Bob Marley: No woman no cry?

So far in my life, I’ve only been slapped round the face once by a woman. It was in 1975, I was 17 and we were at a party at a friend’s house. It wasn’t an extravagant bash with loads of loud music and dancing and people like me huddled in the kitchen discussing the meaning of Incredible String Band lyrics, or whether Bowie should have kept All the Young Dudes for himself rather than giving the song to Mott The Hoople. It was a small affair with a few people sitting on the floor in a circle smoking and talking about the Incredible String Band, Bowie and Mott The Hoople.

Lisa, my girlfriend of a few months, asked me to get some fags out of her handbag. I reached in and pulled out what I thought was a large cigar wrapped in thin, crinkly white paper. Not having seen anything like this before (except lit by Bob Marley on the cover of Catch A Fire) I stuck it in my mouth, struck a match and was half way through lighting it up when I felt a terrible burning sensation on one side of my face, heard a loud ‘thwack’ (agony travels faster than the speed of sound) and perceived a certain sensation of reality. Lisa’s face was bright red and she called me a series of very rude words.

“Classic schoolboy error” my friend Roberta muttered, “now you know better.” It was a very embarrassing moment, and I learned never again to look inside anyone’s handbag, even if asked. A year later, when the relationship was over, friends often harked back to the incident that Roberta had dubbed ‘Tampongate’. “Didn’t you see the writing on the wall that evening?” they would ask. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but so is eyesight. My glasses had been smashed to smithereens, so I couldn’t see the wall, let alone any writing on it.

I met Lisa three years later, at Roberta’s flat in North London. (Was she trying to get us back together again, or just hoping for some more ‘fun’?) I was a few weeks into my speech therapy course, on which I was the only man, and was still fairly green behind the ears, (my new glasses had caused a nasty irritation). “Why” enquired Lisa, “are there so few men on a course that is mainly about caring for children?”

Without thinking, I replied, “Maybe because women are naturally more able to look after children than men are?”

No sooner had I uttered this statement then I knew I was doomed, “Michael Jones”, yelled Lisa, “Never let me hear you say something as blatantly sexist as that again!!” I thought “Don’t worry sweetheart, you ain’t gonna see me again.” “I’m really sorry,” I said.

“Classic schoolboy error”, muttered Roberta, “now you know better.” Whenever I met Roberta after that (which was often) she always harked back with great amusement to these two excruciating moments, including that evening, which she dubbed ‘Sexistgate’.

Was I being ‘sexist’? Yes, I have to admit, I was. It was inadvertent sexism, because I was naïve, inexperienced, it was the tail-end of the 1970s and I was unaware of how women and girls are put down, and kept down, in so many different ways by men. I soon came to understand that men are just as capable of looking after children as women, (though men still only represent four per cent of the early years workforce in the UK).

From my experience, one of the main ways that women and girls are put down is through the words used to describe them when they step outside the ‘accepted norms’ for behaviour. Elton John used one such word in the title of one of his hits. Though he claimed he was singing about himself, it’s still one of the words in English most commonly-used to insult women. In the 1970s, groups like The Faces and even The Eagles, with songs about pursuing ‘girls’, having their wicked way with them and then dumping them, or about how underhand women are in their dealings with men, added to a sense that, to teenagers like me at least, women must be inferior to men.

Eagles: C’mon baby, don’t say ‘maybe’ (and what is that thing Joe Walsh has got on his head?)

In my work with children with selective mutism, who can talk confidently at home but who, because of extreme anxiety about talking, are completely silent at school, I often start by looking at the words that adults use to describe such children. ‘Stubborn’, ‘manipulative’, ‘controlling’ are the most common. Most children with selective mutism are girls, and these words, from my experience, are never used to describe them. ‘Little Madam’ is exclusively used to describe the girls, who are thought to be using their silence in some way, when in actual fact they have no control over their behaviour. I’ve never heard a quiet boy being called ‘A little gentleman’. The term ‘madam’ is actually extremely offensive, referring to ‘a conceited or bossy girl’ or, at worst, a woman who controls prostitutes in a brothel. Now we know that, can we use other words to describe girls who are so overcome by anxiety that they can’t speak in public?

