The War Against Boys (17 page)

Even at this most politically correct of gatherings, the serious deficits of boys kept surfacing. On the first day of the conference, during a special three-hour session, the PEN staff announced the results of a new teacher/student survey entitled
The Metropolitan Life Survey of the American Teacher 1997: Examining Gender Issues in Public Schools.
The survey was funded by Metropolitan Life Insurance Company as part of its American Teacher series and conducted by Louis Harris and Associates.
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During a three-month period in 1997 various questions about gender equity were asked of 1,306 students and 1,035 teachers in grades seven through twelve. The MetLife study had no doctrinal ax to grind. What it found contradicted most of the findings of Gilligan, the AAUW, the Sadkers, and the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women: “Contrary to the commonly held view that boys are at an advantage over girls in school, girls appear to have an advantage over boys in terms of their future plans, teachers' expectations, everyday experiences at school and interactions in the classroom.”
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The MetLife study also asked students to respond to the statement “I feel that teachers do not listen to what I have to say.” Thirty-one percent of boys but only 19 percent of girls said the statement was “mostly true.”
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If Gilligan is right, we should expect more than 19 percent of girls to feel ignored, and certainly more girls than boys. Some other conclusions from the MetLife study: Girls are more likely than boys to see themselves as college-bound and more likely to want a good education.

At the PEN conference, Nancy Leffert, a child psychologist then at the Search Institute in Minneapolis, reported the results of a survey that she and colleagues had recently completed of more than 99,000 children in grades six through twelve.
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The children were asked about what the researchers call “developmental assets.” The Search Institute identified forty critical assets—“building blocks for healthy development.” Half of these are external, such as a supportive family and adult role models, and half are internal, such as motivation to achieve, a sense of purpose in life, and interpersonal confidence. Leffert explained, somewhat apologetically, that girls were ahead of boys with respect to thirty-seven out of forty assets. By almost every significant
measure of well-being, girls had the better of boys: they felt closer to their families and had higher aspirations, stronger connections to school, and even superior assertiveness skills. Leffert concluded her talk by saying that in the past she had referred to girls as fragile or vulnerable, but that the survey “tells me that girls have very powerful assets.”

The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, founded in 1947 and devoted to promoting and affirming individual initiative and “the American dream,” releases annual back-to-school surveys.
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Its survey for 1998 contrasted two groups of students: the “highly successful” (approximately 18 percent of American students) and the “disillusioned” (approximately 15 percent). The successful students work hard, choose challenging classes, make schoolwork a top priority, get good grades, participate in extracurricular activities, and feel that teachers and administrators care about them and listen to them. According to the association, the successful group in the 1998 survey is 63 percent female and 37 percent male. The disillusioned students are pessimistic about their future, get low grades, and have little contact with teachers. The disillusioned group could accurately be characterized as demoralized. According to the Alger Association, “Nearly seven out of ten are male.”
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Finally, in 2000, the Department of Education published its comprehensive analysis of gender and education,
Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women
. According to the report, “There is evidence that the female advantage in school performance is real and persistent.”
⁵⁰
Not only did girls earn better grades, take more rigorous courses, have far better reading and writing abilities, and hold higher academic aspirations, they were also somewhat more willing to speak out. When thousands of students were asked if they would be willing to “make a public statement at a meeting,” more girls than boys at every grade level answered “yes” (83 percent of boys and 87 percent of girls among twelfth graders).
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Contrary to Carol Gilligan's claims, girls appear to become more confident about speaking out as they move from early to late adolescence.

Gilligan's theory would suffer another devastating blow from Susan Harter, a psychologist at the University of Denver. Using the common notion of
voice as “having a say,” “speaking one's mind,” and “feeling listened to” and applying relatively objective measures, Harter and her colleagues tested the claims that adolescent girls have a lower “level of voice” than boys and that girls' level of voice drops sometime between the ages of eleven and seventeen.

In one study, “Level of Voice Among Female and Male High School Students,” Harter and her colleagues distributed a questionnaire to 307 middle-class students in a high school in Aurora, Colorado (165 females, 142 males). The students were asked whether they felt they were able to “express their opinions,” “say what is on their minds,” and “express their point of view.” Harter concludes, “Findings revealed no gender differences nor any evidence that voice declines in female adolescents.”
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In a second study, “Lack of Voice as a Manifestation of False Self-Behavior Among Adolescents,”
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Harter and her associates looked at responses of approximately nine hundred male and female students from grades six to twelve to see if they could find evidence of a decline in female expressiveness. Their conclusion: “Gilligan's argument is that girls in our society are particularly vulnerable to loss of voice. . . . Our cross-sectional data revealed no significant mean differences associated with grade level for either gender, nor are there even any trends, in either the co-educational or all-girl schools.”
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Harter admires Gilligan and is careful to say that these studies are inconclusive and that Gilligan's predictions about loss of voice may be true in certain domains for a certain subset of girls. She also suggests that more in-depth interviews might lend support to Gilligan's claims that girls struggle more with conflicts over authenticity and voice. But for the time being, Harter cautions “against making generalizations about gender differences in voice.”
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Gilligan is the matron saint of the girl-crisis movement. Without her, there would have been no Daughters' Day, no AAUW self-esteem study, and no Gender Equity in Education Act. Yet her thesis about a nation of silenced and diminished girls was a chimera. Why was her research taken so seriously? Why were the women's groups moved to “get this information out to the world”?

