The War Against Boys

by Christina Hoff Sommers

  Between the Perkins Act reauthorization and the new application of Title IX to technology and engineering programs, schools will be forced to adopt gender quotas in those few programs that seem to be working for at-risk boys. Women’s groups vehemently deny that quotas are in the offing. “Title IX does not require quotas,” says the NCWGE. “It simply requires that schools allocate participation opportunities nondiscriminatorily.”69 But over the years, this diffuse requirement has been interpreted by judges, Department of Education officials, college administrators, and women’s groups to mean that women are entitled to “statistical proportionality.” What does that mean? Consider what happened in sports.

  If a college’s student body is 60 percent female, then 60 percent of the athletes should be female—even if far fewer women than men are interested in playing sports at that college. But many athletic directors have been unable to attract the same proportions of women as men. To avoid government harassment, loss of funding, and lawsuits, they have simply eliminated men’s teams. Vocation and technical schools won’t get rid of their “male teams” in welding, engineering, or automotive repair, but they are likely to cut them back and practice reverse discrimination in favor of girls. More resources will be deployed to change the preferences of young women to suit the ideology of groups like the AAUW and the National Women’s Law Center. School leaders have no matching incentive to develop programs that could attract great numbers of disengaged young men. On the contrary, they are well advised to avoid them. Such programs will put them at risk of a federal investigation and loss of funds.

  The Montreal professor, Sumitra Rajagopalan, is surely right. Boys, more than girls, are natural tinkerers, builders, and systematizers. There are a few colleges that have no trouble attracting males—schools whose names include “tech.” If you build them, males will come: Georgia Tech (69 percent male), Rochester Institute of Technology (67 percent); South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (74 percent), and Embry Riddle Aeronautical (85 percent). The Department of Education and the president should be doing all they can to help young men become the builders, engineers, and techies so many of them want to be. Instead, they are creating powerful obstacles to thwart them.

  Temple Grandin, professor of animal science at Colorado State, is an advocate for those who, like herself, are afflicted with a type of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome. She once told an interviewer:

  Who do you think made the first stone spear? That wasn’t the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire. It was some Asperger sitting in the back of a cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearheads. Without some autistic traits you wouldn’t even have a recording device to record this conversation on.70

  But we know that autistic traits are far more common in males than females. Scientists such as Cambridge University’s Simon Baron-Cohen believe autism offers insight into the typical male mind.71 It helps explain the universal male fixation on gadgets, technology, and engineering. Why war against this reality? Why try to change tinkerers into yakkity yaks, or vice versa? To thrive as a society, we need both. By neglecting the needs and interests of boys, we not only sacrifice their life prospects, but our society’s technological future.

  Are There More Girl Geniuses?

  A 2010 New York Times report carries more bad news for boys. A significant gender gap favoring girls has arisen inside New York City’s gifted and talented programs. According to the article, “Around the city, the current crop of gifted kindergarteners . . . is 56 percent girls, and in the 2008–2009 year, 55 percent were girls.”72 In some of the most elite programs, almost three-fifths of the prodigies are girls. Could it be that girls are simply smarter than boys?

  In fact, males and females appear to be equally intelligent on average. But on standardized intelligence tests, more males than females get off-the-chart scores in both directions. The greater variance of males on intelligence tests is one of the best-established findings in psychometric literature. Males predominate among the mentally deficient and the abnormally brilliant. The difference in variation isn’t huge, but it is large and consistent enough that a fair selection process for a gifted-and-talented program will generally produce more boys than girls.

  To give just one example of the difference in IQ distribution, here is what a group of Scottish psychologists found in 2002 when they analyzed the results of IQ tests given to nearly all eleven-year-olds in Scotland in 1932.

  Figure 12: IQ Scores in Scotland, 1932, Gender Percent by IQ Score

  Sample size: 79,376 11-year-olds

  Source: Scottish Mental Survey, 1932.

  This study, one of the most comprehensive in the literature, shows that for the highest IQ score of 140, boys outnumbered girls 277 to 203 (or 57.7 percent boys versus 42.3 percent girls), and for the lowest IQ boys also outnumber girls, by 188 to 133 (or 58.6 percent boys versus 41.4 percent girls).73

  Little appears to have changed in the cognitive profile of men and women since prewar Scotland. Those with IQs above 140 or below 70 are still very much the exception. They can be male or female, but males have a statistically significant edge at both extremes. How did things get turned around with New York City’s kindergarteners? Here is how the Times describes playtime for a group of five-year-old braniacs:

  Four of the boys went to the corner to build an intricate highway structure and a factory from wooden blocks, while two others built trucks. One girl helped them, by creating signs on Post-its to stick on the buildings. Another kindergarten girl, Tamar Greenberg, stood to announce to the class her own activity, a Hebrew lesson. “We’re moving to the green table because it’s too distracting with the computers” in the back, she told the other children. On a roster, she neatly recorded the names of the three children who joined her for the lesson: Skyler, Isabelle and Bayla. “No boys were interested,” Tamar said.74

  Highly gifted boys and girls are just like other children in one respect: in both groups, the girls are more mature, more verbal, and more capable of sitting still. Until a few years ago, admissions directors for New York City’s gifted programs took account of these differences and through a series of tests, interviews, and observations managed to recruit roughly equal numbers of budding engineers and linguists.

