********** Sometimes, especially in early stages of becoming a geographer, one of most difficult questions to answer is, What sort of research do I want to do? Our discipline is so diverse and extensive and possible range and mix of methods so large that sometimes this question seems almost impossible to answer. As you get older and build up experience, one piece of work tends to lead to another, and before you know it you are an expert in a particular field. But sometimes you may decide to start a project that would be considered outside your main interests; this is case for work I reflect on here. The combination of two sets of circumstances pushed me to my new interest: one set personal and other broadly political. For many years now, I have been interested in associations between socioeconomic change in Britain and changing nature of gender relations. I have undertaken research and written books and papers on theoretical, methodological, and empirical nature of these changes and have thought and written about what it might mean to try to do feminist research. I have been involved in various ways in policies to challenge contemporary assertions and assumptions about position of women in contemporary Britain, assuming that, in most cases, girls and women have fewer opportunities and are discriminated against, compared with and men--while recognizing, of course, ways in which divisions based, among other criteria, on class and ethnicity cut across and complicate this simple pattern. I supported single-sex education for girls, for example, and was active in local equal-pay campaigns. I also talked about my work at home and tried to live according to my beliefs. But then I had a son who, as he moved through educational system, challenged almost everything I thought and said through his own experiences. Clearly this is not an uncommon experience for parents of teenagers; what was so challenging for me was that it was girls in his class who were privileged ones. By chance they outnumbered their male peers in his year group; they were lively, articulate, and well organized, they were good competitors inside and outside classroom, and they generally seemed more content and at ease with themselves than did lumpish, antisocial, and uncouth in their early and midteens who passed through my kitchen. Statistical proof of these evident gender differences seemed to be supplied by their respective results in school-leaving exams that my son and his peers took at age of sixteen. The girls outperformed boys, not only in subjects in which female success has been common--in languages and literature, for example--but also in math and science. Moreover, whereas most of girls moved onto local sixth-form college to continue their education, too many of left school and, with varying degrees of success, started to look for employment. My personal experiences at home seemed to be paralleled all over country. Since mid-1990s a popular and political debate has emerged in Britain about the problem with/for (Phillips 1993; Griffin 2000; McDowell 2000a). In these debates, and young men appear in two related guises. They are, first, loutish, troublesome youths who hang around on street corners and engage in various forms of antisocial or illegal behavior, now appearing as hooligans or yobs in policy proposals by British government to counter antisocial public behavior. The same troublesome young men appear in a second form in educational debates as boys who fail, in which a growing gender gap in educational performance of and girls has been identified (Griffin 2000). In some of these debates, schools, teachers, feminism in general, and even girls themselves are blamed for undermining confidence of young men, letting them down and failing to nurture them. In face of girl power, it seems, all tha t are able to do is to fall back into antisocial laddishness. …