As a new NIE study prepares to examine the mental and emotional well-being of students in elite schools, a viral TikTok by an RGS alumna reignites tough questions with the author about what success costs young women, and who they’re being asked to become.
I spent ten years in an-girls school. I still call myself an IJ girl. As do many women who passed through that system, I’ve carried the identity long past graduation, long past school uniforms and mind-numbingly boring morning assemblies. Some of my closest friendships were forged on that campus and have lasted nearly two decades.
That’s why a recent TikTok by Dianna Lee, a Raffles Girls’ School (RGS) alumna, caught my attention. She reflects on her time at RGS, calling it “the best thing that happened” to her, while also admitting that it “f**ked [her] up.”
@coolmumdianna #rgs #raffles #rafflesian #singapore #school #feminism ♬ original sound – Cool Mum Dianna🇸🇬🇭🇰
It’s the kind of conversation I’ve had in private with my own IJ best friends, half-joking, but fully serious. How a place can shape you so deeply, for better and worse.
Lee describes RGS as a place that rewarded excellence, but at the expense of emotional grounding. In her view, its brand of feminism encouraged girls to “become men,” rejecting softness and, eventually, womanhood itself. Whether you agree with her or not, the questions she raises are uncomfortable, important, and increasingly relevant.
What are we really teaching high-achieving girls about strength and success, and what do they lose in the process?
To explore exactly that, Singapore’s National Institute of Education (NIE) will launch a first-of-its-kind longitudinal study examining how life in high-achieving schools affects the mental health and well-being of teenage girls.
The study will track over 4,000 students from elite girls’ and co-ed schools over three years. It aims to investigate the psychological effects of high-achieving educational settings on girls, specifically in institutions that consistently reinforce academic and co-curricular excellence.
Do We Really Want Our Girls to Become Men?
Lee’s phrasing, that in these environments, “we are taught to become men”, is sharp. It’s not language I would personally use to describe my own IJ experience. I never felt I was being moulded into a man, but I do understand what she’s pointing to.
For Lee, “becoming men” means being super aggressive, highly capable, and undeniably successful. These are characteristics long coded as “masculine” in our culture, because they’re the ones historically rewarded in men.
Many see women who embody these traits as too loud, demanding, or difficult. Yet in spaces like RGS, schools often praise, nurture, and reinforce those same qualities.
The catch is, no gender owns these traits. Society has coded them as masculine because it built its systems around men who had the freedom to be assertive, ambitious, and audacious. When women display those same traits, people treat them as deviations from femininity instead of valid parts of personhood.
This conflation of gender and personality leaves young women, especially those in all-girls schools, with a false binary: become the version of strong that looks like a man’s success, or risk being overlooked altogether. It puts young men in a box too, making traits like empathy, softness, or vulnerability feel off-limits.
That’s why the upcoming NIE study feels especially timely. It won’t just measure academic stress or exam burnout, it’s also asking how students perceive school and family life, and how their sense of self develops in these high-pressure environments. It could help illuminate whether top-performing girls are not just being driven to succeed, but being shaped to perform success in ways that align with narrow, gendered ideals of power.
Who Gets to Be the Right Kind of Girl?
One of the most revealing lines in Lee’s video is when she shares,
“The most popular girls were the netballers, the basketballers, who looked exactly like boys, had short hair, no boobs…To this day, this is my idea of what a woman should look like.”
She goes on to describe her own body as “feminine,” suggesting that she never quite fit into that celebrated image.
I don’t doubt her experience. I’ve seen versions of that dynamic in my own all-girls school. In my cohort, it was the hockey girls, the floorball girls, the softballers who carried cultural currency.
By naming that group as “looking like boys,” and positioning herself as the one with a “feminine body,” Lee unintentionally does what she critiques, she reinforces that certain bodies and presentations are framed as more valid expressions of womanhood than others.
In criticising RGS for uplifting “masculine” traits, she ends up reaffirming a narrow idea of what counts as feminine.
Even in all-girls spaces, girls police beauty and social power, not through a masculine gaze, but a learned gaze shaped by cultural messaging. These environments, meant to free femininity from patriarchal constraints, create new hierarchies based on toughness, athleticism, and “coolness.” Girls quickly learn which kinds of femininity earn praise and which ones quietly fall to the sidelines.
Was RGS really privileging “boyishness,” or rewarding legibility? The girls who fit into the global ideal of success: loud, competitive, confident have traits that read well on a CV, on a stage, or in a school newsletter. Cultural systems have long coded these traits as masculine and celebrated a narrow version of power.