  But the old practice of taking equal numbers of boys and girls was phased out a few years ago when Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his administration sought to make the application process more fair, open, and uniform. Reforms were needed because, for many years, admission procedures were haphazard and varied from school to school. Parents who knew how to work the system had a huge advantage. Many average children with assertive parents found their way into the city’s elite programs—and many bright but socially disadvantaged children never had a chance. The Bloomberg administration imposed a uniform and transparent admission process so that all applicants (about fifteen thousand four- and five-year-olds) now take the same two standardized tests. Only children who score in the 90th percentile or above can enter the programs. This approach leaves little room for parental lobbying.

  The reformers believed this open and consistent procedure would yield a more ethnically diverse group of students. So far it has not. It has yielded more girls than boys. As the Times reports, the test is “more verbal than other tests” and it plays to girls’ strengths. Boys are especially disadvantaged by the necessity to sit quietly for one hour and focus exclusively on the test.75 Pre-kindergarten boys with mental abilities three or four standard deviations above the mean have astonishing talents. But as Terry Neu, an expert on gifted boys, told me, sitting still for an extended period of time is not one of them. The capacity to remain seated for a long test does not reliably measure brilliance, but requiring pre-K children to do it is a sure way of securing more places for girls than boys in a gifted program.76

  The developing gender gap in the gifted programs of New York City does not indicate that girls are smarter than boys. Rather, it shows how well-intentioned government officials and educators—adults wit
h the standard adult preferences for order and quiet—can disregard boys’ needs and abilities and unwittingly adopt policies stacked against them. It is a small part of the long story of how boys have become the have-nots in American education.

  The Road to Recovery

  American educators and government officials should follow the example of the British and Australians. We are kindred spirits—inclusive, fractious democracies. We all embrace and insist upon the social and political equality of the sexes, and we all contend with the sometimes excessive pressures for political correctness and multiculturalism. Yet, somehow, the British and Australians openly acknowledge the plight of boys and are unapologetically taking steps to help them. The mood in Great Britain and Australia is constructive and informed by good research and common sense. The mood in the United States is contentious, ideological, and cowed by gender politics. The British have their parliamentary “toolkit of effective practices” for educating boys,77 while Americans have the National Women’s Law Center’s Tools of the Trade: Using the Law to Address Sex Segregation in High School Career and Technical Education.

  We should pay close attention to the advice dispensed by the British Boys’ Reading Commission and the Australians’ Success for Boys. That means more experiments with single-sex classes and academies. That means more schools of education offering special courses on boy-friendly pedagogy. Old-fashioned, structured, competitive, teacher-directed classrooms work best for many boys. Too many get lost in jazz improvisations. We must make room for more boy-enthralling, job-directed schools like Aviation High School and Blackstone Valley Tech, and more boy-effective teachers like Chicago’s Mrs. Daugherty and Montreal’s Professor Rajagopalan.

  Most of all, we need a change of attitude. The women’s lobby, the Department of Education, the gender theorists in our schools of education, the ACLU, the authors of the Perkins Act Reauthorization, and the president of the United States are so carried away with girl power they have forgotten about our male children. They have distracted themselves and the nation from acknowledging a plain and simple fact: American boys across the ability spectrum and in all age groups have become second-class citizens in the nation’s schools. The Australians and British are coping with this reality. If they can do it, so can we.

  8

  The Moral Life of Boys

  Boys who are morally neglected have unpleasant ways of getting themselves noticed. All children need clear, unequivocal rules. They need structure. They thrive on firm guidance and fair discipline from the adults in their lives. But boys need these things even more than girls do.

  The Josephson Institute of Ethics conducts surveys on the moral attitudes of young people. Girls routinely far outperform boys in every measure of honesty and self-control. As part of the 2010 Report Card on the Ethics of American Youth, Josephson researchers polled a sample of more than forty thousand high school students. They found that significantly more boys “agree” or “strongly agree” with the following statements:

  • “A person has to lie or cheat sometimes in order to succeed” (47.4 percent of males versus 29.8 percent of females).1

  • “It’s not cheating if everyone’s doing it” (19.1 percent of males, 9.8 percent of females).2

  • “It’s sometimes okay to hit or threaten a person who makes me angry” (36.7 percent of males, 19.1 percent of females).3

  The American Psychiatric Association defines a “conduct disorder” as “a repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior in which the basic rights of others, or other major age-appropriate societal norms or rules, are violated.”4 According to the APA, the prevalence of conduct disorder has increased since the 1960s. Far more males than females fit the pattern. “Rates vary depending on the nature of populations sampled and the methods of ascertainment: for males under age 18 years, rates range from 6 percent to 16 percent; for females, rates range from 2 percent to 9 percent.”5 For conduct disorders severe enough to gain the attention of the police, boys also predominate. According to the Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Center, 62 percent of children younger than age eighteen arrested for property crimes in 2009 were boys; of those arrested for violent crimes, 82 percent were boys.6