What about the word ‘minx’, again exclusively used to describe girls who don’t behave as adults would like them to? Here’s a definition: ‘An alluring, cunning, or boldly flirtatious girl or young woman. Has unusual seductive powers, such that she could commit acts that would otherwise be considered inappropriate, while still maintaining an air of class or poise.’ That’s not nice, or necessary. And it’s sexist, in the sense that we are choosing to use words that are specifically designed to be negative about girls. What surprises me is that women use this type of pejorative language as much as men, to describe girls who in some way don’t behave in the way we expect them to.

But what about the word ‘bossy’? Is using that word to describe a child an example of sexism? Let’s think this one through. When was the last time anyone described a boy as ‘bossy’? It was Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook who brought that one to my attention. She suggests (and I agree with her) that a boy who frequently tells other children what to do is more likely to be described as ‘a leader’ or ‘a born organiser’ than a girl who does the same. She’s more likely to be described as ‘bossy’. It’s a positive attribute in a boy, but deemed negative in a girl. Is that fair? Is it right? Can we change it? Have a go at introducing that discussion in the staffroom, and see where it leads.

“Yes Michael”, you might say, “that’s all very well. But what about the different terms we use to describe girls and boys when we like them and what they do?” To which I would reply, ”That’s a good point, but I’ll never try and stop someone being NICE to children.”

Kate Rusby: ‘a lovely lass and the darling of the English folk scene’

Which brings me to Sir Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist, who recently caused outrage by describing ‘the trouble’ he has with ‘girls in the lab’.

Sir Tim, who incidentally is married to an eminent scientist, staggered a conference in South Korea by claiming that women scientists have no place in a laboratory because they cry when their work is criticized and have a tendency to fall in love with their colleagues. This apparently distracts male scientists like Sir Tim from getting at the ‘truth’ of science.

Sir Tim Hunt: Nobel Prize for sexism?

You could say that Sir Tim was only joking and he should have known better. That, indeed, was his defence, but he then went on to apologize for offending his audience of scientific journalists, but stuck by the truth of his words. My initial reaction was disbelief and a feeling that it was right that he was instantly dismissed. Then I read about the impact on his career, and I felt some sympathy. Sir Tim’s wife, Professor Mary Collins, is quoted in the Observer interview as saying, “You can see why it could be taken as offensive if you didn’t know Tim. But really it was just part of his upbringing. He went to a single-sex school in the 1960s. Nevertheless he is not sexist. I am a feminist, and I would not have put up with him if he were sexist.” But then I read about the real problem of how so few women are involved in science in the UK, and the misogynistic attitudes that they sometimes experience, and I wasn’t so sure. But then again, I’m a man and have never really suffered the indignity of being discriminated against because of my sex. (By the way, I was taught at a single-sex school in the 1960s…. Come to your own conclusions about that one.)

What’s your view?

Read more reaction on social media here.

And just before we go, for no other reason than I’m in charge of this blog and it’s a brilliant clip, here’s another band full of men. Who’d have thought a song about a South London pub could be so brilliant?

Dire Straits: Sultans of Swing (and not a sexist lyric in sight)

Take care out there!

Michael

Bruce Springsteen: The Man in Charge?

In spring 1978, 100,000 people marched six miles from Trafalgar Square to Victoria Park in Hackney, to protest against the rising tide of racism in the UK. The march, and the legendary concert afterwards, was organised by Rock Against Racism and the Anti Nazi League. The concert featured The Clash, Buzzcocks, Steel Pulse, X-Ray Spex, The Ruts, Sham 69, Generation X and the Tom Robinson Band. Reggae band Misty In Roots led the march from the back of a lorry during the carnival, though didn’t appear on the main stage. One of the main catalysts for the RAR movement was none other than dear old Eric Clapton, who at a gig in Birmingham had harangued his audience with racist language and told his stunned fans that, in his opinion, immigrants were not welcome in the UK. Many bands were horrified at Clapton’s attitude, and jumped at the chance to give their support to the cause of anti-racism.

The Clash at Victoria Park, Hackney, Rock Against Racism 1978

In spring 1978, two young women, one of whom later became a colleague of mine, sneaked backstage at the concert and were chasing after Tom Robinson. Why? Because Tom had recently ‘come out’ and recorded Glad to be Gay. My future colleague (let’s call her Jackie), like many people in the UK at the time, was unclear about gender issues, and particularly why people of the same sex might be attracted to each other. Jackie was convinced that if she threw herself at Tom’s feet he would fall head over heels in love with her, stop being gay and re-embrace heterosexuality.

