In The News

Class Acts

Education Challenge: Educational Firsts

The Virtual High School

Message Board

Index of Student Resources

It’s the Boys Against the Girls (Again)

David Sadker
American University

Remember when your elementary teacher would announce the teams for the weekly spelling bee? "Boys against the girls!" There was nothing like a gender showdown to spice things up. Apparently, some writers never left this elementary level of intrigue. A spate of recent books and articles take us back to the "boys versus girls" fray – but this time, with much higher stakes. May's Atlantic Monthly cover story, "Girls Rule", is a case in point. The Atlantic published an excerpt from The War on Boys (Simon & Schuster, 2000) by Christina Hoff Sommers, a book advancing the notion that boys are the real victims of gender bias while girls are soaring in school. The excerpt has already sparked a flurry of letters to the Atlantic citing a host of factual errors and contesting the article’s premise that the educational equity movement is waging a war on boys.

It is no secret that historically boys and schools have been a bad fit. Boys’ active behavior has always been a magnet for teacher discipline. Boys are more likely to be suspended, become grade repeaters or be assigned to special education classes, behavior that not only sparks stronger teacher discipline, but also contributes to their lower report card grades. For decades, my late wife Myra and I documented gender bias in America's classrooms. We have described sexism as "a double-edged sword," wounding both girls and boys, and called for schools to meet the very real needs of both genders (Sexism in School and Society, Harper and Row, 1973; Failing at Fairness, Scribner's, 1994). Sommers’ assertion that "feminist researchers" and educators are to blame for the "war" on boys flies in the face of reality.

For nearly two hundred years women have worked hard to help boys succeed in school. While male elementary teachers had relied on lecture and corporal punishment, the new wave of women teachers developed strategies and wrote textbooks that promoted more humane classroom climates. As female teachers made classrooms less punitive, they improved school life for both girls and boys. Today’s educators continue this tradition, calling for more equitable and compassionate classrooms. They are as far from warmongers as one could get.

Sommers and her far right supporters are correct about one thing, girls and women have made significant educational progress in the last two decades. Females today comprise more than 40 percent of medical and law school students, and over half of college students. Girls continue to read sooner and write better than boys. And for as long as anyone can remember, girls have received higher grades than boys. So what is all this talk about gender bias against girls?

There is more to these selected statistics than meets the eye. While girls continue to receive higher report card grades than boys, their grades do not translate into higher test scores. The same girls who beat boys on the spelling bees score below boys on the tests that matter, the PSATs crucial for scholarships, the SATs and the ACTs needed for college acceptances, the GREs for graduate school, and even the admission tests for law, business, and medical schools. Many believe that girls’ higher grades may be more a reflection of their manageable classroom behavior than their intellectual accomplishment. Test scores are not influenced by quieter classroom behavior. Girls may in fact be trading their initiative and independence for peer approval and good grades, a tradeoff that may have costly personal and economic consequences.

The increase in female college enrollments catches headlines, since it heralds the first time that females have outnumbered males on college campuses. But even these enrollment figures are misleading. The female presence increases as the status of the college decreases. Female students are more likely to dominate two-year schools than the ivy leagues. And wherever they are, they find themselves segregated and channeled into the least prestigious and least costly majors. In today’s world of E-success, over 60 percent of computer science and business majors are male, about 70 percent of physics majors are male, and more than 80 percent of engineering students are male. But peek into language, psychology, nursing and humanities classrooms, and you will find a sea of female faces. Higher female enrollment figures mask the "glass walls" that separate the sexes and channel females and males into very different careers, with very different paychecks. Today, despite all the progress to date, the five leading occupations of employed women are secretaries, receptionists, bookkeepers, registered nurses, and hairdresser/cosmetologists. Women comprise over 90 percent of employees in these jobs. Add this to the "glass ceiling" (about 3 percent of Fortune 500 top managers are women), and the persistence of gender wage gap (women with advanced degrees still lag well behind their less educated male counterparts), and the crippling impact of workplace and college stereotyping becomes evident.

Even within schools, where female teachers greatly outnumber male teachers, school management figures remind us that if there is a war on boys, women are not the generals. More than 85 percent of junior and senior high school principals are male, while 88 percent of school superintendents are male. Despite sparkling advances of females on the athletic fields, two-thirds of athletic scholarships still go to males. In some areas, women have actually lost ground. When Title IX was enacted in 1972, women coached more than 90% of intercollegiate women's teams. Women today coach only 48% of women's teams, and only one percent of men's teams.

If some adults are persuaded by the rhetoric in books like The War on Boys, be assured that children know the score. When over a thousand Michigan elementary school students were asked to describe what life would be like if they were born a member of the opposite sex, over 40 percent of the girls saw positive advantages to being a boy: better jobs, more money, and definitely more respect. Ninety-five percent of the boys saw no advantage to being a female. A substantial number of boys in the 1991 study indicated they would consider suicide rather than living life as a female.

By fanning the flames of the anti-female backlash, The War on Boys attempts to persuade the public to abandon support for educational initiatives designed to help girls and boys avoid crippling stereotypes. I am hopeful that the public and the Congress will not be taken in by the book’s misrepresentations. We have no time to wage a war on either our boys or our girls.

Dr. David Sadker is a professor at The American University , and is co-author of a number of books, including Failing at Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls (Touchstone, 1995).