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Ena Harrop and Deryn Lavell: Building Confident Young Women

1:01:13 recording · EN · 4 speakers

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Brief overview

All-girls schools build the confidence and agency that turn girls' academic success into women's leadership.

  1. Confidence is the game changerDarren calls real confidence the bottom line, built by letting girls test limits and fail: "we love failure at York House".
  2. Not a glass ceiling but a nappy wallAnna points to unequal home production, citing Corinne Lowe's finding that women breadwinners still do more housework than men.
  3. Every role is up for grabsIn a girls' school the orchestra chairs get moved by girls and the robotics leader is a girl, which Anna says would not happen in a co-ed school.
Executive Summary AI
  • Hosts Indira Samarasikra and Martha Piper open this episode of She's Got Nerve by shifting from interviewing women leaders to asking how girls should be prepared to lead, and whether an all-girls education helps.1:01
  • Their guests are the heads of Vancouver's two all-girls schools: Anna Harrop, at Crofton House since 2019 and previously head of the City of London School for Girls, and Darren Lavelle, head of York House since 2022 after Saltus Grammar School in Bermuda and eight years at Bishop Strachan School.2:28
  • Anna argues the point is not the absence of boys but the presence of girls, citing a South Korean natural experiment begun in the 70s and published in 2025 that found girls'-school graduates had a 10% higher chance of reaching leadership and about 7% higher chance of civic involvement, plus desegregated PISA data from 2018 that favoured single-gender schooling on every indicator.13:57
  • Darren explains why public systems stay co-ed — the cost of retooling, Canada's policy commitment to inclusivity and fluid rather than binary gender — while regretting that the girls who would benefit most often cannot afford independent schools.22:06
  • Martha counters that women are now 60% of Canadian graduates yet Canada has had one woman prime minister for three months and maybe two of the top 100 market-cap companies are led by women, and Anna answers that unconscious narratives and the unequal burden of home production, not the classroom, are what stall women's careers.38:59
Key Quote
“So it's not so much the absence of boys as the presence of girls.”
— Anna Harrop12:56
Key Quote
“And I think the courage to do that came from the fact that I had been raised in an all-girls environment and I did not give a damn.”
— Indira Samarasikra17:28
Key Quote
“But what's a problem is when you need to be liked, when it becomes an obsession and it stands in your way of doing the right thing or making the right decision.”
— Martha Piper20:53