The War Against Boys (16 page)

The description of America's teenage girls as silenced, tortured, and otherwise personally diminished was (and is) indeed dismaying. But no real evidence has ever been offered to support it. Scholars who abide by the conventional protocols of social science research describe adolescent girls in far more positive terms. Anne Petersen, a former professor of adolescent development and pediatrics at the University of Minnesota (now at the University of Michigan), reports the consensus of researchers working in adolescent psychology: “It is now known that the majority of adolescents of both genders successfully negotiate this developmental period without any major psychological or emotional disorder, develop a positive sense of personal identity, and manage to forge adaptive peer relationships with their families.”
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Daniel Offer, a (now retired) professor of psychiatry at Northwestern, concurs. He refers to a “new generation of studies” that find 80 percent of adolescents to be normal and well adjusted.
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Gilligan offered little in the way of conventional evidence to support her alarming findings. Indeed, it is hard to imagine what sort of empirical research could establish large such claims. But, after the
Times
article, she quickly attracted powerful allies. None would prove more important than the Ms. Foundation and the American Association of University Women. With their help, the allegedly fragile and demoralized state of American adolescent girls would achieve the status of a national emergency.

Marie Wilson, then president of the Ms. Foundation, has described the impact of Gilligan's findings on her staff: “The research on girls struck a chord (perhaps a nerve) with the women at the Ms. organization. It resonated deeply and profoundly.”
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Gilligan would soon come down from her ivory tower to discuss her research with Wilson. Wilson recalls their first meeting: “The two of us met soon after the [
New York Times Magazine
] article appeared. The more we talked, the more we became determined to get this information out to the world.”

So Gilligan, who had herself described her findings as “new and fragile,” nevertheless joined Ms. staffers in their mission to alert the world to the plight of girls. Together they searched for solutions. Marie Wilson writes, “The more we read and learned, and the more we collaborated with the Harvard researchers, the more often we said: Yes, that was me—confident at 11, confused at 16. . . . What if this confidence could be tapped—and maintained? What if girls didn't have to lose self-esteem? Our blood quickened.”
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The mood at Ms. was tense but excited. What should be done to help stem the terrible drain of girls' self-confidence? It was in pondering this question that Wilson, Gilligan, and Nell Merlino, a public relations specialist, hit on the idea of a school holiday exclusively for girls. What became Take Our Daughters to Work Day was designed to achieve two purposes. First, an unprecedented girls-only holiday (the boys would stay in school) would raise public awareness about the precarious state of girls' self-esteem. Second, it
would address that problem by taking a dramatic step to alleviate the drain of confidence girls suffer. As Ms. explained: for one day, at least, girls would feel “visible, valued and heard.”
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Looking back to the beginnings of a school holiday now observed by millions, Wilson and Gilligan are understandably self-congratulatory: “Miracle of miracles, seven women and a fax machine at the Ms. Foundation for Women pulled off the largest public education campaign in the history of the women's movement. In a nutshell, that's how Take Our Daughters to Work Day was born.”
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Gilligan's description of the grim fate of American girls' self-esteem is central to the rationale for Daughters' Day. Here is the sort of information the Ms. sponsors included in the information packet: “Talk to an eight-, nine-, or ten-year-old girl. Chances are she'll be BURSTING WITH ENERGY. . . . Young girls are confident, lively, ENTERPRISING, straightforward—and bent on doing great things in the world.”
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But, the guide points out, this does not last: “Harvard Project members found that by age 12 or 13 many girls start censoring vital parts of themselves—their honesty, insights, and anger—to conform to cultural norms for women. What has happened? Gilligan described girls coming up against a ‘wall'—the wall of culture that values women less than men.”
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Gilligan's ideas also had special resonance with leaders of the venerable and politically influential American Association of University Women (AAUW). Officers at the AAUW were reported to be “intrigued and alarmed” by Gilligan's findings.
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“Wanting to know more,” they quickly commissioned a study from the polling firm Greenberg-Lake. With help from Gilligan, the pollsters asked 3,000 children (2,400 girls and 600 boys in grades four through ten) about their self-perceptions. In 1991 the AAUW announced the disturbing results in a report titled
Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America
: “Girls aged eight and nine are confident, assertive, and feel authoritative about themselves. Yet most emerge from adolescence with a poor
self-image, constrained views of their future and their place in society, and much less confidence about themselves and their abilities.”
²⁶

Anne Bryant, then executive director of the AAUW and an expert in public relations, organized a media campaign to spread the word: “What happens to girls during their school years is an unacknowledged American tragedy. . . . By the time girls finish high school, their doubts have crowded out their dreams.”
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Newspapers and magazines around the country carried reports that girls were being adversely affected by gender bias that eroded their self-esteem. Sharon Schuster, at the time the president of the AAUW, candidly explained to the
New York Times
why the association had undertaken the research in the first place: “We wanted to put some factual data behind our belief that girls are getting shortchanged in the classroom.”
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As the AAUW's self-esteem study was making headlines,
Science News,
which has been supplying information on scientific and technical developments to newspapers since 1922, reported the skeptical reaction of leading specialists on adolescent development.
²⁹
The late Roberta Simmons, a professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh (described by
Science News
as “director of the most ambitious longitudinal study of adolescent self-esteem to date”), said that her research showed nothing like the substantial gender gap described by the AAUW. According to Simmons, “Most kids come through the years from 10 to 20 without major problems and with an increasing sense of self-esteem.”
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But the doubts of Simmons and several other prominent experts were not reported in the hundreds of news stories that the Greenberg-Lake study generated.
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Ironically, Gilligan's portrait of adolescent girls “losing their voice” did not agree with the findings of the AAUW self-esteem research—research she herself helped design. In that survey of children aged nine to fifteen, 57 percent of students said teachers call on girls more and 59 percent said that teachers pay more attention to girls.
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One question in the AAUW survey specifically tested Gilligan's hypothesis: “Do you think of yourself as someone who keeps quiet or someone who speaks out?”
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Among elementary school girls, 41 percent said they speak out; for high school girls the number went up to 56 percent. For boys, the reverse was true: 59 percent of elementary
school boys said they speak out, but by high school they were 1 point behind girls, at 55 percent. These differences are small and well within the margin of error for this survey of 2,942 students (2,350 girls and 592 boys), but the results should have prompted Gilligan to ask herself whether her claim that girls increasingly lose confidence as they move into adolescence was tenable.

