The New Gender Gap

[Guest guest]

The New Gender Gap

>From kindergarten to grad school, boys are becoming the second sex

 

Lawrence High is the usual fortress of manila-brick blandness and boxy 1960s

architecture. At lunch, the metalheads saunter out to the smokers' park,

while the AP types get pizzas at Marinara's, where they talk about -- what

else? -- other people. The hallways are filled with lip-glossed divas in

designer clothes and packs of girls in midriff-baring track tops. The guys

run the gamut, too: skate punks, rich boys in Armani, and saggy-panted crews

with their Eminem swaggers. In other words, they look pretty much as you'd

expect.

 

But when the leaders of the Class of 2003 assemble in the Long Island high

school's fluorescent-lit meeting rooms, most of these boys are nowhere to be

seen. The senior class president? A girl. The vice-president? Girl. Head of

student government? Girl. Captain of the math team, chief of the yearbook,

and editor of the newspaper? Girls.

 

It's not that the girls of the Class of 2003 aren't willing to give the guys

a chance. Last year, the juniors elected a boy as class president. But after

taking office, he swiftly instructed his all-female slate that they were his

cabinet and that he was going to be calling all the shots. The girls looked

around and realized they had the votes, says Tufts University-bound Casey

Vaughn, an Intel finalist and one of the alpha femmes of the graduating

class. "So they impeached him and took over."

 

The female lock on power at Lawrence is emblematic of a stunning gender

reversal in American education. From kindergarten to graduate school, boys

are fast becoming the second sex. "Girls are on a tear through the

educational system," says Thomas G. Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell

Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington.

"In the past 30 years, nearly every inch of educational progress has gone to

them."

 

Just a century ago, the president of Harvard University, Charles W. Eliot,

refused to admit women because he feared they would waste the precious

resources of his school. Today, across the country, it seems as if girls

have built a kind of scholastic Roman Empire alongside boys' languishing

Greece. Although Lawrence High has its share of boy superstars -- like this

year's valedictorian -- the gender takeover at some schools is nearly

complete. "Every time I turn around, if something good is happening, there's

a female in charge," says Terrill O. Stammler, principal of Rising Sun High

School in Rising Sun, Md. Boys are missing from nearly every leadership

position, academic honors slot, and student-activity post at the school.

Even Rising Sun's girls' sports teams do better than the boys'.

 

At one exclusive private day school in the Midwest, administrators have even

gone so far as to mandate that all awards and student-government positions

be divvied equally between the sexes. "It's not just that boys are falling

behind girls," says William S. Pollock, author of Real Boys: Rescuing Our

Sons from the Myths of Boyhood and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard

Medical School. "It's that boys themselves are falling behind their own

functioning and doing worse than they did before."

 

It may still be a man's world. But it is no longer, in any way, a boy's.

>From his first days in school, an average boy is already developmentally two

years behind the girls in reading and writing. Yet he's often expected to

learn the same things in the same way in the same amount of time. While

every nerve in his body tells him to run, he has to sit still and listen for

almost eight hours a day. Biologically, he needs about four recesses a day,

but he's lucky if he gets one, since some lawsuit-leery schools have banned

them altogether. Hug a girl, and he could be labeled a "toucher" and swiftly

suspended -- a result of what some say is an increasingly anti-boy culture

that pathologizes their behavior.

 

If he falls behind, he's apt to be shipped off to special ed, where he'll

find that more than 70% of his classmates are also boys. Squirm, clown, or

interrupt, and he is four times as likely to be diagnosed with attention

deficit hyperactivity disorder. That often leads to being forced to take

Ritalin or risk being expelled, sent to special ed, or having parents

accused of negligence. One study of public schools in Fairfax County, Va.,

found that more than 20% of upper-middle-class white boys were taking

Ritalin-like drugs by fifth grade.

