COVER STORY

Business Week, May 26, 2003

The New Gender Gap

>From kindergarten to grad school, boys are becoming the second sex

By Michelle Conlin

 

Lawrence High is the usual fortress of manila-brick blandness and boxy

1960s architecture. At lunch, the metalheads saunter out to the smokers'

park, while the AP types get pizzas at Marinara's, where they talk about

-- what else? -- other people. The hallways are filled with lip-glossed

divas in designer clothes and packs of girls in midriff-baring track

tops. The guys run the gamut, too: skate punks, rich boys in Armani, and

saggy-panted crews with their Eminem swaggers. In other words, they look

pretty much as you'd expect.

 

But when the leaders of the Class of 2003 assemble in the Long Island

high school's fluorescent-lit meeting rooms, most of these boys are

nowhere to be seen. The senior class president? A girl. The

vice-president? Girl. Head of student government? Girl. Captain of the

math team, chief of the yearbook, and editor of the newspaper? Girls.

 

It's not that the girls of the Class of 2003 aren't willing to give the

guys a chance. Last year, the juniors elected a boy as class president.

But after taking office, he swiftly instructed his all-female slate that

they were his cabinet and that he was going to be calling all the shots.

The girls looked around and realized they had the votes, says Tufts

University-bound Casey Vaughn, an Intel finalist and one of the alpha

femmes of the graduating class. "So they impeached him and took over."

 

The female lock on power at Lawrence is emblematic of a stunning gender

reversal in American education. From kindergarten to graduate school,

boys are fast becoming the second sex. "Girls are on a tear through the

educational system," says Thomas G. Mortenson, a senior scholar at the

Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in

Washington. "In the past 30 years, nearly every inch of educational

progress has gone to them." Just a century ago, the president of Harvard

University, Charles W. Eliot, refused to admit women because he feared

they would waste the precious resources of his school. Today, across the

country, it seems as if girls have built a kind of scholastic Roman

Empire alongside boys' languishing Greece. Although Lawrence High has

its share of boy superstars -- like this year's valedictorian -- the

gender takeover at some schools is nearly complete. "Every time I turn

around, if something good is happening, there's a female in charge,"

says Terrill O. Stammler, principal of Rising Sun High School in Rising

Sun, Md. Boys are missing from nearly every leadership position,

academic honors slot, and student-activity post at the school. Even

Rising Sun's girls' sports teams do better than the boys'. At one

exclusive private day school in the Midwest, administrators have even

gone so far as to mandate that all awards and student-government

positions be divvied equally between the sexes. "It's not just that boys

are falling behind girls," says William S. Pollock, author of Real Boys:

Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood and a professor of

psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "It's that boys themselves are

falling behind their own functioning and doing worse than they did

before." It may still be a man's world. But it is no longer, in any way,

a boy's. From his first days in school, an average boy is already

developmentally two years behind the girls in reading and writing. Yet

he's often expected to learn the same things in the same way in the same

amount of time. While every nerve in his body tells him to run, he has

to sit still and listen for almost eight hours a day. Biologically, he

needs about four recesses a day, but he's lucky if he gets one, since

some lawsuit-leery schools have banned them altogether. Hug a girl, and

he could be labeled a "toucher" and swiftly suspended -- a result of

what some say is an increasingly anti-boy culture that pathologizes

their behavior.

 

If he falls behind, he's apt to be shipped off to special ed, where

he'll find that more than 70% of his classmates are also boys. Squirm,

clown, or interrupt, and he is four times as likely to be diagnosed with

attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. That often leads to being

forced to take Ritalin or risk being expelled, sent to special ed, or

having parents accused of negligence. One study of public schools in

Fairfax County, Va., found that more than 20% of upper-middle-class

white boys were taking Ritalin-like drugs by fifth grade.

