The Boys and Girls Debate Rages On

You may have read Christina Hoff Sommers' Wall Street Journal op-ed criticizing my paper questioning the "boy crisis" in America's schools. A letter-to-the-editor I wrote ($-sorry) responding to some misinformation in Sommers' piece ran in last Thursday's WSJ.

A number of people who don't like my take on the boy crisis issue have made arguments something along the lines of "So if you don't think the boy-girl achievement gap matters because both genders are increasing but girls are increasing faster, does that mean you don't think the male-female wage gap matters?"

I think this is a silly argument for multiple reasons, most significantly that it's completely divorced from what's really happening with male-female wage gaps, which have been declining recently, but because of falling average male wages, rather than increasing wages for women. Women's groups have, rightly, not been celebrating this kind of gap narrowing, which is a win neither for men nor women. Gaps are important--but this situation illustrates the problems with looking at them alone, rather than looking at how the achievement of both groups between whom a gap exists have changed over time, too.

This argument also seems to undercut itself--if men still earn more than women, why should we be that upset about gender achievement gaps? Remember, gaps favoring girls in reading are longstanding. Men currently in the workforce did worse than the women they currently outearn on school reading tests by pretty close to the same margin as today's boys do worse than today's girls in reading. And even the supposedly aimless young men right out of college are earning more, controlling for field, than their female peers. Until we have much clearer evidence that these gaps produce negative results for men and society (which we do for specific subgroups, such as low-income and African-American men, but not for men overall), I'm just not going to panic.