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About the Author
Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University. His books include Literary Criticism: An Autopsy (1997) and Negrophobia: A Race Riot in Atlanta, 1906 (2001). His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Weekly Standard, TLS, Yale Review, Partisan Review, Reason Magazine, and many other national periodicals. Topics he will cover include the ideological climate of the campus, knowledge and skill levels of U.S. students, and technology in the classroom.
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More on Boys and Girls
We’ve heard a lot about the “boy crisis” in higher education, and strong evidence for it has come from a variety of sources. College admissions offices struggle each year to keep their entering classes at less than a 3-to-2 ratio of girls to boys. The American Association of Publishers reported in 2005 that “male students study one-third less than women, party more often, are more likely to earn a ‘C’ or less in their courses, and expect to take longer to graduate, according to a nationwide study of 1,800 college students released today by Student Monitor.” And former Newsweek editor Peg Tyre wrote last month at The Huffington Post that “boys get expelled from preschool at nearly five times the rate of girls, they get identified as being learning disabled or having behavior issues at four times the rate. They are twice as likely to get held back. They bring home more C’s and D’s on their report cards and according to the Centers for Disease Control, by the time American boys are 16 years old, a full 14 percent have been ‘diagnosed’ with an attention deficit disorder.”
All of this runs against a much-publicized report by American Association of University Women announcing that the boy crisis was a complete myth. (Go here to reach the full report on pdf file.) The report offered several arguments and facts to counter the belief that boys are in trouble, but singled out this one the most:
“Perhaps the most compelling evidence against the existence of a boys’ crisis is that men continue to outearn women in the workplace. Among all women and men working full time, year round, women’s median annual earnings were 77 percent of men’s earnings in 2005 (Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 2007). Looking at the college-educated, full-time work force one year out of college, women [sic] earned 80 percent of men’s earnings on average in 2001, and 10 years out of college, women earned only 69 percent of men’s earnings in 2003 (AAUP Educational Foundation, 2007).”
Here is an explanation for the disparity, though, offered by Leonard Sax in Education Week. (It’s here, but you’ll need a subscription or to go through your library.)
“Remarkably, [the report] makes no mention of the single biggest contributor to that persistent gender gap; namely, the fact that young women continue to choose professions that pay less well than those chosen by men with similar education.”
Sax affirms that women are just as capable of math and physics and engineering as men are, but they don’t choose those lucrative fields. Apparently, when boys good at math and science are asked if they want to make a career of them, many answer, “Yes.” When girls good at math and science are asked, “girls today almost unanimously answer it NO.” In fact, the absolute number of women in computer science and physics, he notes, fell by more than 50 percent in the last 20 years. The truth is, “Women remain more likely than men to major in art history and journalism; men are more likely than women to major in computer science, physics, and engineering.”
Sax thinks that the answer lies in single-sex classes, which would send more girls into those fields. But according to an AAUP position paper on the issue, quoted by Sax, “Separate is inherently unequal.” That sounds more like an ideological commitment than a factual inference.
(Image derived from a photo by Flickr Creative Commons user Menlo School)
Posted at 02:12:42 PM on June 26, 2008 | All postings by Mark BauerleinComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
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I am not going to infer anything about young adults, their educational capacity or ultimately their earnings power, but the fact that small boys get into trouble more than girls is not news. It has always been this way and always will be. My kids make fun of the fact that I have vivid memories of getting in trouble three times in elementary school, while my husband says he was in trouble “three times before lunch.” I have a degree and he doesn’t, but I earn less because I left my field for 12 years to raise a family and did not keep up with the technology.
— deborah · Jun 26, 03:14 PM · #
There is a sense in which the males of most primate species are more expendable than are the females. In most primate species, a few good males are sufficient. The rest are surplus and are peripheralized. Some of them hang around for occasional opportunistic interactions. Maybe making trouble is also testing the limits, and that process is ultimately only constructive for some—the ones who learn how to constructively deal with limits, learning to either leave them alone or how to challenge them successfully. Of course, there is very substantial overlap in most gender-related behavioral differences, but “testosterone poisoning” surely accounts for something!
— Joe Erwin · Jun 26, 04:05 PM · #
“Separate is inherently unequal.” Of course that’s an ideological statement, more commonly referred to as the Fourteenth Amendment and its subsequent case law. Whether or not gender segregation is pedagogically proven is irrelevant. It’s illegal in public universities.