 

Once a boy makes it to freshman year of high school, he's at greater

risk of falling even further behind in grades, extracurricular

activities, and advanced placement. Not even science and math remain his

bastions. And while the girls are busy working on sweeping the honor

roll at graduation, a boy is more likely to be bulking up in the weight

room to enhance his steroid-fed Adonis complex, playing Grand Theft

Auto: Vice City on his PlayStation2, or downloading rapper 50 Cent on

his iPod. All the while, he's 30% more likely to drop out, 85% more

likely to commit murder, and four to six times more likely to kill

himself, with boy suicides tripling since 1970. "We get a bad rap," says

Steven Covington, a sophomore at Ottumwa High School in Ottumwa, Iowa.

"Society says we can't be trusted."

 

As for college -- well, let's just say this: At least it's easier for

the guys who get there to find a date. For 350 years, men outnumbered

women on college campuses. Now, in every state, every income bracket,

every racial and ethnic group, and most industrialized Western nations,

women reign, earning an average 57% of all BAs and 58% of all master's

degrees in the U.S. alone. There are 133 girls getting BAs for every 100

guys -- a number that's projected to grow to 142 women per 100 men by

2010, according to the U.S. Education Dept. If current trends continue,

demographers say, there will be 156 women per 100 men earning degrees by

2020.

 

Overall, more boys and girls are in college than a generation ago. But

when adjusted for population growth, the percentage of boys entering

college, master's programs, and most doctoral programs -- except for

PhDs in fields like engineering and computer science -- has mostly

stalled out, whereas for women it has continued to rise across the

board. The trend is most pronounced among Hispanics, African Americans,

and those from low-income families.

 

The female-to-male ratio is already 60-40 at the University of North

Carolina, Boston University, and New York University. To keep their

gender ratios 50-50, many Ivy League and other elite schools are

secretly employing a kind of stealth affirmative action for boys. "Girls

present better qualifications in the application process -- better

grades, tougher classes, and more thought in their essays," says Michael

S. McPherson, president of Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., where

57% of enrollees are women. "Boys get off to a slower start."

 

The trouble isn't limited to school. Once a young man is out of the

house, he's more likely than his sister to boomerang back home and

sponge off his mom and dad. It all adds up to the fact that before he

reaches adulthood, a young man is more likely than he was 30 years ago

to end up in the new and growing class of underachiever -- what the

British call the "sink group."

 

For a decade, British educators have waged successful classroom programs

to ameliorate "laddism" (boys turning off to school) by focusing on

teaching techniques that re-engage them. But in the U.S., boys' fall

from alpha to omega status doesn't even have a name, let alone the

public's attention. "No one wants to speak out on behalf of boys," says

Andrew Sum, director of the Northeastern University Center for Labor

Market Studies. As a social-policy or educational issue, "it's near

nonexistent."

 

On the one hand, the education grab by girls is amazing news, which

could make the 21st the first female century. Already, women are rapidly

closing the M.D. and PhD gap and are on the verge of making up the

majority of law students, according to the American Bar Assn. MBA

programs, with just 29% females, remain among the few old-boy domains.

 

Still, it's hardly as if the world has been equalized: Ninety percent of

the world's billionaires are men. Among the super rich, only one woman,

Gap Inc. co-founder Doris F. Fisher, made, rather than inherited, her

wealth. Men continue to dominate in the highest-paying jobs in such

leading-edge industries as engineering, investment banking, and high

tech

-- the sectors that still power the economy and build the biggest

fortunes. And women still face sizable obstacles in the pay gap, the

glass ceiling, and the still-Sisyphean struggle to juggle work and

child-rearing.

 

But attaining a decisive educational edge may finally enable females to

narrow the earnings gap, punch through more of the glass ceiling, and

gain an equal hand in rewriting the rules of corporations, government,

and society. "Girls are better able to deliver in terms of what modern

society requires of people -- paying attention, abiding by rules, being

verbally competent, and dealing with interpersonal relationships in

offices," says James Garbarino, a professor of human development at

Cornell University and author of Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent

and How We Can Save Them.

 

Righting boys' problems needn't end up leading to reversals for girls.

