ABSTRACT
In opposition to the largely liberal feminist concerns to address issues of self-esteem and vulnerability in ‘girls' during the 1980s and 90s, at the start of the current millennium we have been faced with a ‘postfeminist’ onslaught of discourses about ‘girl power’ and the increasingly commonsense ‘presumption’ of gendered equality in education and work (Foster, 2000; Harris, 2004; McRobbie, 2004; Taft, 2004). It has been widely argued (see Adkins, 2002; Francis and Skelton, 2005) that education, work and the labour market have been ‘feminised’. In 1997 the UK left wing think-tank Demos noted the ‘future is female’, suggesting women were set to enter the labour market in huge numbers, suggesting the kinds of work which stress characteristics ascribed to femininity – service, empathy, communication, nurturance, to-be-looked-at-ness would be the ones in demand (in Walkerdine et al., 2001). Ten years later, a ‘futurologist’ for British Telecom, Ian Pearson, confirmed the worrying trends in the ‘gender order’ (Connell, 1987) with the headline ‘The future is female’ (BBC News, 23 April 2007b) which warned of a future dominated by female-oriented jobs that will ‘displace’ men. As discussed in the introduction to this book, in 2011 David Willetts, Minister for Universities and Science in the UK Coalition Government, was quoted as touting feminism as ‘trumping egalitarianism’ through a ‘transformation of opportunities for women [that] ended up magnifying social divides’ and worsening employment opportunities for (particularly working class) men (Prince, 2011).