Tom Robinson Band; 2-4-6-8 never too late

Unfortunately, in her haste to bring Tom back onto the straight and narrow, Jackie fell over a Rastafarian’s foot and landed on her head. (For many years Jackie was convinced that the Rasta had been Bob Marley, and her bruising his foot had been the beginning of the long illness that unfortunately led to his untimely death.) Jackie, if you are reading this, I can put your mind at rest. My extensive research (I looked it up on Wikipedia) has led me to the conclusion that the bloke whose feet you landed at could not have been Bob Marley, but was more likely to have been a member of either Misty in Roots or Steel Pulse. However, after 30 years of being gay, Tom Robinson married a woman and is now raising a family (as well as fronting a show on BBC Radio 6 Music). As they say in the song: ‘C’est la vie say the old folks. It goes to show you never can tell.’

And what about The Clash? I’ve always found them a bit aggressive, but as Woody Allen said, ‘No Nazi is ever going to be influenced by a satirical piece on racism in The New York Review of Books, but he will take notice of a baseball bat round the head.’

The Clash at Rock against Racism: swearing a bit, so watch this clip at home.

In Autumn 1978 I arrived at the Central School of Speech and Drama on the first day of a three-year speech and language therapy diploma course. At 9.00am I was the first person in the room set up for enrolment. I was feeling a bit nervous, but full of positive anticipation of a fascinating course and hopefully a career ahead. The head of department popped her head around the door and said (a little nervously, I thought), “Ah, so you are Michael. Can you come and see me at 10.00am?” By 9.59am I was highly nervous and unsure of what to anticipate. There were 29 female students in the room and one of me. I was the only male on the course. I wasn’t bothered about that so much, but after the head of department had finished with me, I was wondering what was expected of me.

I had unwittingly enrolled myself into a profession that was, at the time, 99.99% female. Head of Dept offered her commiserations and told me that her door was always open if I needed support. ‘Big deal’, I thought, ‘what has being a man got to do about how well you can study or do a job?’ Well, I can safely tell you that it mattered a lot. Not to me so much, but to a lot of other people. Everyone seemed to know who I was. Visiting (male) lecturers knew my name before I even opened my mouth. One Australian consultant took me to one side after his lecture and confided, “I fantasize about being you, Michael. You lucky fella.”

Everyone expected me to be unhappy, but I was only unhappy about everyone’s expectations. On my first practical placement at a leading teaching hospital, the highly regarded speech and language therapist who was supervising me declared, “Most men in this profession are either highly ambitious, useless or queer. Some are all three. Which one are you?” Had I been quicker (and braver) I would have replied, “I’m only a student, but ask me in three years’ time.” Instead I went red, but later reported her to a senior member of staff on my course. In 1978 this type of overt sexism and homophobia seemed to be acceptable to many people in the UK National Health Service. Hopefully now it would lead to disciplinary proceedings.

Our student counsellor (male) gave me some really good advice for how to work well with the female students and in my future career (though it applies to working with anyone really)

• Avoid having relationships with anyone on your course

• Don’t join in with ‘women’s body conversations’: discreetly make your excuses and leave

• Do your best, but don’t try and be ‘the best’

• Avoid using sexist language and making sexist jokes

• Be aware that many women may have experience of men behaving badly at work. Don’t be offended if initially they are a bit wary of you

• Unfortunately, in the workplace, some women who try to behave like men choose the worst-behaved men as role models (Margaret Thatcher came to power shortly after this conversation and proved that point)

• Above all, be respectful. That’s what everyone, including yourself, deserves

This was great advice, and something that I took to heart and practiced as best I could. When I first moved to London I shared a room in a student hostel with George, who by chance was a drama student from our college. We got on well, so decided to quit the hostel and moved into a single room in a dilapidated house near the college. I was either very naïve or unaware of other people’s perceptions. This was not helped by me regularly announcing to my fellow students whenever I saw George at college, “that’s the guy I live with.” One day George warned me, ‘Michael, stop saying that. It’s giving the girls (and some of the guys) on the course the wrong impression. (It seemed that the ‘don’t have a relationship with anyone on your course’ advice either didn’t apply to actors or they just ignored it.)