But some feminists say the danger in exploring what's happening to boys

would be to mistakenly see any expansion of opportunities for women as

inherently disadvantageous to boys. "It isn't a zero-sum game," says

Susan M. Bailey, executive director of the Wellesley Centers for Women.

Adds Macalester's McPherson: "It would be dangerous to even out the

gender ratio by treating women worse. I don't think we've reached a

point in this country where we are fully providing equal opportunities

to women." Still, if the creeping pattern of male disengagement and

economic dependency continues, more men could end up becoming losers in

a global economy that values mental powers over might -- not to mention

the loss of their talent and potential. The growing educational and

economic imbalances could also create societal upheavals, altering

family finances, social policies, and work-family practices. Men are

already dropping out of the labor force, walking out on fatherhood, and

disconnecting from civic life in greater numbers. Since 1964, for

example, the voting rate in Presidential elections among men has fallen

from 72% to 53% -- twice the rate of decline among women, according to

Pell's Mortenson. In a turnaround from the 1960s, more women now vote

than men. Boys' slide also threatens to erode male earnings, spark labor

shortages for skilled workers, and create the same kind of marriage

squeeze among white women that already exists for blacks. Among African

Americans, 30% of 40- to 44-year-old women have never married, owing in

part to the lack of men with the same academic credentials and earning

potential. Currently, the never-married rate is 9% for white women of

the same age. "Women are going to pull further and further ahead of men,

and at some point, when they want to form families, they are going to

look around and say, 'Where are the guys?"' says Mortenson. Corporations

should worry, too. During the boom, the most acute labor shortages

occurred among educated workers -- a problem companies often solved by

hiring immigrants. When the economy reenergizes, a skills shortage in

the U.S. could undermine employers' productivity and growth.

 

Better-educated men are also, on average, a much happier lot. They are

more likely to marry, stick by their children, and pay more in taxes.

>From the ages of 18 to 65, the average male college grad earns $2.5

million over his lifetime, 90% more than his high school counterpart.

That's up from 40% more in 1979, the peak year for U.S. manufacturing.

The average college diploma holder also contributes four times more in

net taxes over his career than a high school grad, according to

Northeastern's Sum. Meanwhile, the typical high school dropout will

usually get $40,000 more from the government than he pays in, a net

drain on society.

 

Certainly, many boys continue to conquer scholastic summits, especially

boys from high-income families with educated parents. Overall, boys

continue to do better on standardized tests such as the scholastic

aptitude test, though more low-income girls than low-income boys take

it, thus depressing girls' scores. Many educators also believe that

standardized testing's multiple-choice format favors boys because girls

tend to think in broader, more complex terms. But that advantage is

eroding as many colleges now weigh grades -- where girls excel -- more

heavily than test scores.

 

Still, it's not as if girls don't face a slew of vexing issues, which

are often harder to detect because girls are likelier to internalize low

self-esteem through depression or the desire to starve themselves into

perfection. And while boys may act out with their fists, girls, given

their superior verbal skills, often do so with their mouths in the form

of vicious gossip and female bullying. "They yell and cuss," says

15-year-old Keith Gates, an Ottumwa student. "But we always get in

trouble. They never do."

 

Before educators, corporations, and policymakers can narrow the new

gender gap, they will have to understand its myriad causes. Everything

from absentee parenting to the lack of male teachers to corporate

takeovers of lunch rooms with sugar-and-fat-filled food, which can make

kids hyperactive and distractable, plays a role. So can TV violence,

which hundreds of studies -- including recent ones by Stanford

University and the University of Michigan -- have linked to aggressive

behavior in kids. Some believe boys are responding to cultural signals

-- downsized dads cast adrift in the New Economy, a dumb-and-dumber dude

culture that demeans academic achievement, and the glamorization of all

things gangster that makes school seem so uncool. What can compare with

the allure of a gun-wielding, model-dating hip hopper? Boys, who mature

more slowly than girls, are also often less able to delay gratification

or take a long-range view.

