Girls Against Boys?
Katha Pollitt
Thu Jan 12, 1:50 PM ET
The Nation
I went to Radcliffe, the women's wing of Harvard, at a time when the
combined undergraduate student body was fixed at four male students for
every female one. I don't remember anyone worrying about the boys'
social lives, or whether they would find anyone to marry--even though
nationally, too, boys were more likely to go to college and to graduate
than girls. When in 1975 President Derek Bok instituted equal-access
admissions, nobody said, "Great idea, more marital choice for educated
men!"
What a difference a few decades and a gender revolution make. Now,
although both sexes are much more likely to go to college than forty
years ago--the proportion of the population enrolled in college is 20
percentage points higher today than in 1960--girls have edged ahead of
boys. Today, women make up 57 percent of undergraduates, and the gap is
projected to reach 60/40 in the next few years. This year, even manly
Harvard admitted more girls than boys to its freshman class. So of
course the big question is, Who will all those educated women marry?
"Advocates for women have been so effective politically that high
schools and colleges are still focusing on supposed discrimination
against women," writes John Tierney in a recent New York Times column.
"You could think of this as a victory for women's rights, but many of
the victors will end up celebrating alone." If the ladies end up
cuddling with their diplomas, they have only themselves--and those
misguided "advocates for women"--to blame. Take that, you
hyper-educated spinster, you.
The conservative spin on the education gender gap is that feminism has
ruined school for boys. "Why would any self-respecting boy want to
attend one of America's increasingly feminized universities?" asks
George Gilder in National Review. "Most of these institutions have
flounced through the last forty years fashioning a fluffy pink playpen
of feminist studies and agitprop 'herstory,' taught amid a green goo of
eco-motherism and anti-industrial phobia." Sounds like fun, but it
doesn't sound much like West Texas A&M, Baylor, Loyola or the
University of Alabama, where female students outnumber males in about
the same proportion as they do at trendy Berkeley and Brown. Even
Hillsdale College, the conservative academic mecca that became famous
for rejecting federal funds rather than comply with government
regulations against sex discrimination, has a student body that is 51
percent female. Other pundits--Michael Gurian, Kate O'Beirne, Christina
Hoff Sommers--blame the culture of elementary school and high school:
too many female teachers, too much sitting quietly, not enough sports
and a feminist-friendly curriculum that forces boys to read--oh
no!--books by women. Worse--books about women.
For the record, in middle school my daughter was assigned exactly one
book by a woman: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. In
high school she read three, Mrs. Dalloway, Beloved and Uncle Tom's
Cabin, while required reading included male authors from Shakespeare
and Fitzgerald and Sophocles to (I kid you not) James Michener and
Robert Adams, author of Watership Down. Four books in seven years: Is
that what we're arguing about here? Furthermore, I don't know where
those pundits went to school, but education has always involved a lot
of sitting, a lot of organizing, a lot of deadlines and a lot of work
you didn't necessarily feel like doing. It's always been heavily
verbal--in fact, today's textbooks are unbelievably dumbed down and
visually hyped compared with fifty years ago. Conservatives talk as if
boys should be taught in some kind of cross between boot camp and
Treasure Island--but what kind of preparation for modern life would
that be? As for the decline of gym and teams and band--activities that
keep academically struggling kids, especially boys, coming to
school--whose idea was it to cut those "frills" in the first place if
not conservatives?
If the mating game worked fine when women were ignorant and helpless
and breaks down when they smarten up, that certainly tells us something
about marriage. But does today's dating scene really consist of women
who love Woolf and men who love Grand Theft Auto? College may not
create the intellectual divide elite pundits think it does. (Just spend
some time looking at student life as revealed at www.facebook.com if
you really want to get depressed about American universities.) For most
students, it's more like trade school--they go to get credentials for
employment and, because of the sexist nature of the labor market, women
need those credentials more than men. Believe it or not, there are
still stereotypically male jobs that pay well and don't require college
degrees--plumbing, cabinetry, electrical work, computer repair,
refrigeration, trucking, mining, restaurant cuisine. My daughter had
two male school friends, good students from academically oriented
families, who chose cooking school over college. Moreover, as I'll
discuss in my next column, sex discrimination in employment is alive
and well: Maybe boys focus less on school because they think they'll
come out ahead anyway. What solid, stable jobs with a future are there
for women without at least some higher ed? Heather Boushey, an
economist with the Center for Economic Policy and Research, noted that
women students take out more loans than their male classmates, even
though a BA does less to increase their income. The sacrifice would
make sense, though, if the BA made the crucial difference between
respectable security and a lifetime as a waitress or a file clerk.
This is not to say that boys make the right choice when they blow off
school, or even that it always is a choice. People's ideas about life
often lag behind reality--some boys haven't gotten the message about
the decline of high-paying blue-collar work, or the unlikeliness of rap
or sports stardom, the way some girls haven't gotten the message that
it is foolish, just really incredibly stupid, to rely on being
supported by a man. Most of them, however, have read the memo about
having, if not a career exactly, career skills. Their mothers, so many
of them divorced and struggling, made sure of that. As for the boys,
maybe they will just have to learn to learn in a room full of smart
females.