  The male’s greater propensity for antisocial behavior is cross-cultural. A 1997 University of Vermont study compared parents’ reports of children’s behavior in twelve countries. The populations studied (which included the United States, Thailand, Greece, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Sweden) differed greatly in how they raised children and defined gender roles. Yet in every case boys were more likely than girls to fight, swear, steal, throw tantrums, and threaten others.7

  Every new generation enters society unformed. Princeton University demographer Norman B. Ryder speaks of “a perennial invasion of barbarians who must somehow be civilized . . . for societal survival.”8 Ryder views the problem from the vantage point of society. But when socialization is inadequate, the children also suffer. A society that fails in its mission to humanize and civilize its children fails its male children in uniquely harmful ways.

  Janet Daley, the education writer at the Daily Telegraph in London, has written at length about how the lack of directive moral education harms boys more than girls:

  There is one indisputable fact with which anyone who is serious about helping young men must come to terms: boys need far more discipline, structure and authority in their lives than do girls. . . . Boys must be actively constrained by a whole phalanx of adults who come into contact with them—parents, teachers, neighbors, policemen, passers-by in the streets—before they can be expected to control their asocial, egoistic impulses.9

  What happens when boys never encounter that “phalanx of adults”? We don’t have to look far. In the middle and late decades of the twentieth century, the United States experimented with value-free education. Stanford education scholar William Damon has described the era:

  Educators found themselves embedded in a . . . postmodern world. Most responded by concluding that the moral part of their traditional mission had become obsolete. Moral relativism was in, in loco parentis was out. . . . This thinking was a misconception that caused so many readily apparent casualties among the young that it was bound to be abandoned sooner or later.10

  Today, most schools have abandoned once popular laissez-faire attitudes toward behavior. As we saw in earlier chapters, many now err in the opposite direction, with draconian zero-tolerance policies for even harmless behavior. But it is instructive to go back a few decades to a time when large numbers of adults defected altogether from the central task of civilizing the children in their care.

  When the “Barbarians” Don’t Get Civilized

  In the late 1980s and early 1990s, newspapers carried shocking stories about adolescent boys exploiting, assaulting, and terrorizing girls. In the South Bronx, a group of boys known as the “whirlpoolers” surrounded girls in public swimming pools and sexually assaulted them. In Glen Ridge, New Jersey, popular high school athletes raped a mentally disabled girl. In Lakewood, California, a gang of high school boys known as the Spur Posse turned the sexual exploitation of girls into a team sport.11

  Women’s groups seized on these incidents as symptomatic of a violent misogyny pervading American culture. The cause? Stereotypical male socialization. Referring to the Glen Ridge case, feminist pioneer Betty Friedan noted somberly that, “machismo is a fertile ground for the seeds of evil.”12 Columnist Judy Mann wrote that the Spur Posse case “contains all the ingredients of patriarchal culture gone haywire.”13 For Susan Faludi, the Spurs were “ground zero of the American masculinity crisis.”14

  Author Joan Didion wrote a lengthy piece on the Spur Posse for the New Yorker, and Columbia University journalism professor Bernard Lefkowitz spent six years researching the Glen Ridge case for his 1997 book, Our Guys: The Glen Ridge Rape and the Secret Life of the Perfect Suburb. Didion and Lefkowitz offer detailed portraits of the lives of the young male predators. We can see for our
selves some of the forces that turned seemingly normal boys into criminals. Were they desensitized by being separated from their mothers at too early an age, as William Pollack and Carol Gilligan suggest? Are they products of conventional male socialization? Are they the offspring of what Judy Mann calls the “machocracy”?15 The narrative evidence points, albeit unintentionally, to an entirely different cause.

  “Our Guys”

  The Glen Ridge rape was reported on May 25, 1989. Several popular high school athletes had lured a mentally disabled girl into a basement, removed her clothes, and penetrated her with a broomstick. Lefkowitz was intrigued by the question of how seemingly normal American boys had come to commit such acts: “This wasn’t about just a couple of oddballs with a sadistic streak. . . . Thirteen males were present in the basement where the alleged rape occurred. There also were reports that a number of other boys had tried to entice the young woman into the basement a second time to repeat the experience. . . . I wanted to know more about how this privileged American community raised its children, especially its sons.”16

  According to Lefkowitz, these boys were “pure gold, every mother’s dream, every father’s pride. They were not only Glen Ridge’s finest, but in their perfection they belonged to all of us. They were Our Guys.”17 To find out what had gone wrong, he undertook “an examination of the character of their community and of the young people who grew up in it.”18

  Lefkowitz shares with Friedan and Mann the view that machismo created much of the evil: