Are we subtly telling young women they are not good enough?

I was recently invited to talk to a group of parents and teachers at a well-known convent school in Dublin. It was nothing major – they were having a meeting anyway, and I was rolled on at the end as a kind of psychological drain-clearer to blast talk of financial statements and all-weather pitches out of the room, shoot the breeze, and generally delay a bunch of decent people who were probably dying to get home to their Horlicks.

I was surprised to be asked. As I said to my hosts, I haven’t exactly seen my finest hours on polished convent-school corridors and, to be blunt, which I was with the committee that invited me, I’m about the last person I’d ask to address a bunch of hardworking professionals with high stakes in the education game.

I was expelled from a convent school at the age of 11, after which I didn’t go to school at all for a while. Then, when I did finally begin my secondary education, in a different convent, under the largely benign tutelage of the Dominicans, I spent significant swathes of my time down the back of the boiler house in my bottle-green knee-socks clutching 10 squashed Grand Parade and nursing my fantasies of eloping with Peter Frampton. (I know, I know, whatever about the nicotine poisoning, just think about the damage I was doing to my musical taste.)

In the end, the Leaving Certificate I got was barely worth having, made up as it was mainly of Es and Fs. So my dreams – small, cloudy ones without much substance – of going to college were dashed on the rocks of my academic failure, of parental indifference and of a serious lack of funds. And, as I told those patient folk in the school auditorium a few weeks ago, that sense of failure and rejection is hard to shake off. There’s something insidious and pervasive about being told at 17 that you haven’t made the grade, any grade; that you are just not good enough.

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It’s almost 40 years now since I left school and you’d be forgiven for thinking that the potency of the let-down I experienced as a teenager would have diminished. But when I stood up in the auditorium that night and talked about my personal journey through education, I was surprised at how close those old feelings of inadequacy and deficiency were to the surface.

The gig was fine

Listen, the gig was fine: I read a bit and reminisced, and people asked questions, and we ended up talking about the different kinds of pressures that students are under now, not just educationally but socially and societally, all of which chimed with something I became aware of when I finally did get to university last year, at the tender age of 56. It seemed to me that some of the young women I observed on campus (though by no means all) were battling a raging perfectionism, frantically trying to achieve absolutely everything: the perfect results, the perfect body, the perfect future.

This burden of perfectionism is obviously not confined to any one school or city

At the end of the evening, a couple of women and I stood around talking about how convent-school life has changed. I can’t find, or haven’t looked hard enough for, the statistics, but in 1979, when I groped my way out of my alma mater, it seemed to me that depressingly few of my schoolmates went on to university. Secretarial college, the bank and, of course, nursing absorbed the majority of us.

While the mothers I spoke to naturally talked about their daughters’ sure expectations of achieving a third-level degree, and beyond, they also referred often to the increased pressure young women seem to find themselves under nowadays. Several said their daughters expressed entirely unwarranted feelings of failure and inadequacy if they weren’t achieving A1 grades as well as all-round social and personal fulfilment.

This burden of perfectionism is obviously not confined to any one school or city, nor can it be attributed solely and simplistically to factors such as helicopter parenting or the ethos of particular institutions. Across the board, the people I spoke with were actively engaged in communicating to young women that their self-worth shouldn’t be solely predicated on intense academic achievement or unattainable ideals of perfection.

I left glad that so much has changed for the better, but wondering if and how, as a society, we’re still peddling fairy stories that, subtly but pervasively, continue to tell young women they’re not quite good enough.