Harvard produces leaders. People with Harvard degrees go on to become administrators in high-level positions in state educational departments and in public schools around the country. It would be really sad if they went to Harvard, to this gender center, and if it became a center for gender propaganda and divisive, anti-male rhetoric.

I know that Fonda insisted that the center have the word "Harvard" in its title, so it's going to carry the prestige of Harvard. People are going to assume that it meets the high standards that Harvard usually insists upon. But they should look more closely at Gilligan's work, and ask themselves what standards were applied to her work. She seems to be in much better standing with journalists than with research psychologists.

What is the main problem, in your view, with Gilligan's conclusions?

I think it's ill-advised to attribute pathologies to healthy people. It doesn't help normal, healthy, thriving children to be viewed as pitiable and fragile. She presented the nation with a distorted view of our children. She presented a picture of girls as diminished and voiceless, and fostered this myth of the incredible shrinking girl.

In reality, American girls are among the most outspoken, ambitious, successful girls in the history of the human race. As a philosophy professor, I observe the women in my classes. We're seeing more and more women because our colleges nationwide are approaching 57 percent female, even more in liberal arts colleges. There are far more girls in my classes. As I was reading Gilligan's grim prognoses, they certainly didn't seem to be true of the young women I was encountering. I looked more generally at the research and found that it was basically an invention.

Of course, Gilligan's first book deals mostly with young adolescent girls.

But again, what we would need to know is, first of all, is this really true? Are girls between 11 and 12 years old really losing their voices? Susan Harder at the University of Denver has not found that to be the case, at least not so far.

We would also need to know whether or not boys suffer from this alleged problem, because Gilligan didn't study boys in that age group. This may be just a normal part of growing up -- to realize that you may not know what you thought you knew. It may be part of maturing during adolescence, during which time children are a little less outspoken.

Having said that, where do you find good research that shows girls become diffident and reticent? I couldn't find it. But I could find much research to the contrary.

It does ring true to some parents. The problem is that when you make generalizations about people, some of them seem to apply. That's how astrology works.

What do you believe is the effect on young girls of being treated by adults as though they are "at risk" of losing their voice and self-esteem?

I think they spend a lot of time with adults who are nagging and cajoling them, which must be annoying for them. Any child may go through periods during which they become less outspoken with their parents or teachers. But girls, like boys, live in many different worlds -- they have their friends and their classroom and their parents -- and within these different domains, they may have different levels of expressiveness.

The best research that I've seen shows that children go through different stages; they are quiet in some domains and outspoken in others and it changes over time. But you can't generalize and say this is what happens to the majority of 11-year-old girls. Because it doesn't.

You've written quite a bit about what you perceive as the negative effects on boys who watch girls being singled out for special attention based on gender. What do you think will be the impact of the proposed Harvard gender center on boys?

With friends like Carol Gilligan and Jane Fonda, boys need no enemies. These two women are convinced that in order to help boys, we have to rescue them from their masculinity, which they view as dangerous and toxic. According to them, we have to get boys in touch with their inner nurturer so they can share their emotions and so forth. Again, I simply see no evidence that the average Little Leaguer or Boy Scout, the average boy, is pathological or disturbed in the ways that Gilligan or and Fonda are suggesting.

There is a small subset of boys who are certainly in serious trouble, who do need radical intervention. But it's not because of the patriarchy. Gilligan claims that boys are the victims of patriarchy, just as girls are. So she's identified a new victim class of the capitalist hetero-patriarchy: little boys. And now that Fonda is the enabler, Gilligan and her acolytes can set about the task of liberating boys from their maleness.

Recent Stories