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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
All in all, this adds up to a rather bleak picture for boys, unless one considers college entrance scores and studies that look at the success of adult men and women. Those who wish to address the issue of educational inequity for boys are caught between the empirical data, which shows very real gender gaps for young boys and college-age men, and the perception that boys can't be doing so terribly, if adult men are still doing relatively well, or at least outperforming women.
Boys continue to outperform girls on the SAT, which is a requirement for admission to the majority of American universities. In 2000, girls scored, on average, 38 fewer points than boys overall (35 points on the math portion; 3 on the verbal). Similar gaps also show up on the PSAT, the SAT II, the ACT and the Graduate Entrance Exam, and though girls are more likely to take advanced-placement classes, boys are more likely to achieve the higher scores needed to attain college credit for these classes. And once they are in the workplace, men still earn more than women (although that gap is closing) and represent the majority of CEOs, politicians and high-wage earners in all industrialized countries.
There have been any number of recent books on what is described by some as a looming educational crisis for boys and men, including many that focus on the special needs and challenges of boys, particularly in adolescence. But a full-blown campaign to reempower boys seems a long way off, possibly because those who concur that boys need help cannot agree on the source of their educational problems or the appropriate methods of relief. While the girl empowerment campaign united women from very different backgrounds and philosophies -- academics like Carol Gilligan, popular writers like Mary Pipher, journalists like Anna Quindlen and Peggy Orenstein, political organizations like the National Organization of Women and researchers in the American Association of University Women -- there is nowhere near this kind of unity in the movement to help boys. In fact, many of the leaders in the movement to empower boys are actively fighting each other.
Harvard professor Carol Gilligan, author of the 1982 book "In a Different Voice," is widely credited with (and, by her critics, denounced for) kick-starting the girl empowerment movement. She was among the first to argue that women experience relationships, morality and communication differently than men, and are therefore silenced in a culture in which the male experience stands in for the universal human experience.
Some of Gilligan's early critics took exception to her so-called difference feminism, fearing that any theory that relied on essential gender difference could be used to rationalize discrimination against women. But it's difficult to overstate just how big a star Gilligan is in the field of gender studies: Throughout the '80s and '90s she was routinely awarded major honors; in 1997 she received the Heinz award for "transforming the paradigm of what it means to be human" and in 2001, Jane Fonda donated $12.5 million to fund a chair at Harvard in Gilligan's name.
In 1990, Gilligan applied her theories of women's psychological development to explain the underachievement of girls. She claimed that girls experience a crisis of confidence in early adolescence, which leads them to become less assertive and outspoken and more uncertain about their futures. To many people, Gilligan's work became the core around which to build a national movement to reform education.
Gilligan's concern for adolescent girls was almost immediately picked up and shared by educators, journalists, parents, teachers and popular writers, including clinical psychologist Mary Pipher, whose bestselling "Reviving Ophelia" claimed that America's sexualized, lookist, media-saturated "girl poisoning" culture led post-feminist American girls to be "much more oppressed" than ever before. Pipher blamed this oppression for girls' alleged low self-esteem, suicides, self-mutilation and low math scores. ("Just as planes and ships disappear into the Bermuda Triangle," wrote Pipher, "so do the selves of girls go down in droves.") Critics, like Hoff Sommers, pointed out that some of these problems -- especially suicide and behavior disorders -- overwhelmingly affected more boys than girls.
But more important, Gilligan's claim led other researchers to try to prove with empirical data that girls were being harmed by sexism in the schools. In 1991, the American Association of University Women released a report, "Schools Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America," which purported to confirm Gilligan's thesis that girls suffer a crisis of self-esteem during adolescence that leaves them much less confident in their abilities. This was followed in 1992 by another AAUW study, "How Schools Shortchange Girls," which placed the responsibility for girls' underachievement directly on the sexist attitudes of educators -- in public and private schools -- who failed to provide girls with adequate classroom attention.
The AAUW studies almost immediately became a battleground in the p.c. wars. They were heavily attacked by Hoff Sommers and others, who claimed that they were tendentious and riddled with methodological errors. But the studies were publicized by popular journalists and writers and their recommendations lobbied for by powerful national women's organizations.
In the end, the view that society was shortchanging girls prevailed. Advocates for girls succeeded in putting pressure on Congress to pass the 1994 Gender Equity in Education Act, which provided millions of dollars in support for programs aimed at correcting sexism in the classroom, including special math and science programs for girls, sensitivity workshops for educators and new textbooks that corrected gender stereotypes (i.e., women as nurses, men as doctors).
