Boys Crying Wolf
The overreaction to women closing the gender gap.
By Rohan Mascarenhas, Amherst College
Wednesday July 26, 2006
A grave crisis has gripped our nation’s universities: female students can’t find dates to the spring formal. Talking to the New York Times, Gail Hanson, a student at American University, described the sorry state of affairs: “If there’s a dance, do the women get their hair done? Yes. Do they get their nails done? Yes. But do they have a date? Probably not. So who do they dance with? Whoever wants to dance.” Lest you think the problem lies with Hanson’s annoying manner of speech, Esquire recently reported that the problem is in fact widespread, with the college ratio of men to women so surprisingly low in America that “1 in 4 female students can’t find a male peer to date.”
And that is only half the problem. After all, we all want to go on good dates, and judging from the recent media coverage of the supposed “boy crisis,” you wouldn’t be wrong in assuming that all men are sports-crazed, lazy, addicted to video games (especially “Grand Theft Auto”), and inherently – biologically – incapable of reading two pages of a book that doesn’t contain an action hero and lots of pictures. Things have gotten so bad that Kenyon College’s Dean of Admissions actually felt the need to apologize to “all the girls I’ve rejected” for the sake of gender balance. It seems that we can only pity ambitious women like Madison Barringer, another AU student, who says, “I know it sounds picky, but…I want to be able to have that intellectual conversation.”
 Well, actually, considering that men still dominate in law, medicine, dentistry, and doctorates, Barringer need not despair. In fact, while the media has been largely content to encourage the notion that a stark “gender gap” exists in colleges and schools, the statistics paint a much more complicated picture, which certainly can’t be described as being as stark as a “crisis.” Men are, after all, still doing very well for themselves, and much better than women. If anything, data of boys’ academic performances reveals only what we’ve known for a long time: America’s high schools are in deep trouble, and are failing those who need them the most – low-income students and disadvantaged minorities. But instead of discussing these issues, analysts – especially conservative ones – are exploiting the coverage to decry the feminist movement and public schooling, opening yet another front in our nation’s increasingly toxic culture wars.
On the surface, Newsweek, The New Republic, National Review and PBS – media outlets that have recently covered the issue – appear to have a point. “Men constitute 44 percent of undergraduates on college campuses,” writes Rich Lowry in National Review, “down from 58 percent 30 years ago.” The problem actually develops long before university, at the upper- and even lower-levels of schooling. Describing “recent plunges” in boys’ performances, Richard Whitmire writes in The New Republic, “Between 1992 and 2002, the gap by which high school girls outperformed boys on tests in both reading and writing – especially writing – widened significantly.”
This is justifiably worrying, but also somewhat misleading. Sara Mead of the Education Sector believes that what we’re seeing isn’t boys falling back, but girls catching up. “The real story,” she says, “is not bad news about boys doing worse; it’s good news about girls doing better.” Yes, women outnumber men in colleges, but men are certainly not disappearing. In fact, they are attending at “historically high” rates, just not as fast as women. And if you look at just students in four-year colleges straight out of high school (not nontraditional schools, like 2-year colleges, where women dominate), “the percentages of men and women are much closer.” In other words, don’t give up hope of finding that “special someone” just yet.
Even in lower levels of schooling, boys aren’t the slackers they’re made out to be. In math, they outperform girls at all grade levels (I am, sadly, an exception to this rule), while the gap between younger boys and girls in reading and writing has “narrowed significantly” since the 1970s.
The real gap has very little to do with gender. It says something that “the Harvard’s and Princeton’s and Stanford’s have no trouble drawing talented men,” as Whitmire concedes, or that men from the highest-income families actually attend college at a slightly higher rate than their sisters. “Overall,” concludes Jacqueline King, an education expert, “the differences between blacks and whites, rich and poor, dwarf the differences between men and women within any particular group.” And even in high schools, where the gender gap is supposedly the most pronounced, performance has fallen across the board, among both boys and girls.
