Boys Crying Wolf

The overreaction to women closing the gender gap.

By Rohan Mascarenhas, Amherst College

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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