Stand with FEMSOC Against Sexism

Dorcas Maxwell is the Alleyn’s staff support for our pupil-led Feminist Society. She shares a few glimpses of FemSoc's journey, its members determination to explore equality and their call for us all to stand against sexism. 

Two weeks ago, I stood at the doors of our Sports Hall, welcoming pupils from across the year groups eagerly pile in to cheer on the Staff Netball Match, and reflected on the joyous manner in which each year the Feminist Society at Alleyn’s uses this occasion to raise awareness and funds for those women at the catastrophic end of sexist injustice, through the charity Women for Women International.

I have had the great honour of being the staff support for our Feminist Society for nearly three years now. I am honestly in awe of the approach our young leaders take and the tenacity of the core community. I marvel at how determined this group of girls and boys have been in their journey to explore equality in a balanced way, keeping in mind the genuinely dangerous implications of structural sexism while planning varied, interesting sessions to explore topics from Disney portrayals to Cherokee kinship systems. I’d love to share a few glimpses of their journey with you here.  

One particularly powerful FemSoc session this term was led by a boy who joined Alleyn’s in Year 12. I was moved to tears to hear of his experiences of the culture of sexism he perceived to be endemic at his previous school and to hear him speak about his very different experiences at our wonderful school. “Everyone is just so nice. So respectful. You take it for granted but you are so lucky to expect people to treat you with that level of kindness as normal.” We are lucky here. But I think if FemSoc have anything to do with it - we will do even better. 

In the week of International Women’s Day, I was on the balcony of our Pavilion with a group of Year 7 children before we watched a documentary on the Lionesses. Then we gently noticed who tends to use the space available on the fields and the MUGA - and who was sitting on the sides. Our club’s data paints an interesting picture of whether it’s girls or boys who choose to lean into leadership opportunities in academic spaces. We talked about how it’s not something innately in our brains and bodies that feeds these behaviours, it’s something in our wider culture and it needs to change. My favourite moment of Field Day recently was seeing a group of Year 9 girls step onto the quad with Year 13 boys and join in the basketball. As staff and parents, we must voice loud and clear our encouragement of these girls taking up space, and likewise of our boys leading clubs in the co-curriculum. 

One lunchtime the Society explored the protests in Iran against the actions of the morality police. In another meeting they supported one another through their education about shutting women out of university education. In terms of rights, we may seem a long way away from Afghanistan, from Iran. But we also see radicalisation in the UK. They explored The Casey Review of the Met Police in our own beloved London. The Society discussed how making light of sexism in the form of flippant language and lazy stereotyping is the thin end of the wedge that normalises sexist behaviour. We were reminded that if women are not in the room, at the table and leading discussions, they can be forgotten, and our whole society is poorer for it. 

Prompted by Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women, they looked at the data gap and the authority gap. Although men are more likely than women to be in a car crash, a woman in a collision “is 47% more likely to be seriously injured than a man … [and] 17% more likely to die,” Fem Soc asked, “Why?” Why is using male as default in research problematic? How do structural inequalities lead to oppression? The girls and boys in Fem Soc worked side by side to answer their own questions. 

Last year our FemSoc leaders talked us through incel culture through an analysis of Laura Bates’ work on Men Who Hate Women. This year we found ourselves discussing extreme misogyny again as we chartered the growing online presence of Andrew Tate before he exploded into the news in December. These little moments add up. These are cultural touchstones which loom large in the lives of our young people. It adds up to a call to change: a call to fight structural sexism. A call for equality of the sexes. 

This is our Standing Against Sexism statement. The students were all given the opportunity to reflect on what they would change about it and what we should do to make it entirely habituated at Alleyn’s, during the week of International Women’s Day. The discussion which followed was wholehearted and deeply considered. We are not a school beholden to a lad culture and the young people in front of me were genuinely curious, asking why some people feel the need to lean into and use the lad culture power play. I love the work of Brene Brown on Daring Leadership in which she claims, “The greatest barrier to daring leadership is not fear; the greatest barrier is armour, or how we self-protect when we’re in fear.” We want to work to build a community where our young people feel free to take off their gendered armour and be their authentic selves every day. 

One area the students have asked us to focus our action on is this: 

 We must do more to recognise, name and respond well to  

sexist language and behaviour in the moment. 

I find the challenge ladder a very helpful framework for how to approach this. It reminds us that the response at different levels matters. At the seed sowing level, we might ask, “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” or, “What do you mean when you say that?”. At the hypothetical, “How might you feel if …”. The framework level allows us to lean into our ROCCK values, “How does that fit with our ideas about Respect / about Kindness?”. We can save the direct statement for much more problematic language and behaviours: “I feel uncomfortable with that and feel it is sexist / problematic because…” The most serious point should be punitive: “Don’t do that! Don’t say that!”. (Adapted from Pearn Kandola’s Continuum of Intervention.) 

Image: The Challenge Ladder

Our Head of PSHE, Will Howell-Harte recently wrote an excellent blog on how to talk to your child about misogyny and I especially warmed to his point on avoiding shaming people: these are young people in our families and community and we should approach the issue of responding to problematic language and behaviour as a learning opportunity and with respect and kindness.