 

Once a boy makes it to freshman year of high school, he's at greater risk of

falling even further behind in grades, extracurricular activities, and

advanced placement. Not even science and math remain his bastions. And while

the girls are busy working on sweeping the honor roll at graduation, a boy

is more likely to be bulking up in the weight room to enhance his

steroid-fed Adonis complex, playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on his

PlayStation2, or downloading rapper 50 Cent on his iPod. All the while, he's

30% more likely to drop out, 85% more likely to commit murder, and four to

six times more likely to kill himself, with boy suicides tripling since

1970. "We get a bad rap," says Steven Covington, a sophomore at Ottumwa High

School in Ottumwa, Iowa. "Society says we can't be trusted."

 

As for college -- well, let's just say this: At least it's easier for the

guys who get there to find a date. For 350 years, men outnumbered women on

college campuses. Now, in every state, every income bracket, every racial

and ethnic group, and most industrialized Western nations, women reign,

earning an average 57% of all BAs and 58% of all master's degrees in the

U.S. alone. There are 133 girls getting BAs for every 100 guys -- a number

that's projected to grow to 142 women per 100 men by 2010, according to the

U.S. Education Dept. If current trends continue, demographers say, there

will be 156 women per 100 men earning degrees by 2020.

 

Overall, more boys and girls are in college than a generation ago. But when

adjusted for population growth, the percentage of boys entering college,

master's programs, and most doctoral programs -- except for PhDs in fields

like engineering and computer science -- has mostly stalled out, whereas for

women it has continued to rise across the board. The trend is most

pronounced among Hispanics, African Americans, and those from low-income

families.

 

The female-to-male ratio is already 60-40 at the University of North

Carolina, Boston University, and New York University. To keep their gender

ratios 50-50, many Ivy League and other elite schools are secretly employing

a kind of stealth affirmative action for boys. "Girls present better

qualifications in the application process -- better grades, tougher classes,

and more thought in their essays," says Michael S. McPherson, president of

Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., where 57% of enrollees are women.

"Boys get off to a slower start."

 

The trouble isn't limited to school. Once a young man is out of the house,

he's more likely than his sister to boomerang back home and sponge off his

mom and dad. It all adds up to the fact that before he reaches adulthood, a

young man is more likely than he was 30 years ago to end up in the new and

growing class of underachiever -- what the British call the "sink group."

 

For a decade, British educators have waged successful classroom programs to

ameliorate "laddism" (boys turning off to school) by focusing on teaching

techniques that re-engage them. But in the U.S., boys' fall from alpha to

omega status doesn't even have a name, let alone the public's attention. "No

one wants to speak out on behalf of boys," says Andrew Sum, director of the

Northeastern University Center for Labor Market Studies. As a social-policy

or educational issue, "it's near nonexistent."

 

On the one hand, the education grab by girls is amazing news, which could

make the 21st the first female century. Already, women are rapidly closing

the M.D. and PhD gap and are on the verge of making up the majority of law

students, according to the American Bar Assn. MBA programs, with just 29%

females, remain among the few old-boy domains.

 

Still, it's hardly as if the world has been equalized: Ninety percent of the

world's billionaires are men. Among the super rich, only one woman, Gap Inc.

co-founder Doris F. Fisher, made, rather than inherited, her wealth. Men

continue to dominate in the highest-paying jobs in such leading-edge

industries as engineering, investment banking, and high tech -- the sectors

that still power the economy and build the biggest fortunes. And women still

face sizable obstacles in the pay gap, the glass ceiling, and the

still-Sisyphean struggle to juggle work and child-rearing.

 

But attaining a decisive educational edge may finally enable females to

narrow the earnings gap, punch through more of the glass ceiling, and gain

an equal hand in rewriting the rules of corporations, government, and

society. "Girls are better able to deliver in terms of what modern society

requires of people -- paying attention, abiding by rules, being verbally

competent, and dealing with interpersonal relationships in offices," says

James Garbarino, a professor of human development at Cornell University and

author of Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them.

