Gender bias in The Children’s Society

In the UK, five teenage boys commit suicide for every two girls. So why does UK charity “The Children’s Society” emphasise the wellbeing of girls in its reports? An open letter.

Matthew Reed
Chief Executive, The Children’s Society
Edward Rudolf House
Margery St
London WC1X 0JL

Dear Mr Reed,

GENDER BIAS IN THE CHILDREN’S SOCIETY REPORTING

In the UK, five teenage boys commit suicide for every two girls. That number will rise to eight by the time a boy reaches his twenties [1].

Yet your charity, in a recent report [2], claims:

“girls are unhappier with their lives” (p.5)

Given Office of National Statistics data showing that significantly more boys than girls find life so intolerable that they choose to end it rather than endure it, your claim that girls are unhappier than boys with their lives appears at best unexplained and, at worst, absurd.

Many will interpret this as evidence of a bias in The Children’s Society towards the interests of women and girls that is incompatible with your mandate, and an abuse of the public funding you receive.

This bias is evident throughout your report, website, and social media statements. For example on page 34, you state:

“By 14 years old, girls have more emotional health problems than boys”

At page 42, you state:

“Girls are more than twice as likely as boys to self-harm”

From page 50, you present a series of charts depicting relative happiness in which you distort apparent differences by manipulating the Y axis— a practice widely associated with sensationalism and misrepresentation by the exaggeration of statistical difference. For example, in the first graph purporting to show happiness with life as a whole, the Y axis is truncated at 7.6 to allow a 3.2 percentage point variation between boys and girls reporting greater than 80% satisfaction to be represented as a 50% gap — a difference your narrative describes as “significant”.

On page 61, you concede that you have excluded from your data set all children who have no contact with a parent. In the UK, 91% of all resident parents are women [3]. Having effectively excluded from your analysis boys who have no contact with their father (a significant and relevant causal factor in your study), you attempt to make a number of statements about the impact of relationships on (un)happiness, concluding that it disproportionately affects girls. For example, on page 63:

not feeling close to a parent had a significantly greater negative impact on girls’ happiness with family than boys’.

You allocate the whole of page 71 to reproduce seven quotes from girls. There are no quotes from boys anywhere in your report. You employ images of girls twice as often (8) as images of boys (4). In a banner on your website homepage promoting this report (featuring the claim that “every child should be included”) every image and message is about girls, women, women’s magazines, and quotes by and about girls. In your twitter feed promoting your report (see image at bottom), 75% of the tweets reported girls’ issues, 25% were neutral, and no tweets reported boys’ issues.

At page 30 of your report, you state:

“Measuring children’s well-being can help us to know where to focus our attention, and to think about actions that might bring about improvements to children’s lives”

In your measurement of well-being, you have failed to account for: the reported difficulty boys have in expressing their feelings; suicide i.e. the ultimate expression of self-harm and measure of well-being ; the inability of those boys who have committed suicide to report their state of well-being afterwards (in contrast to those girls who survive self harm); and the tendency of those who survive self-harm (mostly girls) — unlike suicide (mostly boys) — to repeat it, thus increasing its apparent frequency. Your measurements deliberately exclude boys who have poor or no contact with their father — a significant explanatory factor for reported unhappiness in boys.

In communicating your measurements of well-being, you have employed graphical methods for distorting differences to exaggerate girls’ experience. And, through your exploitation of selective quotation and imagery, you have manufactured a strong cognitive bias favouring the preferential consideration of girls and their problems.

May I therefore invite you, as Chairman of a charity that in 2017–18 received £10 million in public money [4] and is obliged to treat boys and girls equally, to:

(i) explain the worrying appearance of gender bias in your report and

(ii) state, in the context of the ratio of 5:2 suicide between boys and girls, whether you believe your report, website, and social media campaign is effective in helping us “to know where to focus our attention, and to think about actions that bring about improvements” in the lives of those most at risk from it?

Sincerely yours,

Richard Lyon

Courtesy Copies:
* Rt Hon Keir Starmer MP (Holborn and St Pancras)
* The Charity Commission

References:

[1] Office for National Statistics. 2016. “Suicides in the UK: 2016 registrations — 6. Suicides in the UK by age”. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/suicidesintheunitedkingdom/2016registrations

[2] The Children’s Society. 2018. “The Good Childhood Report 2018”, August. https://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/good-childhood-report

[3] Office for National Statistics. 2014. “Families and Households: 2014–5. Lone parents”. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/families/bulletins/familiesandhouseholds/2015-01-28#lone-parents

[4] The Children’s Society. 2018. “How we raised money, 2017–18”. https://www.childrenssociety.org.uk/donate/where-your-money-goes. Retrieved 30 August 2018.