Claire Stancliffe

I'm Claire Stancliffe — a former primary school teacher, a feminist, and the mum of a boy who made me completely reassess everything I thought I knew about gender.
​
I trained as a primary teacher at UCL's Institute of Education and spent years working in schools in London and Barcelona. I loved the classroom, the chaos and the creativity of it, the moment something clicks for a child, but I also knew there was more I wanted to explore.
 
I moved into education charity work, managing local education centres in under-resourced communities and training graduate educators in classroom management and theory. Then. I stepped into the corporate world as Head of Digital Learning for a diversity and inclusion consultancy, where I worked alongside organisations like The Fawcett Society to create courses on unconscious bias, sexual harassment, antiracism and more.
​
In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, I became a mum.
​
From the moment we found out we were having a boy, the gendered expectations started flooding in — sometimes from strangers, sometimes from people who loved us, and sometimes, to my great surprise, from myself. I became obsessed with understanding why. I read everything I could find, and I started thinking hard about what it really means to raise a feminist child when that child is a boy.
​
Raising Gentle Boys grew out of that obsession, when I started to share what I was learning online. Today, RGB reaches over half a million people every month. But at its heart it's still the same thing it always was: a space to think carefully about the messages we're sending children, and to do something about the ones that aren't good enough. It's so much easier when you know you're not doing it alone!
​
I believe that breaking down gender stereotypes is one of the most important things we can do — for girls, for boys, for all children. I hope you'll join me.