Looking back, maybe some of the girls had a bit of a ‘Tom Robinson’ idea about me. One weekend George and I threw a party, which was full of actors and speech therapy students. I was sitting at the bottom of the stairs, taking a breather, when one of my student friends threw herself at me. (It was all a bit hazy. Maybe she fell down the stairs?) Anyway, once I had dusted her off (we didn’t go in for hoovering in 1978) she asked me if I’d like to have a relationship with her. (Those weren’t her exact words, but I’ll leave you to imagine how she phrased it.) The student counsellor’s wise words echoed in my head, so I said, “I’m sorry Florence, I can’t.”

“Is it because of George?” Florence countered. She looked crestfallen and I wasn’t exactly sure what George had to do with it. So I patted Florence on the knee, untangled myself from her arms and whispered, (rather enigmatically I thought), “I guess it is Florence. I guess it is.” It was nothing of the sort. Florence already had a boyfriend (who was bigger than me) and he was standing at the top of the stairs.

As a speech and language therapist I was usually the only man in a room full of women. It wasn’t a problem (for me anyway), and as a teacher men were usually in the minority in any staffroom I was in. I have always done my best to abide by my counsellor’s advice from way back in 1978. But I can’t deny that gender is a big issue in the workplace and a huge issue in early years in the UK, where only 4% of the workforce is male.

Just occasionally I have slipped up. I worked with a teaching assistant who always said, ‘Yes Boss’ whenever I asked her to do something. One day I was in the staffroom at break and sensed a ‘women’s body conversation’ starting. Instead of leaving discreetly I decided to hover by the sink. As I noisily clunked the teacups I heard my TA colleague announce, “I love The Boss, especially his bum when he wears faded blue jeans and has a red baseball cap sticking out of his back pocket.”

I was shocked! I left the room sharpish. This was on Monday, and I must admit I was a bit ‘distant’ with my TA for a few days. Until Friday. By chance this was designated as ‘mufti day’ when any child who donated a pound to charity didn’t have to wear uniform, or the adults could wear jeans.

As a joke, I wore a pair of faded jeans with a red baseball cap hanging out of my back pocket.

My TA was thrilled: “Michael, you’ve dressed up just like ‘The Boss’. Bruce Springsteen is my idol!!”

The Boss: You never can tell

Take care out there.

Michael

The Incredible String Band: wearing incredible string vests?

When I was 15 there was nothing I’d like more than to head down to the local Wimpy café with my friends. (Well that’s not exactly true: there was nothing better to do.) As a rock obsessive, I was always able to turn any lull in the conversation to my advantage, and play my favourite game: 10 Reasons Why You Think Such and Such a Band are Brilliant. The most difficult band to think of re: 10 reasons for brilliance were The Incredible String Band. I would always get stuck at five, until one day someone waved around the cover of The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter and I was off. Just take a look at Rose Simpson and Liquorice McKechnie and it’s as clear as day: those girls had style. You only have to glance at their cheesecloth smocks, home-knitted Shetland pullovers, Afghan coats and maxi skirts to see why the ISB’s music went up 10 notches when the girls joined the band. At the time I was saving all my spare cash to invest in an Afghan coat, to go with the woolly jumper my granny was busy knitting me for Christmas.

But this was 1972, when the winds of change were blowing through the pink loon pants of UK teenage. This seismic shift, which we now know as Glam Rock, was responsible for many a denim-clad die-hard rocker taking to wearing gold lamé, and even eye liner (and these were guys who were just beginning to sprout chest hair.) It was terrifying. As we were learning in physics, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and the rock backlash was personified by a diminutive singer from Detroit called Suzi Quatro. I saw her on Top of the Pops and my life was changed forever. Yes, she was wearing a black leather jumpsuit, but this was secondary to the fact that she was the only woman we had heard of who not only fronted a band but played electric bass as well. Nor did it escape our attention that all the hunky members of the band Suzi reigned supreme over were wearing the same type of top. Could she and her band be the antidote to Glam?