 

Schools have inadvertently played a big role, too, losing sight of boys

-- taking for granted that they were doing well, even though data began

to show the opposite. Some educators believed it was a blip that would

change or feared takebacks on girls' gains. Others were just in denial.

Indeed, many administrators saw boys, rather than the way schools were

treating them, as the problem.

 

Thirty years ago, educational experts launched what's known as the "Girl

Project." The movement's noble objective was to help girls wipe out

their weaknesses in math and science, build self-esteem, and give them

the undisputed message: The opportunities are yours; take them. Schools

focused on making the classroom more girl-friendly by including teaching

styles that catered to them. Girls were also powerfully influenced by

the women's movement, as well as by Title IX and the Gender & Equity

Act, all of which created a legal environment in which discrimination

against girls

-- from classrooms to the sports field -- carried heavy penalties. Once

the chains were off, girls soared.

 

Yet even as boys' educational development was flat-lining in the 1990s

-- with boys dropping out in greater numbers and failing to bridge the

gap in reading and writing -- the spotlight remained firmly fixed on

girls. Part of the reason was that the issue had become politically

charged and girls had powerful advocates. The American Association of

University Women, for example, published research cementing into

pedagogy the idea that girls had deep problems with self-esteem in

school as a result of teachers' patterns, which included calling on

girls less and lavishing attention on boys. Newspapers and TV

newsmagazines lapped up the news, decrying a new confidence crisis among

American girls. Universities and research centers sponsored scores of

teacher symposiums centered on girls. "All the focus was on girls, all

the grant monies, all the university programs -- to get girls interested

in science and math," says Steve Hanson, principal of Ottumwa High

School in Iowa. "There wasn't a similar thing for reading and writing

for boys."

 

Some boy champions go so far as to contend that schools have become

boy-bashing laboratories. Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War

Against Boys, says the AAUW report, coupled with zero-tolerance sexual

harassment laws, have hijacked schools by overly feminizing classrooms

and attempting to engineer androgyny.

 

The "earliness" push, in which schools are pressured to show kids

achieving the same standards by the same age or risk losing funding, is

also far more damaging to boys, according to Lilian G. Katz, co-director

of ERIC Clearinghouse on Elementary and Early Childhood Education. Even

the nerves on boys' fingers develop later than girls', making it

difficult to hold a pencil and push out perfect cursive. These

developmental differences often unfairly sideline boys as slow or dumb,

planting a distaste for school as early as the first grade.

 

Instead of catering to boys' learning styles, Pollock and others argue,

many schools are force-fitting them into an unnatural mold. The reigning

sit-still-and-listen paradigm isn't ideal for either sex. But it's one

girls often tolerate better than boys. Girls have more intricate sensory

capacities and biosocial aptitudes to decipher exactly what the teacher

wants, whereas boys tend to be more anti-authoritarian, competitive, and

risk-taking. They often don't bother with such details as writing their

names in the exact place instructed by the teacher.

 

Experts say educators also haven't done nearly enough to keep up with

the recent findings in brain research about developmental differences.

"Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of teachers are not trained in this,"

says Michael Gurian, author of Boys and Girls Learn Differently. "They

were taught 20 years ago that gender is just a social function."

 

In fact, brain research over the past decade has revealed how

differently boys' and girls' brains can function. Early on, boys are

usually superior spatial thinkers and possess the ability to see things

in three dimensions. They are often drawn to play that involves intense

movement and an element of make-believe violence. Instead of

straitjacketing boys by attempting to restructure this behavior out of

them, it would be better to teach them how to harness this energy

effectively and healthily, Pollock says.

 

As it stands, the result is that too many boys are diagnosed with

attention-deficit disorder or its companion, attention-deficit

hyperactivity disorder. The U.S. -- mostly its boys -- now consumes 80%

of the world's supply of methylphenidate (the generic name for Ritalin).

