co-Director of the Discourse and SocialPsychology unit. Her research is in the fields of health, gender and educationwith a focus on issues of identity management and accountability. She is alsoinvolved in research and consultancy in the area of elite sport and achievement.ADDRESS: School of Psychology, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA,5005, Australia.[email: [email protected]]

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