Modelling mould-breaking, not ‘maleness'
Geoff Taggart
Monday, March 3, 2014
We need to clarify exactly why we want more men in early years, says lecturer Dr Geoff Taggart
There are two reasons usually given for wanting more men in early years settings, one of them is noble and laudable and the other is more suspect and controversial. Unfortunately, both of them get discussed at the same time, within the same meeting, the same article or even the same sentence and this has the effect of muddying the waters. If we can be clearer about exactly why we want more men in early years, it will make it more likely to happen.
The first reason given is that the current early years workforce is not representative of society at large and this is a problem, given that young children need to see a broad range of people to identify with.
The lack of men is part of a larger problem involving the lack of black and minority ethnic workers in the sector: imagine being the only black child in a wholly white setting with no black practitioners to identify with. Compared to teachers in schools, the workforce is also disproportionately young.
An ideal setting, by contrast, would represent all kinds of people, demonstrating to the children that age, ethnicity and gender are no barrier when it comes to expressing your skills and sense of purpose. Young boys and girls would have a range of mother and father figures to attach to. In this way, we can see that the small number of men in early years settings are trailblazers for a more equitable and socially just society. Whatever you think about their politics, Barack Obama and Margaret Thatcher are undoubtedly role models in this sense.
The other reason, however, is more dubious. This argument says that, simply by being male, you bring to the nursery distinctly male qualities which help counteract an excessively ‘feminised’ environment.
Time and again, one hears of practitioners saying that ‘Robert is fantastic having a bit of rough and tumble with the kids outside’, as if this is the most memorable and salient point about him. One can scarcely blame male practitioners if they play up to this if it is encouraged so much by the staff culture. But what about male practitioners who don’t fit the traditional mould?
Some recent research with female nursery workers concluded that most of them have a very definite idea about the ‘right kind of man’ to work alongside them and that this idea was a combination of unexamined stereotypes. Female practitioners often say ‘but men are great because they do things with the children that we just don’t do’ but my response would be to ask, ‘Why aren’t you doing them too?’
What a great example to young children of rounded, non-stereotypical behaviour it would be if female practitioners were more often the ones getting muddy, mending the shed and kicking the football. Why do you have to wait for men to join you?
The distinction between the two arguments is quite subtle but can be clearly illustrated with this story. Suppose a woman is hired to work in the strongly masculine world of investment banking or employed as a mechanic at a Kwik-Fit workshop. This is an excellent example to young women of breaking the mould. But then the management are asked to explain and justify their decision. The financial board of directors points to the ‘testosterone-fuelled’ lives of most young bankers and hopes that a bit of ‘feminine common sense’ will help the bank make better investment decisions. The boss at the workshop says that he has heard that women have more ‘emotional intelligence’ and this goes down better with customers. Whilst the women are clearly role models in a feminist sense, what they are being expected to ‘model’ is very conservative, if not sexist.
So why is the latter argument about ‘maleness’ so pervasive, almost to the extent of being ‘obvious’ and ‘natural’?
The first reason is the eagerness with which educators far and wide have absorbed simple and popular books and articles seeking to summarise complex research into gender differences in brain structure and development. The result is a kind of ‘pink brain, blue brain’ reductionist attitude, effectively exposed as ‘neurosexism’ by psychologist Cordelia Fine.
The honest fact is that, despite all the scientific research, we don’t really know conclusively the extent to which biological gender conditions brain function. What we do know is that we are strongly primed to respond in a gendered way if we know gender is the focus of the research. So, at a first glance of research questionnaires, there does seem to be a big difference.
However, if the people are given similar sets of questions but not told that the research is about gender, this difference disappears. I am reminded of a postcard which says ‘Men are from Earth. Women are from Earth. Get over it.’
The second reason is the usefulness of this argument to a political position which says that the UK is on the way to hell in a handbasket, a ‘narrative of decline’. Conservative commentators routinely lament the collapse of morality, the ‘traditional family’ and support given to supposedly feckless young mothers. One hoped-for remedy is the restitution of the moral authority of the traditional father and the heroic rhetoric applied to men in childcare testifies to this attitude.
However, as author of early years bestseller ‘Why Love Matters’ put it in her follow-up book, Britain is not so much ‘broken’ as selfish. Sue Gerhardt pins the blame more on rampant turbo-capitalism and its short-term ‘boom and bust’ thinking as the cause of social discord rather than personal moral failing. For an answer to social breakdown, we have to put more faith in the ballot box than in the prospect of an army of father figures flocking to nurseries.
Finally, a couple of pleas. We are men, not ‘males’ : I always wonder why early years folk resort to police language on gender matters (e.g. ‘ a couple of males seen entering a vehicle’). Also, when you want to compliment your bloke on his choice of work, call him a trail-blazer, a mould-breaker, a pathfinder by all means, but remember the qualities he is modelling are yours too.
Dr Geoff Taggart is an early years lecturer at the Insititute of Education, University of Reading
