Gender gap blues

For almost 12 years, in the 1980s and early 1990s, I homeschooled my two children, a girl and a boy. One was driven and anxious and sometimes drove me crazy. The other was casual and unmotivated and sometimes drove me crazy. Any guesses as to which was which? Most readers would probably guess the girl was the driven one, and that is correct. She was older, and allowance should be made for birth order and personality and less-obvious factors. Still, classroom teachers agree that in a class of 30 students, evenly divided between girls and boys, the former will in general be more attentive, more cooperative, and more motivated.

That’s why Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (published in 1994) made no sense. The author argued that boys were the favored class in school, where they received more attention from teachers and enjoyed an institutional structure that played to their strengths. But if teachers lavished their attention on boys it was often just prior to sending them to the principal’s office. The structure of the classroom inherently favors the social, verbal, and reciprocal gifts of females. Who are the note-takers? And who are the show-offs?

We started hearing about a “gender gap” in the 1990s that was not to the advantage of boys. It grows wider year-by-year, and a study published last week by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) offers new details. For instance, in 32 countries, adolescent girls academically outperformed boys of the same age. The narrowest gaps were in China and the U.K., while the widest appeared in Greece, Jordan, and Turkey—yes, Jordan and Turkey, where women are supposedly at a disadvantage when it comes to educational opportunities. The gap is universal across cultural and social divides, though it narrows toward the highest economic levels.

The key to academic success is reading, where girls rule. But, interestingly, the OECD report confirmed that boys still lead in math skills. When it comes to figuring, the highest-performing boys always outscore the highest-performing girls, and when they’re ready to decide on a college major, only 14 percent of young women opt for STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) degrees. The scarcity of girls in STEM fields appears to be as great a concern as boys slipping behind in overall academics. This New York Times headline makes them sound equally problematic: “Gender Gap in Education Cuts Both Ways” (even though the article under the headline gives a greater weight of concern to the boys).

A Google query, “How do we get more girls in STEM,” yields almost 81 million hits (and a White House initiative). “How do we close the achievement gap between girls and boys” results in 77 million. But think about it: What will be the consequence of a few thousand more young women signing up for engineering majors versus a few million aimless young men who lack training and motivation? Men have traditionally been the drivers of events and culture, and I believe they still are. The real issue is in what direction they drive.