Put your man in the can: Suzi Quatro

At the weekend I headed into Marks to see if I could bag a three-pack of black singlets. No such luck. There had been a complete run on black vests and the head of men’s underwear was left in a state of utter bewilderment. Luckily I was saved by a rather kindly old gent in the men’s outfitters down the road: “Perhaps Sir would consider purchasing this rather hardwearing white vest and a pot of Dylon to dye it black?” Sorted. I have long recognised that dressing and acting like your pop heroes is not dissimilar to young children dressing up and pretending to be princesses or Bob the Builder. While some of us would have liked to have role-played being Jim Morrison, by investing in a pair of leather strides, none of us (at least as far as I’m aware) wanted to buy a jumpsuit.

I recently heard Suzi Quatro claim in an interview that the whole black leather jumpsuit thing happened by accident. She used to wear a cheesecloth top onstage, but was experiencing a lot of unpleasant chafing from the guitar strap of her very weighty bass. Her manager had heard that leather reduced irritation, so invested in a jumpsuit for Suzi. The rest is history. (At one stage there were wild rumours going around that Suzi had been spotted poolside wearing a leather bikini. But that would have been totally ridiculous: everyone knows that if you rinse a leather cozzie in a washbasin after a dip in the pool, and hang it on the radiator to dry, the whole thing will be completely ruined.)

In one fell swoop, Suzi Quatro had not only changed our sartorial outlook, but had struck a blow for women in rock… and bass players. Bassists were the band members who stood stock still in the shadows next to the drum kit, while the singer and lead guitarist (and in the case of Keith Moon, even the drummer) cavorted around hogging the limelight. OK, there was John Entwhistle of The Who and Paul McCartney, but you’d struggle to think of another famous bassist, (Sting was still known as Graham Sumner and working as a teacher in Newcastle, and had yet to form The Police). You’d also be hard pressed to think of a woman who played an electric guitar and led a band.

But you can’t have a rock band without bass and drums. As Carlos Santana pointed out: “I may play lead guitar, but it’s the drums and bass that I build on… and that make everyone dance.” Enter Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads. When I think of Talking Heads I think of David Byrne. That’s inevitable, as he was the lead singer. But this band were really brilliant because everyone worked together as a tight unit onstage, and Tina Weymouth’s melodic bass playing gave the band it’s unique sound.

Rock’n’Aerobics? Talking Heads and Tina Weymouth/Tina Weymouth and Talking Heads

Tina was cool. Tina was a great role model for aspiring female electric bass guitarists. But Tina was stuck in the background. Actually that’s not true: maybe she wasn’t centre stage, because that was always going to be where David Byrne belonged, but she was an integral part of the band. And Tina didn’t want to be centre stage anyway. She says she didn’t need that experience. She wanted her bass and Chris Frantz’s drumming to be the indispensable backbone of the band’s sound and stage presence. She recognised that if she was to push herself forward as the singer she would have shredded her voice.

As a man, I can only put forward a suggestion as to why there aren’t more females rocking at the front of bands: maybe they just don’t need to do it. Perhaps it’s mainly the guys who leap around and show off in front of the adoring crowd because it fulfils a need deep inside them. I just don’t know, but I’d really like to find out. I checked this out with a female bass player (and Talking Heads fan) that I know. From her point of view, women just don’t need to leap around whipping the crowd into a frenzy. Maybe female rocker musicians are looking for something more cooperative and fundamental: providing the real substance to the musical experience? It is, after all very hard to be a lead singer, lead guitarist and front person at the same time, and especially if you want to play and sing well. (Whatever we may think about Jimi, Eric and even David of Pink Floyd, they are not great singers.)

And these are the kind of thoughts I have when I plan how to draw little girls into the type of outdoor play activities that they might not normally associate themselves with: involving massive buckets, wheelbarrows, shovels, stones and sand and role-playing being builders. A few years ago I was asked by staff in a foundation unit in a primary school to involve their children in mark-making activities outdoors. I thought it would be a great idea to link making marks to something real, like measuring pieces of wood using real tape measures and then writing numbers with thick pencils on the wood – just like real carpenters and joiners do. I got all the kit ready: yellow hard hats, high visibility vests, metal tape measures, big pencils and large pieces of wood.