— Josephine · Jun 26, 04:20 PM · #
“Et tu, Brute?” Just when it looked like we had a bit of peace on this subject over at the Nemko blog.
All right. This is the CHE, right? So, let’s just mosey over to the AAUP’s salary statistics and find out if women fare as well as men in academia – home of the “enlightened”.
Answer: No. And in general, it doesn’t even matter which field a woman is in. There will be a few token new minority hires here and there at a salary higher than her peers, but that will be made up for later in promotions, salary raises, etc. Even in fields where women have earned the majority of PhDs during the past few decades, men dominate the ranks of full professor, and within rank, salaries as well.
The interesting question for all the “old boys” out there is how is it that boys have been in these “crises” all of their lives and yet they manage to dominate wage statistics so that gender even cuts across the race lines: white males earn more than black males who earn more than white females who earn more than black females?
Clearly, given the situation for women in academia, where places like Stanford are just thrilled with themselves when fewer than one-fourth of the faculty are female – after all, that statistic was enough to save Stanford and its then Provost, now Secretary of State, from having to pay the piper on a gender discrimination suit – someone ought to admit that the AAUW has some real ammunition in its arsenal.
Heck, Johns Hopkins just promoted its first black female to full professor of medicine this past academic year. Now, there have been no black women in medicine in the USA, eh? It took until 2007 for that finally to happen at the premier medical institution of the country.
AAUW, you’re onto something, that’s for sure. The “old boys” are circling the wagons, once again.
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jun 26, 04:25 PM · #
My sense of the matter, after forty years of university teaching, is that the lure of scholarly life and academic careers (outside of science and engineering and medicine) has declined greatly for young men. A good part of the explanation, I think, is that many fields in the humanities and social sciences are perceived to have been “feminized’, both in terms of demographics and in terms of doctrine. Like it or not, bright and ambitious young men are still embedded in a macho culture, as are young men with less on the ball intellectually. As a result, the usual inducements to pursue scholarship seriously—prestige and secure professional status—have lost their luster, while the appeal of, say, investment banking, which once might have been considered a bit vulgar, is that much stronger.
Needless to say, AAUW is just about the last organization one would expect to recognize the negative effects of its own dogmas.
— Fossil · Jun 26, 06:25 PM · #
On Comment 5:
I know it’s only from SFGate but here are some of the “overwhelming” statistics of women’s “dominance” at Stanford that helped the U.S. Labor Department to “disprove” gender discrimination in hiring at former Provost (now Secretary of State) Rice’s Stanford:
“In the last decade, Stanford has increased its hiring rate for women from 26 percent of new hires in the 1997-98 academic year to 30 percent of new hires in 2006-07, according to Patricia Jones, vice provost for faculty development and diversity. And women who are hired achieve tenure at a slightly greater rate than men: Of the women hired since 1995, 52 percent stayed and received tenure while 50 percent of the men did.
“Overall, women make up 24.5 percent of the faculty.”
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/03/BAGMVUM5S.DTL&hw=Stanford+discrimination&sn=001&sc=1000
Men just aren’t going into academia much anymore at all; it’s so “‘feminized’, both in terms of demographics and in terms of doctrine”. Why, just look at those numbers. Academia used to be able to attract and keep men at a much more “respectable” 90+ percent of new hires and newly tenured.
Tsk, tsk. That darned AAUW….
— Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jun 26, 09:30 PM · #
Josephine (Comment 3) asserts that single-sex education is “illegal in public universities.” Not so. The United States Supreme Court ruled on this matter in 1996 in the case of US v. VMI. The decision, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, affirmed that single-sex education IS legal in public universities provided that comparable courses, services, and facilities are made available to both sexes. Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote a ten-page concurrence devoted to an explanation of what the word “comparable” means in this context. He explained that “comparable” does not mean “identical.” It means that you spend the same amount of money on the women as you do on the men. The ruling offered Virginia the opportunity to retain VMI as an all-male university, provided that Virginia establish a comparable all-female university. Virginia unfortunately declined the invitation, and instead compelled VMI to become coed. More information about the legal status of single-sex public education is available at http://www.singlesexschools.org/policy-legalstatus.htm.
— Leonard Sax MD PhD · Jul 1, 06:09 AM · #