 

Righting boys' problems needn't end up leading to reversals for girls. But

some feminists say the danger in exploring what's happening to boys would be

to mistakenly see any expansion of opportunities for women as inherently

disadvantageous to boys. "It isn't a zero-sum game," says Susan M. Bailey,

executive director of the Wellesley Centers for Women. Adds Macalester's

McPherson: "It would be dangerous to even out the gender ratio by treating

women worse. I don't think we've reached a point in this country where we

are fully providing equal opportunities to women."

 

Still, if the creeping pattern of male disengagement and economic dependency

continues, more men could end up becoming losers in a global economy that

values mental powers over might -- not to mention the loss of their talent

and potential. The growing educational and economic imbalances could also

create societal upheavals, altering family finances, social policies, and

work-family practices. Men are already dropping out of the labor force,

walking out on fatherhood, and disconnecting from civic life in greater

numbers. Since 1964, for example, the voting rate in Presidential elections

among men has fallen from 72% to 53% -- twice the rate of decline among

women, according to Pell's Mortenson. In a turnaround from the 1960s, more

women now vote than men.

 

Boys' slide also threatens to erode male earnings, spark labor shortages for

skilled workers, and create the same kind of marriage squeeze among white

women that already exists for blacks. Among African Americans, 30% of 40- to

44-year-old women have never married, owing in part to the lack of men with

the same academic credentials and earning potential. Currently, the

never-married rate is 9% for white women of the same age. "Women are going

to pull further and further ahead of men, and at some point, when they want

to form families, they are going to look around and say, 'Where are the

guys?"' says Mortenson.

 

Corporations should worry, too. During the boom, the most acute labor

shortages occurred among educated workers -- a problem companies often

solved by hiring immigrants. When the economy reenergizes, a skills shortage

in the U.S. could undermine employers' productivity and growth.

 

Better-educated men are also, on average, a much happier lot. They are more

likely to marry, stick by their children, and pay more in taxes. From the

ages of 18 to 65, the average male college grad earns $2.5 million over his

lifetime, 90% more than his high school counterpart. That's up from 40% more

in 1979, the peak year for U.S. manufacturing. The average college diploma

holder also contributes four times more in net taxes over his career than a

high school grad, according to Northeastern's Sum. Meanwhile, the typical

high school dropout will usually get $40,000 more from the government than

he pays in, a net drain on society.

 

Certainly, many boys continue to conquer scholastic summits, especially boys

from high-income families with educated parents. Overall, boys continue to

do better on standardized tests such as the scholastic aptitude test, though

more low-income girls than low-income boys take it, thus depressing girls'

scores. Many educators also believe that standardized testing's

multiple-choice format favors boys because girls tend to think in broader,

more complex terms. But that advantage is eroding as many colleges now weigh

grades -- where girls excel -- more heavily than test scores.

 

Still, it's not as if girls don't face a slew of vexing issues, which are

often harder to detect because girls are likelier to internalize low

self-esteem through depression or the desire to starve themselves into

perfection. And while boys may act out with their fists, girls, given their

superior verbal skills, often do so with their mouths in the form of vicious

gossip and female bullying. "They yell and cuss," says 15-year-old Keith

Gates, an Ottumwa student. "But we always get in trouble. They never do."

 

Before educators, corporations, and policymakers can narrow the new gender

gap, they will have to understand its myriad causes. Everything from

absentee parenting to the lack of male teachers to corporate takeovers of

lunch rooms with sugar-and-fat-filled food, which can make kids hyperactive

and distractable, plays a role. So can TV violence, which hundreds of

studies -- including recent ones by Stanford University and the University

of Michigan -- have linked to aggressive behavior in kids. Some believe boys

are responding to cultural signals -- downsized dads cast adrift in the New

Economy, a dumb-and-dumber dude culture that demeans academic achievement,

and the glamorization of all things gangster that makes school seem so

uncool. What can compare with the allure of a gun-wielding, model-dating hip

hopper? Boys, who mature more slowly than girls, are also often less able to

delay gratification or take a long-range view.

