Today marks exactly 100 years since property-owning British women over 30 years of age were given the right to vote. The trend on social media, as well as honouring the remarkable achievements of the Suffragettes who drove this momentous change, has been to do an audit asking how far gender equality has advanced in the intervening years - and what still needs to be addressed.

The following represents my, education-specific contribution to the conversation in the form of three, key areas I believe we should focus on:

Girls studying Stem

A study conducted in spring 2017 by Microsoft found that while most girls in the UK enjoy Stem subjects at primary school, there is a sharp drop just before GCSE. Sixty-two per cent of the young people surveyed said they would like to see more female role models in the field.

Interestingly, 23 per cent of girls in the UK said they felt Stem subjects are “geared towards” boys, whereas in Finland, where the number of female pupils who said they would consider a career in Stem is 10 per cent higher, it was generally perceived to be “gender neutral”. Furthermore, a study by the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 found that more girls choose to study Stem subjects at A-level if they had come from single-sex schools, where by definition subjects cannot be divided along perceived gender-appropriate terms.

The aim should be to have no more “girl” and “boy” subjects. If we’re rightly going to encourage more women into what have traditionally been considered the “masculine” environments of business, politics and science, we need to expend just as much energy encouraging boys and young men into roles which involve the infuriatingly termed “soft skills” - caring, nursing and, most crucially in the context of this column, teaching.

The perception that females ‘exaggerate’

Rightly, countless column inches - including some of my own - have been dedicated to addressing the issue of social expectations around men not being allowed to express themselves emotionally, or heard when they do. It has been hypothesised that this is in part responsible for the three times higher rates of addiction in men and the fact that a man kills himself in the UK every two hours - self-medication and crisis being the consequences of not having access to appropriate help for emotional difficulties. However, there is a flip side to that coin: girls and women are perceived to be “melodramatic” or “attention seeking” which can, in turn, mean that their concerns - while more likely to be voiced - aren’t taken as seriously.

On receiving a 2015, DfE commissioned report that showed that one-third of teenage girls were experiencing symptoms of depression and anxiety, Daily Mail columnist and partner of former education secretary Michael Gove, Sarah Vine neatly summed up this attitude when she wrote “asking a teenage girl if she’s depressed is like asking a dog if it wants to go for a walk”.

While I very much doubt most school staff think in these heartless terms, unconscious gender bias inevitably creeps in. A good start is to swap the terms “drama queen” with “great at expressing herself” and “attention seeking” for “attention needing”.

Understanding gender

After the furore that erupted last year when the tabloids decided to wilfully misinterpret a small section of a speech in which I mentioned the benefits of gender-neutral language at the GSA Annual Conference, prominent education voices at the traditional end of the spectrum gleefully took to social media to ask how I could advocate this and simultaneously argue that boys and men needed specific and special consideration in mental health. They clearly thought they had caught me out, or exposed some kind of hypocrisy. I, in turn, worried that such prominent advocates for what they deem to be “proper” education could have been taught to think in such binary terms.

Everyone has a take on gender and with such conflicting opinions and information, I decided - long before my speech at GSA - to seek the advice of experts in order to arrive at my own. These included a senior lecturer at the University of West London, a psychologist who has worked in the NHS for 30 years, a neurobiologist and a researcher in reproductive biology at Cambridge University, all of whom were doctors.

Piecing together the evidence they gave me, I began to build a picture of what gender is and it’s not as straightforward as most commentators would have you believe. It’s neither 100 per cent social construct, nor entirely genetic in its nature and it’s not the same as sexuality. Gender is a complex web of hormones, chromosomes, social expectation and psychology and - when you take the time to examine it properly - you realise that it’s entirely possible to simultaneously believe that gender stereotypes are too oppressive and that we should believe transgender people when they tell us they were born in the wrong body.

It’s crucial that educators and parents understand this, since so much of our core belief system and the decisions we will ultimately go on to make are unconsciously laid down in childhood in response to social cues.

In the next 100 years, let’s hope a culture can flourish in which everyone - regardless of where they fall on the gender spectrum - is encouraged to fulfill their unique potential.

Natasha Devon MBE is the former government mental health champion. She is a writer and campaigner and visits an average of three schools per week all over the UK. She tweets @_natashadevon. Find out more about her work here

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