But we have known all this for a long time, and we have been discussing it ever since President Bush made education reform and “No Child Left Behind” a cornerstone of his domestic policy. Strangely, however, conservatives have not taken their usual position; instead of emphasizing the need for increased accountability in public schools or decrying the “cultural” roadblocks that exist amongst struggling minority youth, they have framed this crisis as “biology’s revenge.” Suddenly, black men who were previously listening to too much hip-hop or rejecting Bill Cosby’s advice to stop talking “funny” are in trouble now because they’re not “male” enough. And it’s all feminism’s fault.
“Why would any self-respecting boy want to attend one of America’s increasingly feminized universities?” asks George Gilder in National Review. “Most of these institutions have flounced through the last forty years fashioning a fluffy pink playpen of feminist studies and agitprop ‘herstory,’ taught amid a green goo of eco-motherism and anti-industrial phobia.” Christina Hoff Sommers, another conservative scholar who has hyped the “boy crisis” for half a decade now, chimes in as well and blames anti-boy feminists, who believe that “so-called male behaviors – roughhousing and aggressive competition – are not natural but artifacts of culture.” Her solution? Enforce discipline; stop making boys read Jane Eyre; and if they “don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about their feelings,” let them be!
And there we have it, plain and simple: conservatives may argue that they are just concerned with a new inequality, but they are talking about the “boy crisis” so much because they are worried about what independent, well-educated women might do to our society. Tom Mortenson, a conservative, explains his dilemma: “On the one hand, you want to embrace the success of women,” he admits. “Yet, as more and more women substitute careers for having babies, I’ve come to see that we’re looking at a population crisis…You can do the math—if we continue this way the white population is headed for extinction.” In other words, if the human race is to survive, women need to put down the books and make us some babies.
This reaction is very disappointing, as are reports that a boy has sued his high school because it promoted the arts and community service over sports. One great legacy of feminism was precisely its ability to challenge to “traditional” stereotypical gender roles. Mark Edmundson, a professor at UVA, recounts how, when he was in high school in the fifties, there were only three types of boys: “bullying alphas,” “betas who followed them around,” and “group three – the ‘faggots.’” We have come a long way since then; men don’t always have to be businessmen who play baseball and belch loudly and women certainly don’t have to slave away in the kitchen all day. Part of the fun about being an adolescent – either boy or girl – is fully exploring who you are, and not being afraid of who you want to be.
If we stop concerning ourselves with what makes a boy a boy, and focus on the hard stuff – like committing our government to funding its education reform proposals or examining why we put so many of our African-American citizens in jails – maybe then we can say something good has come out of all this “crisis” talk. And maybe then I will be able to admit proudly that I watch "Gilmore Girls" and actually enjoy it.
Rohan Mascarenhas is a summer 2006 intern with the Progress Report team at the Center for American Progress. He studies Political Science at Amherst College.
Illustration: Matt Bors
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As much as I would like to belive what I just read there is a problem, what I see with my own eyes convince me that woman are getting far better treatment in schools.
At my University’s honors program I can honestly say that I went to meeting of 40-50 and been the only male in the room. Those graduating with honors at my school were almost 80 precent female.
— Mike - Jul 26, 07:51 PM - #Mike—so you’re saying that since more women graduated with honors they must be “getting far better treatment”?
could it be that more women than men at your school are interested in pursuing (and, apparently, earning) graduation honors?
— Annika - Jul 26, 08:29 PM - #Annika- I think you’re right about why there would be more women graduating with honors in Mike’s class than men. But I also think that women need to have those honors on their resumes more than men do. I don’t think it’s right, but I know there are people out there who are more inclined to hire men, if only to avoid the possibility of things like (gasp) maternity leave, etc. Not to mention that there’s a huge wage gap. If there was more gender equality in the workplace and women and men were always hired based on their qualifications, and not their gender – or race for that matter (that’ll be the day), things might balance out at the undergraduate level as well.
— AnnaF - Jul 26, 11:17 PM - #I’m not saying anything of the sort…Only what my eyes tell me.
You can draw the implications of what it means for yourself.
However, the idea that the solution to inequality for one group of people is to tolorate inequality in another area is morally wrong.
