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

Suppose we were to turn our attention away from the highly motivated self-selected two fifths of high school students who take the SAT and instead consider a truly representative sample of American schoolchildren. How would girls and boys then compare? The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), started in 1969 and mandated by the U.S. Congress, offers the best and most comprehensive measure of achievement for students of all levels of ability. Under the NAEP program, a large scientific sample of 70,000 to 100,000 students drawn from forty-four states is tested in reading, writing, math, and science at ages nine, thirteen, and seventeen. (The NAEP scale scores range from 0 to 500.) In 1996, seventeen-year-old boys outperformed girls by 5 points in math and 8 points in science, while the girls outperformed boys by 14 points in reading and 17 points in writing. Throughout the past two decades, girls have been catching up in math and science, while boys continue to lag far behind in reading and writing, a gap that is not narrowing.

New Research Findings

In the July 7, 1995 issue of Science, Larry Hedges and Amy Nowell, researchers at the University of Chicago, observed that girls' deficits in math were small but not insignificant. These deficits, they noted, could adversely affect the number of women who "excel in scientific and technical occupations." Of boys' writing skills, they wrote, "The large sex differences in writing...are alarming. The data imply that males are, on average, at a rather profound disadvantage in the performance of this basic skill." Hedges and Nowell go on to warn, "The generally larger numbers of males who perform near the bottom of the distribution in reading comprehension and writing also have policy implications. It seems likely that individuals with such poor literacy skills will have difficulty finding employment in an increasingly information-driven economy. Thus, some intervention may be required to enable them to participate constructively."

Hedges and Nowell are describing a serious problem of national scope, but because the focus has been exclusively on girls' deficits, it is not a problem Americans know much about or even suspect exists. It is very hard to look at the school data on adolescents or the most recent data on college students without coming to the conclusion that girls and young women are thriving, while boys and young men are languishing.

In 1995, perhaps in reaction to criticism -- from an increasing number of unpersuaded scholars -- the AAUW commissioned a more serious scientific study of gender and academic achievement. That study, The Influence of School Climate on Gender Differences in the Achievement and Engagement of Young Adolescents, by University of Michigan professor Valerie E. Lee and her associates, was released without the fanfare the AAUW usually lavishes on such publications. This is not surprising. Lee's study strongly suggests that earlier reports of a tragic demoralization and shortchanging of America's schoolgirls have been greatly exaggerated.

Lee and her associates analyzed data on the educational achievement and engagement of more than nine thousand eighth-grade boys and girls and found that the differences between boys and girls were "small to moderate." Moreover, the pattern of gender differences is "inconsistent in direction." In some areas, females are favored; in others, males are favored. The study showed that the girls were more engaged academically than the boys: they were better prepared for class, had better attendance records, and evinced more positive academic behavior overall.

Lee's temperate conclusions, in research sponsored by the AAUW, were based on U.S. Department of Education data and were fully consistent with the findings of Hedges and Nowell. But they are at odds with the disturbing picture that the AAUW earlier so successfully sold to the American public and Congress. Lee concluded, "The public discourse around issues of gender in school needs some change...Inequity can (and does) work in both directions." As far as I have been able to ascertain, Valerie Lee's responsible and objective study was not mentioned in a single newspaper.

Copyright © 2000 by Christina Hoff Sommers