Excerpt from The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Someone should have noticed that the boys were lagging behind. The college gap was a genuine and dangerous trend. But at just the time the girls were surpassing the boys in this critical way, the gender activists in the Department of Education, the AAUW, the Wellesley Center, and the Ms. Foundation chose to announce the "shortchanged-girl" crisis. For the next several years, the gender gap in college enrollment continued to widen, but the attention of the American public and government was focused on the nation's "underserved girls."

Why Do Boys Test Better?

The girl advocates cannot plausibly deny that girls get better grades, that they are more engaged academically, or that they are now the majority sex in higher education. So they point to psychological and sociological differences: self-esteem gaps, "call-out" gaps, confidence gaps. But these, we have seen, do not withstand scrutiny. There is a better argument advanced by the girl-crisis crowd that is based on correct data: boys do score better on almost every significant standardized test, especially high-stakes tests such as the Scholastic Aptitude Assessment Test (SAT) and law school, medical school, and graduate school admission tests.

In 1996, I wrote an article for Education Week reporting on the many ways in which female students were moving ahead of males. Seizing on the test data that suggest that boys were doing better than girls, David Sadker, in a critical response, wrote, "If females are soaring in school, as Christina Hoff Sommers writes, then these tests are blind to their flight." Boys do, indeed, tend to test better than girls. On the 1998 Scholastic Assessment Test, boys were 35 points (out of 800) ahead of girls in math, 7 points ahead in English. Is Sadker right in suggesting that the boys' superior scores are a manifestation of their privileged status?

The answer is no. A careful look at the pool of students who take the SAT and other such tests shows that the girls' lower scores have little or nothing to do with bias or unfairness. Indeed, the scores do not even signify lower achievement by girls. First of all, a greater percentage of girls than boys take the SAT (54 percent to 46 percent). Furthermore, according to the College Board's Profile of SAT and Achievement Test Takers, many more girls from "at-risk" categories take the test than do "at-risk" boys. Specifically, more girls from lower-income homes or with parents who never graduated from high school or never attended college attempt the SAT than boys from the same background. "These characteristics," says the College Board Profile, "are associated with lower than average SAT scores."

In other words, because boys at risk tend not to take the test while girls at risk tend to do so, the girls' average score is lower. Instead of wrongly using SAT scores as evidence of bias against girls, scholars should be concerned about the boys who never show up for the tests they need if they are to move on to higher education.

Yet another extraneous factor skews test results so they appear to favor boys. Nancy Cole, president of the Educational Testing Service, terms it the "spread" phenomenon. : On almost any intelligence or achievement test, male scores are more spread out than female scores at the extremes of ability and disability: there are more male prodigies at the high end and more males of marginal ability at the low end. Or, as the political scientist James Q. Wilson once put it, "There are more male geniuses and more male idiots."

We should also take into account that males dominate the dropout lists, the failure lists, and the learning disability lists. Such students rarely take high-stakes tests. On the other hand, the exceptional boys who take school seriously show up in disproportionately high numbers for the standardized tests. Gender-equity activists such as Sadker ought to apply their logic consistently: if the shortage of girls at the high end of the ability distribution is evidence of "unfairness" to girls, the excess of boys at the low end must be deemed evidence of "unfairness" to boys.

Copyright © 2000 by Christina Hoff Sommers