The War Against Boys

by Christina Hoff Sommers

  But how remarkable is it that the girls, asked by an interviewer to say something about (a) unfairness and (b) not listening, got the idea that they were expected to describe instances in which they had felt that they were unfairly treated and their views were ignored?

  Gilligan’s sentimental, valorizing descriptions of adolescent girls are frankly absurd. Her study of “unfairness and not listening”—despite its charts, graphs, and tables—is a caricature of research. Most of the girls’ comments are entirely ordinary. Gilligan inflates their significance by reading profound meanings into them.

  What About Boys?

  Gilligan would have us believe that preteen girls are cognitively special. But what about boys? Do boys of eleven also make “outrageously wonderful statements”? Are they also spontaneous and incorruptibly frank? Or does Gilligan believe that, unlike girls, eleven-year-old boys are “for sale”? As boys move into adolescence, do they, too, suffer a loss of openness and frankness? Are they also diminished in their teen years? Could it be that girls’ specialness consists of their sophistication when compared with relatively clueless boys?

  To establish her thesis that our culture silences adolescent girls, Gilligan would need to identify some clear notions of candor and measures of outspokenness, then embark on a carefully designed study of thousands of American boys and girls. Anecdotal methods—especially anecdotal methods applied to one sex—cannot begin to make the case. Moreover, Gilligan does not offer even anecdotal evidence that preteen boys and girls differ in natural wisdom and forthrightness.

  It might actually be, then, that preteen boys are just as astute and alive as preteen girls. That would have several possible implications for Gilligan’s theory. Perhaps, like girls, adolescent boys are silenced and “forced underground.” But if that is the case, sex is not a decisive factor; instead we are dealing with the familiar problem of adolescent insecurity that afflicts both girls and boys, and Gilligan’s sensational claim that girls are at special risk would turn out to be false.

  Alternatively, it may be that only girls “sell out” and become inarticulate and conformist; that adolescent boys remain independent, honest, and open interpreters of social reality. This, too, doesn’t seem right; certainly Gilligan would reject any alternative that valorized boys as more candid and articulate than girls.

  Unlike Gilligan, the rest of us enjoy the option of avoiding gender politics and returning to the conventional view that normal girls and boys do not differ significantly in respect to astuteness and candor. Both pass from childhood to adolescence by becoming less narcissistic, more reflective, and less sure about their grasp of the complex world that is opening up to them. Leaving junior high school, both boys and girls emerge from a “know-it-all” stage into a more mature stage in which they begin to appreciate that there is a vast amount they do not know. If so, it is not true that “girls start not knowing what they had known,” but rather that most older children of both sexes quite sensibly go through a period of realizing that what they thought they knew may not be true at all—and that there is a lot out there to be learned.

  When the Times article appeared, Gilligan had not yet studied boys. The article gave the impression that boys, beneficiaries of the male-voiced culture, were doing comparatively well. A few years later, Gilligan would announce that boys, too, were victims of the dominant culture, forced in early childhood to adopt masculine stereotypes that cause a host of ills, including their own loss of “voice.” But in the early nineties, her focus was exclusively girls.

  Prose did not deem Gilligan’s neglect of boys a failing. On the contrary, she treated it as a virtue: “By concentrating on girls, the project’s new studies avoid the muddle of gender comparisons and the issue of whether boys experience a similar ‘moment of resistance.’ Gilligan and her colleagues are simply telling us how girls sound at two proximate but radically dissimilar stages of growing up.”12 What Prose considered a muddle to be avoided is, however, clearly a crucial part of any research on adolescent development. For how, in the absence of comparative studies, can we possibly know whether what Gilligan described is specific to girls?

  Gilligan might at least have warned Prose of the limitations of her findings. Quite apart from Gilligan’s scholarly obligation to give us a comprehensive picture of adolescence as a backdrop for her assertions about girls, she should have taken care that the public was not misled. Instead, her inattention to boys invited the conclusion that girls were in distress because the system was biased in favor of boys. And indeed, many of her readers (including some who are in charge of important women’s organizations) did take Gilligan’s research as surefire proof that our society favors boys and shortchanges girls.

  The Girl Crisis

  Popular writers, electrified by Gilligan’s discovery, began to see evidence of the crisis everywhere. Anna Quindlen, who was then a New York Times columnist, recounted in a 1990 column how Gilligan’s research had cast an ominous shadow on the celebration of her daughter’s second birthday: “My daughter is ready to leap into the world, as though life were chicken soup and she a delighted noodle. The work of Professor Carol Gilligan of Harvard suggests that some time after the age of 11 this will change, that even this lively little girl will pull back [and] shrink.”13

  The country’s adolescent girls were both pitied and exalted. The novelist Carolyn See wrote in the Washington Post Book World in 1994, “The most heroic, fearless, graceful, tortured human beings in this land must be girls from the ages of 12 to 15.”14 In the same vein, American University professors Myra and David Sadker in Failing at Fairness predicted the fate of a lively six-year-old on top of a playground slide: “There she stood on her sturdy legs, with her head thrown back and her arms flung wide. As ruler of the playground, she was at the very zenith of her world.” But all would soon change: “If the camera had photographed the girl . . . at twelve instead of six . . . she would have been looking at the ground instead of the sky; her sense of self-worth would have been an accelerating downward spiral.”15 In Mary Pipher’s 1994 Reviving Ophelia, by far the most successful of the girl-crisis books, girls undergo a fiery demise. “Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves. They crash and burn.”16

  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.”17 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.18

  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.

  Seven Women and a Fax Machine

  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.”19 Gilligan would soon come down from her ivory to
wer 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.”20

  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.”21

  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.”22

  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.”23 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.”24

  An American Tragedy

  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.25 “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.”27 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.”28

  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.”30 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.31

  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.32 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?”33 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.”34

  Education Week reported that the AAUW spent $100,000 for the second study and $150,000 promoting it.35 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.”36 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.”37

  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.’ ”38

  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.39 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.40

  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?’ ”41 Political action came next, and here, too, girls’ advocates were successful.