The End of Men and the Rise of Women (22 page)

The student gender gap started to feel like a crisis to some people in higher education circles in the mid-2000s, when it began showing up not just in community and liberal arts colleges but in the flagship public universities—the UCs and the SUNYs and the UNCs. Like many of those schools, the University of Missouri at Kansas City, a
full research university with more than 14,000 students, is now tipping toward 60 percent women, a level that many admissions officers worry can permanently shift the atmosphere and reputation of a school. In February 2010, I visited with Ashley Burress, UMKC’s student body president. (The other three student government officers that year were also women.) Burress, a cute, short, African-American twenty-four-year-old grad student who was getting a doctor of pharmacy degree, had many of the same complaints I heard from other young women. Guys high-five one another when they get a C, while girls beat themselves up over a B-minus. Guys play video games in their dorm rooms while girls crowd the library. Girls get their degrees with no drama, while guys seem always in danger of drifting away. “In 2012, I will be Dr. Burress,” she said. “Will I have to deal with guys who don’t even have a bachelor’s degree? I would like to date, but I’m putting myself in a really small pool.”

UMKC is a working- and middle-class school—the kind of place where traditional sex roles might not be anathema. Yet as I talked to students, I realized how much the basic expectations for men and women had shifted. Many of the women’s mothers had established careers later in life, sometimes after a divorce, and they had urged their daughters to move more quickly to establish their own careers. Victoria, Michelle, and Erin are sorority sisters. Victoria’s mom is a part-time bartender at a hotel. Victoria is a biology major and wants to be a surgeon; soon she’ll apply to a bunch of medical schools. She doesn’t want kids for a while, because she knows she’ll “be at the hospital, like, one hundred hours a week,” and when she does have kids, well, she’ll “be the hotshot surgeon, and he”—a nameless he—“will be at home playing with the kiddies.”

Michelle, a self-described “perfectionist,” also has her life mapped out. She’s a psychology major and wants to be a family therapist.
After college, she will apply to grad school and look for internships. She is well aware of the career-counseling resources on campus. And her fiancé? “He’s changed majors, like, sixteen times. Last week he wanted to be a dentist. This week it’s environmental science.” Erin says, “Did he switch again this week? When you guys have kids, he’ll definitely stay home. Seriously, what does he want to do?” Michelle sighs. “It depends on the day of the week. Remember last year? It was bio. It really is a joke. But it’s not. It’s funny, but it’s not.”

Among traditional college students from the highest-income families, who can afford to go to private schools such as Vassar or University of Richmond, the gender gap seems to disappear. Incoming classes are often more evenly balanced between men and women. But elite private schools live by their own rules, and are legally free to consider gender in admissions. In 2005, a study by the economists Sandy Baum and Eban Goodstein found that among selective liberal arts schools, being male raises the chance of college acceptance by 6.5 to 9 percentage points. In other words, they are keeping some women out to keep their schools from becoming “too female,” as Heriot once put it.

Jennifer Delahunty Britz, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, in Ohio, let out this secret in a 2006
New York Times
op-ed. Gender balance, she wrote, is the elephant in the room. And five years later, she told me that the problem hasn’t gone away. When it tips toward 60 percent of women, “you’ll hear a hint of desperation in the voices of admissions officers.” In her op-ed she described a typical dilemma facing her office. A young woman from Kentucky had racked up an unseemly number of accomplishments, although her grades put her in the middle of the pool. They hesitated, something they would never do if she had been a man. “Because young men are rarer,” she wrote, “they’re more valued.”

But not necessarily more impressive. A typical female applicant to Kenyon, Delahunty said, manages the process herself. She lines up the interviews, sets up a campus visit, requests a meeting with faculty members. But the college has seen more than one male applicant “sit back on the couch, sometimes with their eyes closed, while their mom tells them where to go and what to do. Sometimes we say, ‘What a nice essay his mom wrote,’” she said, in that funny-but-not vein.

To avoid crossing the dreaded 60 percent threshold, admissions officers have created a language to explain away the boys’ deficits: “Brain hasn’t kicked in yet.” “Slow to cook.” “Hasn’t quite peaked.” “Holistic picture.” At times Delahunty has become so worried about “overeducated females” and “undereducated males” that she jokes she is getting conspiratorial. She once called her sister, a pediatrician, to vet her latest theory: “Maybe these boys are genetically like canaries in a coal mine, absorbing so many toxins and bad things in the environment that their DNA is shifting. Maybe they’re like those frogs—they’re more vulnerable or something, so they’ve gotten deformed.”

Whatever its origins, the problem of young men falling behind is becoming entrenched. In a 2006 paper, sociologists Claudia Buchmann and Thomas A. DiPrete proposed a fascinating explanation as to why. Both sons and daughters born before the mid-1960s into families where both parents were college educated were likely to finish college as well. Less-educated families of that period, the strivers hoping to get to the middle class, sent mostly sons, following old cultural habits. But over time this pattern has reversed. Now, in families where the fathers have a high school education or less, girls are much more likely than boys to finish college. If the boys do go, they are more likely to drop out. The difference is especially pronounced in families where there is no father.

A mother who went to college seems to have some effect on the daughter’s chances of finishing college, but no effect on her sons; they just don’t seem to consider her a suitable role model, or to be inspired to follow her example. These dynamics set the stage for a matriarchy laying down roots. Women in the middle class are less likely to get married these days, and if they do marry, more likely to marry someone without a college degree. Thus we look into a future where, generation after generation, mothers serve as role models for aspiring daughters while sons look on, lost. And, reversing centuries of tradition, families are investing in their daughters. The son preference that prevailed for so much of history was not based only on sentimental attachment or habit. Families poured their resources into sons because sons were the most likely to succeed, and perhaps to help support their parents in old age. With women dominating American colleges, the still-striving middle class is putting its best bet on its daughters.

