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COPYRIGHT 1998 Transaction Publishers, Inc.
When the American Association of University Women (AAUW) launched its now famous report, How Schools Shortchange Girls (1992), I wondered how anyone could believe such an absurdity. Hadn't all of us spent years of our lives in schools? Didn't we all know from our own personal experience that it was the girls who usually got the higher grades, that it was the boys who got disciplined more often and more harshly, that it was the boys who more often got held back a grade? "Having been going to school for the past billion years," as one of my own college students put it in a paper he wrote on the AAUW report, "I'm just as qualified to write about this as the University Women" (Kleinfeld, 1996:146).
I could see how people might well believe that women were shortchanged in the labor market. Women do earn less than men and hold jobs of lower prestige. Whether this pattern reflects women's personal choices or gender discrimination requires sophisticated statistical analyses to control for such influences as part-time work or work history interruptions. But wages in the labor market are like grades in school, and progress up the educational ladder is like progress up the occupational ladder. The school pattern is the opposite of the labor market pattern. Why do so many smart people seem to believe, then, that schools discriminate against girls? After all, most people don't blindly accept the "findings" of social science research, especially when these findings conflict with their personal experience. They ask themselves, "Does this research ring true?"
I got a clue to this puzzle when I had dinner with my daughter, a Yale senior, and her friends during a visit to the campus. "What are you working on now?" asked Susan, one of my daughter's roommates. "I'm reviewing the research on the issue of gender differences in school achievement, this idea that the schools shortchange girls," I told her. "You probably read in the media about the AAUW study, which argued that teachers give a lot more classroom attention to boys. That's a shocking tale! The backbone of the AAUW study was research by David and Myra Sadker who claimed to have found that boys call out answers in the classroom eight times more often than girls. The Sadkers said that the teachers paid attention to the boys when they called out but told the girls they should raise their hands when they wanted to talk.
"Now here's the disturbing part. Christina Hoff Sommers explains in Who Stole Feminism? that she tried to find the original research on which the Sadkers' claim was based and the research report had vanished. Can you imagine - research featured in newspapers, magazine articles, and television programs across the country? I decided to call David Sadker myself to ask for a copy of this research. I figured I shouldn't accept Christina Hoff Sommers's account without giving him a chance to respond. But he admitted he had no copy of his own research and actually referred me to his university's proposal office to search for a copy!"(1)
Susan listened politely, but her body language revealed her skepticism. She was no ideologue on gender issues, but her personal experience resonated far more with the Sadkers' claims than with Sommers's critique. Since I was reviewing the literature on gender issues, she figured she would ask me a question that troubled her. "Why do men do so much better in mathematics?" she asked me, hoping I could shed some light on what she saw with her own eyes at Yale.
My own daughter, whose political passions do not include gender issues, held the same view. "In my classes at Yale," she said, "it's the men who talk a lot. The women don't talk nearly as much, even in the small seminars." To these Yale seniors, the AAUW accusation that the schools shortchanged girls rang true. To me, a professor at the University of Alaska, a state school enrolling high school students from the middle of their high school classes, the charge seemed absurd. I had just as many, if not more, female students who excelled and dominated class discussion.
Furthermore, professors at many other colleges had noticed not male dominance but instead a troubling pattern of "male underachievement" in college that most people didn't notice or want to talk about (Kleinfeld, 1997). Eric Godfrey, a professor at Ripon College in Wisconsin, had posted this message on the Internet:
On our campus, a task force has been discussing the reason for the difference in academic performance between male and female students, which is substantially in favor of women: (1) Have you observed this phenomenon on your campus - women as a whole outperforming men as a whole?.... One of my seniors did his research project on the subject and found that on virtually every measure of academic work women outperformed men by a statistically significant margin. (p. 4)
Of the thirty-six responses to Godfrey's posting, virtually everyone said an academic gap existed in favor of women on their campuses - the exception was a college of engineering. But the vast majority (thirty-one out of thirty-six responses) did not define this situation as a "problem." Such Internet postings are not, of course, a generalizable source of evidence, but they do suggest a possible problem which has not received serious research attention.
As I thought more about the perspective of these young women at Yale, I realized that they were living in an unrepresentative universe. These young women were living in a tail - specifically the far right hand tail of the normal curve. The male and female students at Yale were hardly representative of male and female students; they were a "select sample." But then the authors of the AAUW report themselves, researchers at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, inhabited another select setting, as I knew well from my own Wellesley College days. The nationally syndicated columnists who wrote about the AAUW report, the professionals and policymakers concerned with the issue, all lived in the same unrepresentative universe.
Among such select samples, in this unrepresentative universe, males very often do better than females - far better - on intellectual tasks. The reasons are complicated, poorly understood, and rooted in part in the greater variability of males in many domains, from mental retardation and neurological disorders...
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