 

Schools have inadvertently played a big role, too, losing sight of boys --

taking for granted that they were doing well, even though data began to show

the opposite. Some educators believed it was a blip that would change or

feared takebacks on girls' gains. Others were just in denial. Indeed, many

administrators saw boys, rather than the way schools were treating them, as

the problem.

 

Thirty years ago, educational experts launched what's known as the "Girl

Project." The movement's noble objective was to help girls wipe out their

weaknesses in math and science, build self-esteem, and give them the

undisputed message: The opportunities are yours; take them. Schools focused

on making the classroom more girl-friendly by including teaching styles that

catered to them. Girls were also powerfully influenced by the women's

movement, as well as by Title IX and the Gender & Equity Act, all of which

created a legal environment in which discrimination against girls -- from

classrooms to the sports field -- carried heavy penalties. Once the chains

were off, girls soared.

 

Yet even as boys' educational development was flat-lining in the 1990s --

with boys dropping out in greater numbers and failing to bridge the gap in

reading and writing -- the spotlight remained firmly fixed on girls. Part of

the reason was that the issue had become politically charged and girls had

powerful advocates. The American Association of University Women, for

example, published research cementing into pedagogy the idea that girls had

deep problems with self-esteem in school as a result of teachers' patterns,

which included calling on girls less and lavishing attention on boys.

Newspapers and TV newsmagazines lapped up the news, decrying a new

confidence crisis among American girls. Universities and research centers

sponsored scores of teacher symposiums centered on girls. "All the focus was

on girls, all the grant monies, all the university programs -- to get girls

interested in science and math," says Steve Hanson, principal of Ottumwa

High School in Iowa. "There wasn't a similar thing for reading and writing

for boys."

 

Some boy champions go so far as to contend that schools have become

boy-bashing laboratories. Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against

Boys, says the AAUW report, coupled with zero-tolerance sexual harassment

laws, have hijacked schools by overly feminizing classrooms and attempting

to engineer androgyny.

 

The "earliness" push, in which schools are pressured to show kids achieving

the same standards by the same age or risk losing funding, is also far more

damaging to boys, according to Lilian G. Katz, co-director of ERIC

Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education. Even the nerves

on boys' fingers develop later than girls', making it difficult to hold a

pencil and push out perfect cursive. These developmental differences often

unfairly sideline boys as slow or dumb, planting a distaste for school as

early as the first grade.

 

Instead of catering to boys' learning styles, Pollock and others argue, many

schools are force-fitting them into an unnatural mold. The reigning

sit-still-and-listen paradigm isn't ideal for either sex. But it's one girls

often tolerate better than boys. Girls have more intricate sensory

capacities and biosocial aptitudes to decipher exactly what the teacher

wants, whereas boys tend to be more anti-authoritarian, competitive, and

risk-taking. They often don't bother with such details as writing their

names in the exact place instructed by the teacher.

 

Experts say educators also haven't done nearly enough to keep up with the

recent findings in brain research about developmental differences.

"Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of teachers are not trained in this," says

Michael Gurian, author of Boys and Girls Learn Differently. "They were

taught 20 years ago that gender is just a social function."

 

In fact, brain research over the past decade has revealed how differently

boys' and girls' brains can function. Early on, boys are usually superior

spatial thinkers and possess the ability to see things in three dimensions.

They are often drawn to play that involves intense movement and an element

of make-believe violence. Instead of straitjacketing boys by attempting to

restructure this behavior out of them, it would be better to teach them how

to harness this energy effectively and healthily, Pollock says.

 

As it stands, the result is that too many boys are diagnosed with

attention-deficit disorder or its companion, attention-deficit hyperactivity

disorder. The U.S. -- mostly its boys -- now consumes 80% of the world's

supply of methylphenidate (the generic name for Ritalin). That use has

increased 500% over the past decade, leading some to call it the new K-12

management tool. There are school districts where 20% to 25% of the boys are

on the drug, says Paul R. Wolpe, a psychiatry professor at the University of

Pennsylvania and the senior fellow at the school's Center for Bioethics:

"Ritalin is a response to an artificial social context that we've created

for children."

