The article, a profile of an incredibly smart and academically successful high school senior named Elizabeth Mann, was written at the peak of the early 1990's "girl crisis," following the 1992 publication of the American Association of University Women report How Schools Shortchange Girls, and it has most of the hallmarks of the girl crisis genre. There are the opening paragraphs, in which Elizabeth waits patiently to get a word in during class while her more aggressive male peers interrupt and ignore her efforts to speak (or course, when she's finally able to speak, she offers the right solution to the question they've been hashing out). There's the obligatory reference to research that places Elizabeth's story in national context:
Every year, every month, every week seems to bring another study detailing how dismal things are for females in math and science and how they need to be encouraged. One study says that the number of women going into either field is "disproportionately low." Another says that "gender differences in science achievement are not decreasing but increasing." Another says that although girls have as much ability as boys, they often start developing sour attitudes toward math and science in middle school and soon lose all interest. Others say that's because in classrooms boys dominate, that girls are hesitant to speak up out of fear that they'll look foolish if they're wrong, that eventually girls reach the point where they not only don't do well but decide they're incapable.
On and on the studies go, endlessly on, all making the same points about how lousy things are for females. Math, it seems, eventually becomes nothing more than a skill to balance a checkbook, while science, horrible science, becomes a nauseating memory of formaldehyde and some frogs.
There's the description of how Elizabeth's school, a magnet math and science program at Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County, is trying to foster girls' interest and achievement in math:
[The math and science magnet program] had been structured to mirror a boy's emotional development, he realized, which in many ways was at odds with a girl's. For instance, an early emphasis on physics, rather than life sciences, was something many of the girls said they didn't like. They also didn't like the strong emphasis on using computers. "Why?" Haney remembers asking a girl one day as they looked at some boys in the computer lab who were busy typing away. "They like it," he said. "They'll sit there all day." "Yeah," the girl said, "but look at the social skills of those boys."So the program was recast to seem a little friendlier toward girls -- competition was de-emphasized, group work was stressed -- and by the time Elizabeth arrived four years ago, things were humming nicely along. The number of girls still hadn't come close to 50 percent (and hasn't so far), but at least the migration had stopped.
And then there's the emotional fallout of "being the smart girl" for Elizabeth--her sense of insecurity (in contrast to the apparently confident boys) and nagging questions about her own intelligence and achievements, as well as a fair amount of emotional brutality from male peers who resent her success.
"I feel like 'The Girl' in the class. It's something I'm very conscious of, almost every minute in there." She says, "I have a certain fear that somehow when I'm in that class, I'm this impostor who doesn't really understand."
The only thing that's missing is a dire story about depression, an eating disorder, promiscuity, substance abuse or self-mulitation. In fact, Elizabeth is "obliging" and "obedient," seemingly well-adjusted and "has never smoked a cigarette nor drunk the first drop of alcohol, rarely fights with her parents and doesn't yell at her younger brother."
Having spent a lot more time than I ever intended to reading, writing and talking about the "boy crisis" that has recently supplanted the girl crisis in the public and journalistic imagination, I couldn't help but be struck by the both the similarities and contrasts between this "girl crisis" article and many of the "boy crisis" pieces I've been reading lately. The 1993 article told us that: "girls are hesitant to speak up out of fear that they'll look foolish if they're wrong." Compare that to Newsweek's boy crisis cover story earlier this year:
Middle-school boys will do almost anything to avoid admitting that they're overwhelmed. "Boys measure everything they do or say by a single yardstick: does this make me look weak?" says Thompson. "And if it does, he isn't going to do it."(
The section on how Montgomery Blair tried to make its school more "girl-friendly" in the early 1990s also has eerie similarities with proposals to make schools more "boy-friendly" today. Both suggest that boys are more competitive but girls prefer cooperation and group projects, and that girls like people (or at least living critters) while boys prefer objects and computers. The difference is that while Montgomery Blair added group work and downplayed competition to attract girls, schools are now being urged to do the opposite in order to better serve boys.
Most significantly, both the boy crisis and girl crisis stories seem to rely heavily on rather dubious research and anecdotal reports about individual boys and girls whose experiences, while they make for compelling narrative, are often not representative. Today the girl crisis issues that garnered so much attention in the 1990s are often dismissed as wrongheaded analysis based on bad research that has since been debunked, or folks say that the achievement gains girls have made mean whatever problems there were have been resolved. Reading this 13-year-old article, I couldn't help but wonder if, 13 years from now, we'll see today's boy crisis hype largely the same way.
But there are contrasts between this article and the boy crisis stories that catch my eye, too. Most notably, it's no coincidence that Elizabeth Mann is an extremely high-performing--by all accounts exceptional--young woman. Much of the efforts to address the girl crisis in the 1990s seemed to focus on opening up opportunities for the highest-performing young women. To some extent, this makes sense: There have been real ceilings placed on women's opportunities and achievements (and in some places there still are) that need to be shattered. If you think it's important to build the next generation of women leaders and to make sure women have key leadership roles in politics, business, the sciences, it makes sense to focus on encouraging high-aptitude girls to do into these fields. In this respect, though, the boy crisis and girl crisis conversations are radically different. The boy crisis, to the extent it exists, is about the problems of a subset of low-performing boys--particularly but not exclusively low-income, African American and Hispanic boys--who do seem to be disproportionately concentrated in the lowest portions of the achievement distribution and who as a result of this low-performance aren't obtaining the basic skills and knowledge they need to make a decent life for themselves in the mainstream economy today.
Both the boy crisis and girl crisis narratives have considerable flaws, particularly when they're cast as broad, dramatic social problems that impact virtually every adolescent member of a particular sex. But beneath the hoopla both include significant truths that demand public and policymaker attention. The problem is that these truths are point to very different types of problems, but public conversation about both the boy and girl "crises" have been couched in strikingly similar (and largely useless) terms. There are significant, in some ways different, social, educational, and economic opportunity problems facing both male and female teenagers in the United States today. But I don't think we're doing a very good job of having public conversations about them.
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Finally, a personal note. I am three years younger than Elizabeth Mann. I would never claim to be anywhere near as accomplished as Mann, but by the standards of my school I was also "the smart girl," which, along with having my dad as principal, carried lots of negative social consequences. But I never felt dominated in class by boys, never felt like my achievements were discounted or in any way treated differently because I was a girl, never was made to feel the kind of intellectual insecurities Mann mentions in this article. I was a freshman in high school when How Schools Shortchange Girls came out. I'm sure I benefitted from some of the things that were done in response to it and other studies suggesting girls were in trouble (but I mostly remember wondering why everyone seemed so dead set on convincing me to become an engineer just because I got good grades in math and science). I didn't know then about How Schools Shortchange Girls, but if I had, I wouldn't have recognized it as matching my teenage reality.
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