“Let’s pretend to be builders!” was my first instruction. Enter lots of boys and exit most of the girls. The boys got stuck in: happy to wear all the gear and make all the moves and use the language of the building site and motorway roadside. The girls were not impressed. I was a bit baffed and disappointed that they had chosen not to join in. Here, after all, was a chance for them to strike out for equality and take part in an activity normally the reserve of males. Luckily I had a sensible female colleague working with me who had the girls sussed. “What you need to do, Michael, is to help the girls see the point of this activity. When was the last time you saw a woman digging a trench or whacking up some scaffolding, let alone measuring a piece of four by two? Why should these girls pretend to be men?”

It was a very valid point, and I watched and learned very quickly as my colleague went off with a group of girls to find some minibeasts. “Shall we make some houses for our minibeasts?” she asked the girls. In no time they were all measuring, mark-making and building. They weren’t bothered about wearing the high-viz vests or hard hats, because they weren’t role-playing being construction workers: they were building houses for a good reason. And while the boys had gone indoors because their little hands were getting cold, the girls had to be begged to come in because they were getting soaked in the rain.

The following week I decided to involve the children in building a wall. I had all the gear there: cement, black buckets, water, trowels, shovels and bricks. All the lads were getting stuck in with gusto. One little girl was busy mixing up the mortar in the bucket, ready for her turn to add another brick to the wall. “Are you enjoying mixing up that mortar?” I asked with a self-satisfied smirk on my face, confident in the knowledge that I’d finally struck a blow for equal opportunity through play.

“No I’m not,” little Flossie replied, “I’m making a cake.”

I finally have learned. When I arrive at your nursery or reception class with a van-load of resources for involving children in outdoor play: including sacks of gravel, shingle, slate, pebbles and cobbles, and collections of sticks, pine cones, buckets, wheelbarrows and shovels, I will also have a large crate of old cooking pots, wooden spoons, washing up bowls and baking trays. Because you never know who might prefer to knock up a quick batch of rock cakes in our makeshift mud kitchen, in between shovelling sand and grit into their huge purple bucket, or filling their small pink bucket with every shiny little stone they can lay their hands on.

Not all boys have the same interests as each other, and not all girls want to do the same things as boys (though some do, and good for them). What we need to do is make sure that all children get a chance to play in the way that they would like. This not only increases their language development and learning, but builds their positive self-image and confidence. So if the girls grow up to play in a band, they can be happy being in the position they want to be in. If not, they can quit and form the next Spice Girls, or be like Norah Jones.

And here’s Norah Jones: cool, comfortable, cooperative and fundamental, and fronting a band with an electric guitar. She doesn’t need to be centre stage, or wear a black leather jumpsuit and leap around to get noticed: all she does is sing and play. And I don’t think it’s an accident that she’s wearing a red cotton blouse, bright red lipstick and playing a bright red guitar, while the rest of the band blend into the background wearing grey or black. Cool.

Norah Jones: feminine, cool, leading a band and playing an electric guitar

Take care out there

Michael

To find out more about mark-making and construction play outdoors click here.

Sabbath circa 1970

I don’t mind admitting that when I was 14 I was big fan of Ozzie Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler, aka Black Sabbath. Their image, music and lyrics seemed to have been designed to appeal to the spotty adolescent male. Very little seems to have changed since they first emerged from the UK’s industrial heartland in the early 1970s. Recent concert footage shows that they still appeal to 14 year old boys, as well as the ‘inner 14 year old’ of men in their fifties. I moved on from Sabbath when Ozzie ate a live bat on stage, (legend has it that someone threw an unconscious bat on stage. Ozzie thought it was rubber so bit its head off). After that I took to listening to more ‘progressive’ bands like Yes and King Crimson. Though I’m clear that Sabbath and their ilk were a passing phase for me, I’m still very confused about gender. I’m not talking about my lingering fondness for the music of Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane phases, but about what to think about boys and girls learning.

Just to make it clear, by gender I mean how being a boy or girl is interpreted by family, culture and society, as opposed to sex, which is your physical makeup. There is so much written about boys, and specifically why they don’t so as well as girls in early years and in school. I find it very confusing. A lot of research is about sex differences; i.e. about how male and female brains differ. A popular branch of research is to give men and women certain stimuli and see what parts of their brains are activated. If a scan shows more activity in a man’s brain than a woman’s, then there is evidence of physical difference. I’m not confused about that. But what really annoys me is how these physical differences are reported on, interpreted, and then used as evidence against women, and particularly against women teachers and early years practitioners.

