In individual interviews, many of the boys and a number of the other girls accounted for the ‘nice girls” unpopularity by describing them as ‘boring’ and ‘not fun to be with’, while the ‘girlies’ were variously described by boys as ‘stupid’ and ‘dumb’. While the boys were drawing on a male peer group discourse which positioned the ‘girlies’ as less intelligent than they were, the ‘girlies’ were far from ‘stupid’ or ‘dumb’. Although not as scholarly as the ‘nice girls’, they were educationally productive and generally achieved more highly that their working-class male counterparts. Rather, the working class discourse of conventional femininity within which they were enmeshed operated to elide their academic achievement within the peer group.