 

Instead of recommending medication -- something four states have recently

banned school administrators from doing -- experts say educators should

focus on helping boys feel less like misfits. Experts are designing new

developmentally appropriate, child-initiated learning that concentrates on

problem-solving, not just test-taking. This approach benefits both sexes but

especially boys, given that they tend to learn best through action, not just

talk. Activities are geared toward the child's interest level and

temperament. Boys, for example, can learn math through counting pinecones,

biology through mucking around in a pond. They can read Harry Potter instead

of Little House on the Prairie, and write about aliens attacking a hospital

rather than about how to care for people in the hospital. If they get antsy,

they can leave a teacher's lecture and go to an activity center replete with

computers and manipulable objects that support the lesson plan.

 

Paying attention to boys' emotional lives also delivers dividends. Over the

course of her longitudinal research project in Washington (D.C.) schools,

University of Northern Florida researcher Rebecca Marcon found that boys who

attend kindergartens that focus on social and emotional skills -- as opposed

to only academic learning -- perform better, across the board, by the time

they reach junior high.

 

Indeed, brain research shows that boys are actually more empathic,

expressive, and emotive at birth than girls. But Pollock says the boy code,

which bathes them in a culture of stoicism and reticence, often socializes

those aptitudes out of them by the second grade. "We now have executives

paying $10,000 a week to learn emotional intelligence," says Pollock. "These

are actually the skills boys are born with."

 

The gender gap also has roots in the expectation gap. In the 1970s, boys

were far more likely to anticipate getting a college degree -- with girls

firmly entrenched in the cheerleader role. Today, girls' expectations are

ballooning, while boys' are plummeting. There's even a sense, including

among the most privileged families, that today's boys are a sort of payback

generation -- the one that has to compensate for the advantages given to

males in the past. In fact, the new equality is often perceived as a loss by

many boys who expected to be on top. "My friends in high school, they just

didn't see the value of college, they just didn't care enough," says New

York University sophomore Joe Clabby. Only half his friends from his high

school group in New Jersey went on to college.

 

They will face a far different world than their dads did. Without college

diplomas, it will be harder for them to find good-paying jobs. And more and

more, the positions available to them will be in industries long thought of

as female. The services sector, where women make up 60% of employees, has

ballooned by 260% since the 1970s. During the same period, manufacturing,

where men hold 70% of jobs, has shrunk by 14%.

 

These men will also be more likely to marry women who outearn them. Even in

this jobless recovery, women's wages have continued to grow, with the pay

gap the smallest on record, while men's earnings haven't managed to keep up

with the low rate of inflation. Given that the recession hit male-centric

industries such as technology and manufacturing the hardest, native-born men

experienced more than twice as much job loss as native-born women between

2000 and 2002.

 

Some feminists who fought hard for girl equality in schools in the early

1980s and '90s say this: So what if girls have gotten 10, 20 years of

attention -- does that make up for centuries of subjugation? Moreover,

what's wrong with women gliding into first place, especially if they deserve

it? "Just because girls aren't shooting 7-Eleven clerks doesn't mean they

should be ignored," says Cornell's Garbarino. "Once you stop oppressing

girls, it stands to reason they will thrive up to their potential."

 

Moreover, girls say much of their drive stems from parents and teachers

pushing them to get a college degree because they have to be better to be

equal -- to make the same money and get the same respect as a guy. "Girls

are more willing to take the initiative...they're not afraid to do the

work," says Tara Prout, the Georgetown-bound senior class president at

Lawrence High. "A lot of boys in my school are looking for credit to get

into college to look good, but they don't really want to do the grunt work."

 

A new world has opened up for girls, but unless a symmetrical effort is made

to help boys find their footing, it may turn out that it's a lonely place to

be. After all, it takes more than one gender to have a gender revolution.

 

 

By Michelle Conlin