The AAUW quickly commissioned a second study,
How Schools Shortchange Girls.
This one, conducted by the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and released in 1992, asserted a direct causal relationship between girls' alleged second-class status in the nations' schools and deficiencies in their self-esteem. Carol Gilligan's girl crisis was thus transformed into a civil rights issue: girls were the victims of widespread discrimination. “The implications are clear,” the AAUW said. “The system must change.”
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Education Week
reported that the AAUW spent $100,000 for the second study and $150,000 promoting it.
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With great fanfare,
How Schools Shortchange Girls
was released to the remarkably credulous media. A 1992 page-one article for the
New York Times
by Susan Chira was typical of coverage throughout the country. The headline read “Bias Against Girls Is Found Rife in Schools, with Lasting Damage.”
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The piece was later reproduced by the AAUW and sent out as part of a fund-raising package. Chira had not interviewed a single critic of the study.

A few years later, when the academic plight of boys was making itself known, I called Chira and asked about the way she had handled the AAUW study. Would she write her article the same way today? No, she said, pointing out that we have since learned much more about boys' problems in school. Why had she not canvassed dissenting opinions? She explained that she had been traveling when the AAUW study came out, and was on a short deadline. Yes, perhaps she had relied too much on the AAUW's report. She had tried to reach Diane Ravitch, a former US Assistant Secretary of Education and a known critic of women's-advocacy findings, but without success.

Six years after the release of
How Schools Shortchange Girls,
the
New York Times
ran a story that raised questions about its validity. This time the reporter, Tamar Lewin, did reach Diane Ravitch, who told her, “That [1992]
AAUW report was just completely wrong. What was so bizarre is that it came out right at the time that girls had just overtaken boys in almost every area. It might have been the right story twenty years earlier, but coming out when it did, it was like calling a wedding a funeral. . . . There were all these special programs put in place for girls, and no one paid any attention to boys.”
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One of the many things about which the report was wrong was the famous “call-out” gap. According to the AAUW, “In a study conducted by the Sadkers, boys in elementary and middle school called out answers eight times more often than girls. When boys called out, teachers listened. But when girls called out, they were told ‘raise your hand if you want to speak.' ”
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But the Sadker data is missing—and meaningless, to boot. In 1994 Amy Saltzman, of
U.S. News & World Report,
asked David Sadker for a copy of the research backing up the eight-to-one call-out claim. Sadker said that he had presented the findings in an unpublished paper at a symposium sponsored by the American Educational Research Association; neither he nor the AERA had a copy.
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Sadker conceded to Saltzman that the ratio may have been inaccurate. Indeed, Saltzman cited an independent study by Gail Jones, an associate professor of education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which found that boys called out only twice as often as girls. Whatever the accurate number is, no one has shown that permitting a student to call out answers in the classroom confers any kind of academic advantage. What does confer advantage is a student's
attentiveness.
Boys are less attentive—which could explain why some teachers might call on them more or be more tolerant of call-outs.
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Despite the errors, the campaign to persuade the public that girls were being diminished personally and academically was a spectacular success. The Sadkers described an exultant Anne Bryant, of the AAUW, telling her friends, “I remember going to bed the night our report was issued, totally exhilarated. When I woke up the next morning, the first thought in my mind was, ‘Oh, my God, what do we do next?' ”
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Political action came next, and here, too, girls' advocates were successful.

The National Council for Research on Women reported on the next major victory in its 1993 newsletter:

Last year a report by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) documented serious inequities in education for girls and women. As a result of that work, an omnibus package of legislation, The Gender Equity in Education Act (HR 1793), was recently introduced in the House of Representatives. . . . The introduction of HR 1793 is a milestone for demonstrating valuable linkages between feminist research and policy in investigating gender discrimination in education.
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The Gender Equity Act enjoyed strong bipartisan support and became law in 1994. According to the act, “Excellence in education . . . cannot be achieved without educational equity for women and girls.” It provided millions of dollars for equity workshops, training materials, and girl-enhancing curriculum development. The AAUW lobbied vigorously for the legislation. But, as the
New York Times
would report in a 2002, “Ms. Gilligan is often cited as an impetus behind the 1994 Gender Equity in Education Act.”
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By the late 1990s the myth of the downtrodden girl was showing some signs of unraveling, and concern over boys was growing. In November 1997, the Public Education Network (PEN), a council of organizations that support public schools, sponsored a conference entitled Gender, Race and Student Achievement. The conference's honored celebrities were Carol Gilligan and Cornel West, who at the time was a professor of Afro-American studies and philosophy of religion at Harvard University. Gilligan talked about how girls and women “lose their voice,” how they “go underground” in adolescence, and how women teachers are “absent,” having been “silenced” within the “patriarchal structure” that governs our schools. Cornel West spoke of having had to overcome his own feelings of “male supremacy.”