For one thing, her message was music to orthodox feminist ears: not
only women but
girls
were being silenced in our male culture. More important, Gilligan was not just another activist deploring patriarchal oppression. She was a Harvard professor who had authored a classic book on women's psychology—
In a Different Voice.
She offered the women's groups something powerful and new—the cachet of university science. Here was a high-powered scholar telling us that girls were being crushed. And she had “data” to prove it.

For a better understanding of the manufactured crisis, and for a ringside view of the phenomenon of faux social science, it is worth carefully considering Gilligan's brilliant early career.

In 1984 Carol Gilligan published her book on women's distinctive moral psychology—
In a Different Voice
. Its success was dazzling. It sold more than seven hundred thousand copies and has been translated into sixteen languages. A reviewer at
Vogue
explained its appeal: “[Gilligan] flips old prejudices against women on their ears. She reframes qualities regarded as women's weaknesses and shows them to be human strengths. It is impossible to consider [her] ideas without having your estimation of women rise.”
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Journalists routinely used words like “groundbreaking” or “landmark research” to describe
In a Different Voice.
Because of that book, Gilligan was
Ms.
magazine's Woman of the Year in 1984, and
Time
put her on its short list of most influential Americans in 1996. In 1997 she received the $250,000 Heinz Award for “transform[ing] the paradigm for what it means to be human.” In 2000, Jane Fonda was moved to donate $12.5 million to Harvard for a new Center on Gender and Education—devoted to advancing the research of Carol Gilligan. For Fonda,
In a Different Voice
was life-changing. As she said in a speech at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, “I know what Professor Gilligan writes about. I know it in my skin, in my gut, as well as in my voice.”
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Francine Prose noted in her 1990
New York Times Magazine
story that
In a Different Voice
had made Gilligan “the object of almost cult-like veneration”
with readers, journalists, and activists. By contrast, said Prose, it “provoked intense hostility” on the part of academics. Why the hostility? For one thing, most of Gilligan's research on women's loss of voice consists of anecdotes based on a small number of interviews. Her data are otherwise unavailable for review, giving rise to some reasonable doubts about their merits and persuasiveness. Transforming the paradigm for what it means to be human would certainly be an admirable feat—but scholars want to see the supporting evidence.

In a Different Voice
offered the provocative thesis that men and women have distinctly different ways of reasoning about moral quandaries. Relying on data from three studies she had conducted, Gilligan found that women tend to make moral decisions based on an “ethic of care.” When reasoning about right and wrong, they focus on their responsibilities and connections to others. For women, according to Gilligan, morality tends to be contextual, personal, and motivated by concern rather than duty. Men, by contrast, are more likely to deploy an “ethic of justice,” with a focus on individual rights and abstract principles. Male moral reasoning is impersonal, separate-from-others, and focused on noninterference, rights, and duties. Gilligan argued further that women's moral style (their “different voice”) had been denigrated by professional psychologists. She complained that the entire fields of psychology and moral philosophy had been built on studies that excluded or depreciated women's moral orientation. According to Gilligan, women's culture of nurture and care and their habits of peaceful accommodation could be the salvation of a world governed by hypercompetitive males and their habits of abstract moral reasoning.

The book received a mixed reaction from feminists. Some—such as the philosophers Virginia Held and Sara Ruddick, and those in various fields who would come to be known as “difference feminists”—were excited by the idea that women were different from, and quite probably better than, men. But other academic feminists attacked Gilligan for reinforcing stereotypes about women as nurturers and caretakers.

Many academic psychologists, feminist and nonfeminist alike, found Gilligan's specific claims about distinct male and female moral orientations
unpersuasive and without empirical support. Lawrence Walker, of the University of British Columbia, has reviewed 108 studies of sex differences in solving moral problems. He concluded in a 1984 review article in
Child Development
that “sex differences in moral reasoning in late adolescence and youth are rare.”
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In 1987 three psychologists at Oberlin College attempted to test Gilligan's hypothesis: they administered a moral-reasoning test to 101 students (males and females) and concluded, “There were no reliable sex differences . . . in the directions predicted by Gilligan.”
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Concurring with Walker, the Oberlin researchers pointed out that “Gilligan failed to provide acceptable empirical support for her model.”

The thesis of
In a Different Voice
is based on three studies Gilligan conducted: the “college student study,” the “abortion decision study,” and the “rights and responsibilities study.” Here is how Gilligan described the last:

This study involved a sample of males and females matched for age, intelligence, education, occupation, and social class at nine points across the life cycle: ages 6–9, 11, 15, 19, 22, 25–27, 35, 45, and 60. From a total sample of 144 (8 males and 8 females at each age), including a more intensively interviewed subsample of 36 (2 males and 2 females at each age), data were collected on conceptions of self and morality, experiences of moral conflicts and choice, and judgments of hypothetical moral dilemmas.

This description is all we ever learn about the mechanics of the study, which seems to have no proper name; it was never published, never peer-reviewed. It was, in any case, very small in scope and in number of subjects. And the data are tantalizingly inaccessible. In September 1998, my research assistant, Elizabeth Bowen, called Gilligan's office and asked where she could find copies of the three studies that were the basis for
In a Different Voice.
Gilligan's assistant, Tatiana Bertsch, told her that they were unavailable and not in the public domain; because of the sensitivity of the data (especially the abortion study), the information had been kept confidential. Asked where the studies were now kept, Bertsch explained that the original data
were being prepared to be placed in a Harvard library: “They are physically in the office. We are in the process of sending them to the archives at the Murray Center.”