In 2005, researchers at the University of Sheffield looked at how male brains interpret women’s voices. They concluded that male and female voices affect male brains differently. In the male brain, the perception of male and female voices activates distinct brain regions. That’s interesting. However the conclusions that were drawn from this research, across the internet and in the media, are mind-boggling!

• Apparently women use both halves of the brain when they listen to voices, while men only use one part.
• Women’s voices are more ’difficult’ for men to interpret than men’s, because female voices are more ‘musical’.
• Males hear females’ voices as ‘music’ and males as ‘language’.
• This explains why men don’t listen to women.
• Women teachers should raise the volume and lower the pitch of their voices when teaching boys.
• In a mixed group, boys should be seated at the front of the class and girls at the back (so the boys can hear better and the girls will respond to your soft voice).

What I should mention is that this study was based on the brain activity of only 12 men, and was looking at why people who ‘hear hallucinatory voices’, e.g. in schizophrenia, mainly perceive male voices.

I have a big collection of books on male and female differences. I use them on my ‘Supporting Quiet Children’ course, to explore why there appear to be more girls who are quiet in schools, and anxious about being so, than boys. There are widely conflicting messages in these books. It’s not just that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but that girls can put up with boredom better than boys; girls and boys should be taught separately; boys learn through action and girls through being told what to do; women talk more than men; women need to be told what to do, while men need to work things out; boys are failing in school because there are too many women. And now boys are not listening because women’s voices are not deep enough.

Clearly I am distilling a large body of work into a few choice soundbites. However these soundbites can really stick in people’s minds, create opinions and get acted upon. There was a ‘frank exchange of views’ on one of my courses when a delegate informed the audience, quoting the Sheffield University research, that a reason for boys not achieving as well as girls was because women need to change the way they talk to boys. It seemed to me that women were being finished with because they couldn’t help boys with their minds.

I’m not denying that there are differences between boys and girls, and especially in the ways they behave when they are playing and being taught in groups. However I prefer to follow Neil Farmer’s suggestions: that we respect the differences in how boys and girls behave, based on the family and culture they are growing up in. In his book, Getting It Right for Boys: Why boys do what they do and how to make the early years work for them, he suggests that children are choosing gender-specific roles: they are influenced by the behaviour and opinions of the adults and older children around them. This was brought home to me when I set up an activity combining mark making and construction role play outdoors. We all dressed up as construction workers (hard hats, high-viz vests etc.) and used real metal tape measures to make marks with pencils on offcuts of wood, just like real-life carpenters. We gave each child a brick, mixed up mortar in a bucket and built a wall. Some of the children even role-played working in a builders’ yard and wrote down how many bricks they needed.

Most of the children got totally involved in the project. Actually the boys got involved. Most of the girls couldn’t quite see the point of pretending to be construction workers, and one girl, mixing up a bucket full of mortar, told me she was pretending to make a cake. It wasn’t that the girls were being stereotypically ‘girly’: it was just difficult for them to pretend to be men. On my travels up and down the motorways of the UK I rarely spot women construction workers, and those I do see are probably surveyors. It’s not a female role that girls can easily copy, because they just don’t see it. For me, this was an example of gender role models being defined by the wider culture and society. While I was busy despairing about girls and their lack of mark making in my activities and how this would impact on their writing, and bemoaning the fact that there are too few women out working on the roads, and that it’s a man’s world and there can never be equality between the sexes, my female colleague got on and did something to get the girls involved. She made the activity meaningful by saying, ’Let’s go and find a spider and build a house for it.” In no time a group of girls were busy building houses with my offcuts and measuring and mark making on their wood.

So instead of searching for differences between men and women’s brains, let’s spend our time creating activities that make sense and stimulate children to have fun together as equals.

Sabbath 2013: Finished with their women? Are their brains now occupied?

Getting It Right for Boys: Why boys do what they do and how to make the early years work for them by Neil Farmer is published by Featherstone Education.

For information about mark making, including our construction role play project, see Marking Time.

Black Sabbath are currently on a world tour.