Heidi safia mirza biography of alberta

Fist held high, Professor Heidi Safia Mirza ended our zoom call by mandating young people to “smash the patriarchy – it is still here!”  Even over Zoom, her enthusiasm and smile were infectious.

UCL professor Mirza became known for her landmark study of Caribbean girls in secondary education called Young, Female and Black.

To conduct her study, she went back to her old school. There, she theorized the “backdoor entry” young Caribbean women used to get into university despite being awarded insufficient grades to enter higher education the traditional way.

“I found that, when they arrived at university, Caribeean girls were often older – because they had to use the backdoor entries”.

Young, Female and Black was inspired by her own experience of arriving from the Caribbean at sixteen and going to school in Brixton, where she encountered “very overt racism”.

“The book is about how the girls navigated t