H
OW DID THIS COME TO PASS
? What goes on in the earlier years of schooling that discourages more boys from going to college? Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s, various experts have looked in vain for the magic index or theory that could explain what is going wrong with boys. Many of their theories contradict one another. Christina Hoff Sommers caused a storm in 2000 with her
Atlantic
story “The War Against Boys,” which blamed a misguided feminism that treated normal boys as incipient harassers. Many other experts blamed a rigid and overly macho insistence on competition and testing.

The latest trend is to look for answers in brain scans. Boys, writes Michael Gurian, best-selling author of
The Wonder of Boys
and
several other books explaining the “male mind,” are “graphic thinkers and kinesthetic learners,” meaning they like systems and prefer to move around a lot when they learn. In a
Newsweek
story, “The Trouble with Boys,” Peg Tyre referred to the “kinetic, disorganized, maddening and sometimes brilliant behaviors that scientists now believe are not learned but hard-wired.” But as neuroscientist Lise Eliot has written, brain science has only begun to figure out the fundamentals of neurological gender difference, and all those colorful illustrations of the male mind and the female mind are at this early stage, “frankly, bogus.” Neuroscientists know something about the different form and functions of the male and female brains, but not nearly enough to decide on “any meaningful differences between boys’ and girls’ mental or neural processing as they learn how to speak, read, or memorize their times tables,” writes Eliot.

The Nation’s Report Card (officially the National Assessment of Educational Progress) is a series of tests that’s been given every few years since the late 1960s by the Department of Education, as a kind of check-in on the progress of students in different grades. In the latest assessment, girls scored much higher than boys in reading, but girls have always scored higher in reading. The only significant change over the last decade or so is a dip in twelfth-grade boys’ scores. The dip is most acute for boys from poor and minority families but is not exclusive to them. At the end of high school, nearly one in four white sons of college-educated parents scored “below basic” on the reading section of the NAEP, compared to 7 percent of girls. In math, scores of both boys and girls have been steadily improving, but in the last few years girls have been closing the gap.

In any given year the differences are not alarming, and in some
years boys in certain grades even do better than girls. But cumulatively the numbers paint a picture of an education system that plays to girls’ strengths, and a new generation of girls who are confident and ready to rise to those expectations. Schools have in effect become microcosms of the larger economy. Richard Whitmire, author of
Why Boys Fail
, summarizes the trend this way: “The world has gotten more verbal; boys haven’t.” In the late 1990s, educators acted on the correct assumption that all jobs now require more sophisticated writing. Cops now need advanced degrees and practice in communication skills; factory workers are expected to be able to fill out elaborate orders. Society expects most workers to have college-level literacy, even if their day-to-day jobs do not really require that.

Schools responded accordingly and began pushing verbal skills earlier in the curriculum. Now a typical pre-kindergartner learns what a first-grader used to learn. The verbal curriculum heats up long before boys are mature enough to handle it. As a result, they start to think of themselves early on as failures in school. Their discouragement builds and, many years down the road, schools face what Whitmire calls the ninth-grade bulge. That year often produces much larger classes than subsequent years, because classes are full of boys waiting it out until they are old enough to drop out altogether. Girls meanwhile amp up their ambition as they progress through school. They are more likely than boys to take college-preparatory classes, including geometry, algebra II, chemistry, biology, and foreign languages, although boys are more likely to take physics. A University of Michigan study found that 67 percent of female high school seniors say they plan to graduate from a four-year college, compared with 55 percent of male students.

Beyond straight verbal skills, boys tend to get tripped up by what
researchers call “noncognitive skills,” meaning the ability to focus, organize yourself, and stay out of trouble. Boys of every race and background have a much higher incidence of school disciplinary and behavior problems and suspensions, and they spend far fewer hours doing homework. They are much more likely to be in special ed programs or diagnosed with a disability or some form of autism. Teachers consistently rate girls as being less disruptive and putting in more effort than boys in high school. And these days the temptations that can siphon off effort are much greater. Boys and girls both fritter away time on technology, but studies show that boys tend to do it in much longer blocks, spending hours after school playing video games. In fact, a consensus is forming that the qualities most predictive of academic success are the ones that have always made up the good girl stereotype: self-discipline and the ability to delay gratification. In other words, the ability to spend two hours doing your homework before you take out the PlayStation.

Of course, it’s possible that girls have always had the raw material to make better students, that they’ve always been more studious, organized, self-disciplined, and eager to please, but, because of limited opportunities, what did it matter? In George Eliot’s
The Mill on the Floss
, published in 1860, it’s clear that Maggie is much better suited to higher education than her brother Tom. She’s more curious and open-minded, and always has a book in her hand (although in that era, Maggie’s hunger for learning is interpreted as rebellious, not obedient). But the day Tom comes home from school and Maggie offers him two half crowns and a sixpence, he says: “What for? I don’t want
your
money, you silly thing. I’ve got a great deal more money than you, because I’m a boy. I shall always have half sovereigns and sovereigns for my Christmas boxes, because I shall be a man, and you only have five-shilling pieces, because you’re only a
girl.” Silly though Tom thinks she is, he promises to take care of her always.