That use has increased 500% over the past decade, leading some to call

it the new K-12 management tool. There are school districts where 20% to

25% of the boys are on the drug, says Paul R. Wolpe, a psychiatry

professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the senior fellow at the

school's Center for Bioethics: "Ritalin is a response to an artificial

social context that we've created for children."

 

Instead of recommending medication -- something four states have

recently banned school administrators from doing -- experts say

educators should focus on helping boys feel less like misfits. Experts

are designing new developmentally appropriate, child-initiated learning

that concentrates on problem-solving, not just test-taking. This

approach benefits both sexes but especially boys, given that they tend

to learn best through action, not just talk. Activities are geared

toward the child's interest level and temperament. Boys, for example,

can learn math through counting pinecones, biology through mucking

around in a pond. They can read Harry Potter instead of Little House on

the Prairie, and write about aliens attacking a hospital rather than

about how to care for people in the hospital. If they get antsy, they

can leave a teacher's lecture and go to an activity center replete with

computers and manipulable objects that support the lesson plan.

 

Paying attention to boys' emotional lives also delivers dividends. Over

the course of her longitudinal research project in Washington (D.C.)

schools, University of Northern Florida researcher Rebecca Marcon found

that boys who attend kindergartens that focus on social and emotional

skills -- as opposed to only academic learning -- perform better, across

the board, by the time they reach junior high.

 

Indeed, brain research shows that boys are actually more empathic,

expressive, and emotive at birth than girls. But Pollock says the boy

code, which bathes them in a culture of stoicism and reticence, often

socializes those aptitudes out of them by the second grade. "We now have

executives paying $10,000 a week to learn emotional intelligence," says

Pollock. "These are actually the skills boys are born with."

 

The gender gap also has roots in the expectation gap. In the 1970s, boys

were far more likely to anticipate getting a college degree -- with

girls firmly entrenched in the cheerleader role. Today, girls'

expectations are ballooning, while boys' are plummeting. There's even a

sense, including among the most privileged families, that today's boys

are a sort of payback generation -- the one that has to compensate for

the advantages given to males in the past. In fact, the new equality is

often perceived as a loss by many boys who expected to be on top. "My

friends in high school, they just didn't see the value of college, they

just didn't care enough," says New York University sophomore Joe Clabby.

Only half his friends from his high school group in New Jersey went on

to college.

 

They will face a far different world than their dads did. Without

college diplomas, it will be harder for them to find good-paying jobs.

And more and more, the positions available to them will be in industries

long thought of as female. The services sector, where women make up 60%

of employees, has ballooned by 260% since the 1970s. During the same

period, manufacturing, where men hold 70% of jobs, has shrunk by 14%.

 

These men will also be more likely to marry women who out-earn them.

Even in this jobless recovery, women's wages have continued to grow,

with the pay gap the smallest on record, while men's earnings haven't

managed to keep up with the low rate of inflation. Given that the

recession hit male-centric industries such as technology and

manufacturing the hardest, native-born men experienced more than twice

as much job loss as native-born women between 2000 and 2002.

 

Some feminists who fought hard for girl equality in schools in the early

1980s and '90s say this: So what if girls have gotten 10, 20 years of

attention -- does that make up for centuries of subjugation? Moreover,

what's wrong with women gliding into first place, especially if they

deserve it? "Just because girls aren't shooting 7-Eleven clerks doesn't

mean they should be ignored," says Cornell's Garbarino. "Once you stop

oppressing girls, it stands to reason they will thrive up to their

potential." Moreover, girls say much of their drive stems from parents

and teachers pushing them to get a college degree because they have to

be better to be equal -- to make the same money and get the same respect

as a guy. "Girls are more willing to take the initiative...they're not

afraid to do the work," says Tara Prout, the Georgetown-bound senior

class president at Lawrence High. "A lot of boys in my school are

looking for credit to get into college to look good, but they don't

really want to do the grunt work." A new world has opened up for girls,

but unless a symmetrical effort is made to help boys find their footing,

it may turn out that it's a lonely place to be. After all, it takes more

than one gender to have a gender revolution.