In high-achieving environments like these, the pressure to be that legible version of excellence can turn inward. Competition bleeds into social dynamics, body image, even identity, and eventually empowerment mutates into performance.
Shouldering the Weight of Excellence
Lee’s video may sound extreme to some, but parts of it ring true, especially for those of us who grew up in environments where achievement was the default setting.
Looking back, my school rarely prioritised emotional needs. No one discouraged gentleness, empathy, or softness, but no one nurtured them either. We celebrated the quantifiable, grades, leadership roles, sports trophies, public speaking medals. Sharing, resting, even vulnerability? We quietly pushed those to the margins.
That kind of conditioning shapes how we move through school, and sticks in how we move through adulthood, especially in relationships, in work, and in our own self-perception.
This is precisely the kind of long-term emotional residue that NIE’s upcoming study is hoping to surface. The project was inspired by the work of Dr. Suniya Luthar, a psychologist whose 1990s research in the U.S. uncovered something that many found counterintuitive: students in high-achieving communities were facing substance use and depression rates up to six or seven times higher than national averages.
It flipped the script on what we assumed about academic success. These were not students “at risk” in the conventional sense, not experiencing poverty, neglect, or trauma. They were the students with straight A’s, decorated co-curricular portfolios, and glowing references.
Dr. Jacqueline Lee Tilley, who is leading the NIE study, wants to explore whether a similar pattern exists here in Singapore, especially among girls. She has pointed out that in Hong Kong, where she conducted earlier research, female students reported significantly higher levels of anxiety and depression compared to their male peers.
What’s still unclear is whether this is simply due to a gendered tendency toward internalising behaviours, or if there’s something uniquely corrosive about high-performance environments for girls specifically.
The Pressure to “Have It All” and the Cost of Even Trying
One of the most jarring lines in Lee’s video is this: “In our careers, we are typically just as successful as the men, but in marriage and motherhood we’re completely destroyed.”
We’re told that women today can have it all. The career, the relationship, the family. There’s a pressure that sits specifically on women, one that struggles to shift, even as the world claims to have modernised.
No one asks if men can “have it all.” Their careers don’t come under scrutiny if they choose to be hands-on fathers. We don’t write op-eds about how many hours they spend at work, or what time they leave the office to pick up their children. There’s no cultural fixation on whether a man can be both a CEO and an emotionally present dad. But for women, the question of “can she balance it?” is constant and asked before we’ve even had a chance to choose.
This pressure starts early. Even as girls, we learn that every choice carries weight. When we show academic drive, people ask if we’re losing touch with our emotions. When we act kind and nurturing, they wonder if we’re giving up ambition. If we prioritise family, they see it as settling. If we focus on our careers, they blame us later for what’s missing.
There’s no winning framework, just constant performance, constant self-assessment, constant positioning.
Support Can’t Replace Prevention
And as all of this unfolds, girls are also absorbing structural inequities they didn’t create. The gender wage gap still exists. So does the expectation that women do more unpaid labour, more invisible labour, more emotional labour. There’s the added layer of national fertility discourse, where women are seen as demographic solutions. Our bodies become public interest. Our lives become data points.
We are not just asked to succeed, we are asked to succeed in a way that fits everyone else’s needs first.
That’s why I find the rhetoric around “support” both important and insufficient. In coverage of the NIE study, the article by The Straits Times highlights about the value of alternative forms of support: boxing, community activities, creative expression.
But I do also find myself asking, why must everything we offer girls be framed around managing their stress, coping with their anxiety, resolving their symptoms?
We rarely talk about preventing these symptoms before they surface. Instead, the focus stays on adaptation, recovery, and response. We wait until girls bend or break under pressure, then study the aftermath, instead of interrogating the systems that apply that pressure in the first place.
And more than anything, why are we so sure that young girls must already be thinking about these trade-offs? Why must they, at 13 or 14 or 16, already carry the question of who they will become, and what they will lose in becoming her?
What Are We Really Raising Girls For?
If this study succeeds in what it sets out to do, it might do more than produce statistics. Ideally, we aren’t just educating girls to get good grades. We’re raising them into a world that still measures them differently, still expects more from them, still asks them to justify every decision, every delay, every deviation.
That’s why this conversation is bigger than just school culture or TikTok anecdotes. What ideals are we actually passing down?
Perhaps one where success isn’t earned by mimicking masculinity, and softness isn’t framed as a liability. Where you can be angry and nurturing, ambitious and aimless, powerful and uncertain.
And maybe even, a reality where girls don’t have to be anything at all, but simply given the freedom to grow, and to take their time doing it.