— Mike Z. - Jul 27, 05:53 AM - #I enjoyed this article very much. As a feminist theories major at an accreditied university I have a real knowledge from experience of seeing women succeed men in academics. Men, in my experience, are very much afraid of this succession. And therefore oppose it to all ends. This article did make reference to feminism a few times, and would like to add that this discourse is the only one of its kind that critiques itself as much as it critiques the societies of our world. Statistics will always be our quantitative form of denial and in I am glad to see an article written with so much more than those in mind.
Mike, women are not getting better treatment in school, don’t fool yourself. Most of the women graduating from four year universities busted their asses out of junior college to get there.
Most gender generalizations balence themselves out through graduate school and doctoral programs, where men far outnumber women.
— Jeff M - Jul 27, 08:15 AM - #The Feminist Majority Fnd. just had a forum that included some information about this, especially a couple things the coverage on this subject has left out:
1) women are disproportionately attending 2-year colleges
2) Women are participating, but not leading—though women make up a well-published majority on college campuses, only 1 out of 4 student body presidents are female.
If you’re like most college students, your student body and class presidents are male, and your vice president is female. In other words, women are still not running and/or not getting elected to positions of authority, instead playin a supporting role—how connected is this to the lack of women in positions of leadership in the federal government?
— Dara K. - Jul 27, 09:41 AM - #This analysis is nicely done—especially refreshing after all the analyses trying to show exactly the opposite lately.
Another point is that even while the number of women may be increasing in colleges, their pay after college is still way below that of their male counterparts. White men with four-year degrees still make more than any other group. It will take women until 4/24/07 to earn as much as men earn in 2006.
Think women have far to go until people can start griping that they’re outpacing men.
— Amanda T. - Jul 27, 03:00 PM - #Amanda – thanks for providing the figures on the wage gap.
Mike – you said “However, the idea that the solution to inequality for one group of people is to tolorate inequality in another area is morally wrong.”
— AnnaF - Jul 27, 05:07 PM - #I think you completely misinterpreted what I said, but I’m not quite sure how to make it any clearer. I’m not supporting inequality at ANY level. I’m saying that EQUALITY in hiring and wages would make it equally important for men and women to pursue honors, and then we might see more men doing so. I completely disagree with the notion that women get better treatment, and maybe I should have made that clear. In short, I am in no way suggesting that inequality is the way to make things right.
Well done, Rohan! An astute analysis from a gifted Amherst man. Methinks one day you just may grow up to be a cartographer (a mapmaker)..
— Tim - Jul 27, 05:25 PM - #Great article. Thanks .
— Elsa - Jul 27, 10:27 PM - #I think the last paragraph sums it up very nicely!!! There are other gaps to worry about besides boy vs. girl
— amber h. - Jul 28, 11:10 AM - #This article was a fun read on a different issue that added contrast to many of the other articles on this site! Thanks!
— Corey Ponder - Jul 29, 11:44 PM - #I totally agree with the last comment made about the last paragraph, which basically gave a brief summation as to needing more funds put into the education system. This is a very imformative article.
— Gerrie - Aug 2, 07:33 AM - #As mentioned by one other, about the fact of seeing the lack of men in the college scene (as stated), we as women our wages are still lower then the men’s even though we have the same college education,sometimes better ones. Could the difference be only a biological one, but what does that have to do with it? We are all humans.
Mike, I am glad you took the time to make your points. The feminists around these parts are incurably androphobic. They must see women as victims regardless of how compelling the evidence to the contrary. They carry so much influence on campus and with the media that misandry has become the final acceptable form of bigotry.
— Phil - Aug 3, 09:13 PM - #Phil,
— Dara - Aug 4, 09:00 AM - #you hit the nail on the head! We feminists also have terrible penis envy and enjoy eating babies and promoting the gay agenda. Keep up the good work!
Yes Dara, No you don’t have a penis envy, in the rest I fully agree with you
— Durman - Aug 26, 02:58 AM - #I would agree that women greatly outnumber men at the college level. They worked hard to get there and they deserve to be there. Men seem to have this mentality that they can be lazy in life and still succeed. It’s kind of mind boggling.
Women you can get a date if you are friendly and outgoing. A little gym time wouldn’t hurt either
— Tyler - Sep 21, 09:36 AM - #