Declaring and debunking crises has become a subsidiary industry of the gender wars.
The latest to roll off the D&D assembly line is a study from the American Association of University Women (AAUW) that purports to debunk the idea of a "boys crisis," which followed closely on the heels of a purported "girls crisis."
Boys are doing just fine, say the AAUW authors, who also insist that the boy crisis was a fabrication of people who are uncomfortable with the progress of girls and women. The authors also assert that girls' development hasn't come at the expense of boys, as some allegedly claim. These conclusions are somewhat baffling, given that (1) they are untrue (boys are not fine, as abundant evidence makes clear) and (2) they refute what has never been claimed.
What is true is that when attention rightly focused on girls' special needs - thanks in part to the 1992 AAUW report, "How Schools Shortchange Girls" - boys were, wrongly, shuttled to the back burner.
The AAUW report does present some compelling findings indicating that the real education crisis is tied more to race and family income than to gender. That is, both boys and girls in certain groups (African-American and Hispanic) and children from low-income homes are doing almost equally poorly. But those findings don't justify the conclusion that boys aren't in trouble. According to Judith Kleinfeld, psychology professor at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and director of the Boys Project, illiteracy rates among high school boys are higher than among girls; the reading gap for boys is larger at all ages and increases with age; and boys receive lower marks from grade school through college.
By trumpeting advances of both sexes while ignoring problems characteristic of boys, the AAUW authors' purpose seems clear: to divert attention from the "boy problem" lest any more attention be siphoned from programs built around the alleged girl crisis.
Much can be inferred from the defensive tone of the study and from the people the authors chose to attack. One target was Christina Hoff Sommers, the cool-headed philosopher and American Enterprise Institute scholar who wrote The War Against Boys, which the AAUW authors describe as "incendiary." The report also mentions former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who was derided for suggesting innate differences between men and women might partly explain why fewer women than men excel in science and math.
