Have you heard of the phrase ‘basic white girl’? No, nor me, until I ran a series of workshops to help teenagers prepare for, amongst other things, university interviews. A number of courses would be mentioned and immediately dismissed by some as ‘basic white girl’ courses. These included: psychology (80% female), English literature (70%) and sociology (77%). (‘Basic white girls,’ I learned, also love side-stripe baggy trousers, Taylor Swift and being pretty.) These subjects represent the extreme trend in universities becoming female dominated: 57% of UK undergraduates are now female. The balance of academic teaching staff at universities in 2022-23 is 51% male and 49% female, but the wider university staff is 55% female. Is it possible that what happened in primary schools, where only 15% of teachers are male and secondary schools (35%), will happen in higher education? Are boys already self-excluding from this female-dominated world?
I bumped into a group of aforementioned students yesterday, a mixture of boys and girls all with high (conditional) offers from great universities, and had a chat about their A-Level revision. What alarmed me is the difference in enthusiasm between the boys and girls about their intended university adventures. The girls are locked in: open days and offer days enthusiastically visited, first choices chosen. The boys are altogether more diffident. One of them explained: “Me and my friends are just motoring along with no sense of purpose. We all have fantasies about going off on a great adventure, fighting animals, living in the wild.” One of the girls shoved him and said, “OMG, you’re so lame.”
I conducted a straw poll amongst my friends – all their children who are off to university have noticed the same sex divide: girls already enthusiastically planning university stationery and the boys reluctantly being sent on offer days by their parents. Our own 18 year-old son has decided on a gap year, unable, in spite of lovely offers, to muster up sufficient enthusiasm to justify the average student debt of £48,000. He and a mate are investigating mining opportunities in Australia.
And this is where we get back to the troubling idea of ‘basic white girl’ stuff. My husband shouts from the hammock, my pink straw hat balancing on his head to shade out the spring sunshine: “Don’t make these teenage boys sound like misogynistic bastards, because they’re not.” He’s right of course, teenage boys love teenage girls, they worship them, they adore them, they expand a considerable amount of energy trying to talk to them, have a coffee with them, and if they are extremely brave and successful, kiss them. But they do not want to predominantly hang out with big groups of them. They do not want to be the only boy in the psychology lecture theatre. Hence whole spheres of knowledge, education and training being written off by boys on account of the preponderance of female students. I’m not sure this is misogyny – just a natural preference to spend significant amounts of time with other males – and females – just not majority female.
When my son ordered university prospectuses I noticed a decided lacklustre attempt to recruit white boys (still the majority ethnicity of the UK at 74%). One top university did not picture a boring white male until page 26 – lots of happy photographs of girls in burkas, gentlemen from the Afro-Caribbean club, young men waving pride flags, but nothing for the majority male until page 26.
Of course all of these marketing efforts are well-intentioned efforts to correct a once male-dominated enterprise. The Oxford college I attended in the 1990s only admitted women in 1980. My history don said it was a marvellous thing to do so, as well as encouraging state school applicants. He explained: “Academic standards soared. When it was just aristos they used work on entirely the wrong subjects – throwing sofas out of windows – that sort of caper. Dreadful.”
Has the correction been too thorough? How alarmed should we be that a July 2024 House of Commons research briefing on ‘Equality of access and outcomes in higher education in England‘, reports that: “White pupils are less likely than any other broad ethnic group to go to higher education. … Access to Higher Education was higher among women than men.” Various “barriers to access, participation and outcomes” are listed that include: financial concerns, insufficient advice, sexual and racial harassment on campus or general lack of support. It seems to me however that the real peeling off of boys from the university system is a vague feeling of it being simply, somehow, not quite for them.
Would strict sex quotas help? 50% of all the student body and staff must be male and female? Not sure. Let’s see how this mining venture pans out.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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