Gender policies in Australia and the United Kingdom : The construction of 'new' boys and girls

Since the early 1990s, concerns about boys’ underachievement have dominated gendered policy concerns in the United Kingdom and Australia. However, the take-up of the boys’ issue in each country, though often grounded in similar backlash politics, have of late taken different turns in relation to their constructions of “boys.” In the U.K. context, boys have been simultaneously positioned as “at risk” (because of their masculinity) and (if this is not attended to) as “problem boys” (Francis, 2006; Francis & Skelton, 2005). However, in the Australian context, while there are some aspects of this “therapeutic turn” apparent in references to boys’ abilities to cope with change, and a demonization of particular groups of boys (for example, Muslim boys), there is still very much a construction of boys as an oppressed group dominating the policy agenda (Mills, Martino, & Lingard, 2007). In this chapter, we examine these two national take-ups of the boys’ debate and situate them within the histories of their relevant local contexts and within global anti-feminist discourses. We argue that though these two different national trends in the educational “boy-turn” (Weaver-Hightower, 2003) indicate the differing concerns of each national context, underpinning each trend is an anti-feminist politics that works toward undermining girls’ educational experiences by constructing them as undeserving of their achievements