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Is There an Old Girls Network? Girls Schools and Recruitment to the British Elite

Elites
Gender
Family
Education
Power
Sam Friedman
The London School of Economics & Political Science
Aaron Reeves
University of Oxford
Eve Worth
University of Oxford
Sam Friedman
The London School of Economics & Political Science

Abstract

Private schools have long played a crucial propulsive role in men's elite formation in Britain. Yet the influence of such schools in women’s elite trajectories is far less clear. In this paper we plug this gap via an unusual dataset—120 years of biographical data contained within Who’s Who, an unrivalled catalogue of the British elite. Specifically, we use Who’s Who to explore the degree to which elite girls’ schools have remained pivotal to elite recruitment over time and how this compares to the power of boys schools in the same period. We then go a step further to examine the institutional channels through which these schools propel their alumni, documenting the independent and cumulative advantages that flow from attending Britain’s elite girls’ schools, Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and women-only private members clubs. Finally, we explore the links with parents and spouses among elite women, finding that the number of women with a spouse in Who’s Who has fluctuated significantly over time, reaching its peak among women born in the inter- war years. Our analysis echoes earlier work on men but with important differences. Elite schools were never as central to the trajectories of elite women as they were for men and we argue that this difference is partially explained by the challenge of navigating the gender politics of the time: these schools were haunted by their founder’s efforts to achieve academic excellence whilst continuing to produce good wives and mothers.