"It may still be a man's world," writes Michelle Conlin of Business Week. "But it is no longer, in any way, a boy's." Conlin runs through an increasingly familiar counter argument to the 1990s social science focus on how girls were supposedly being shortchanged by education. Now it's actually boys who are hurting - with higher rates of drop out, illiteracy, drug abuse, suicide, depression, and anti-social behavior, and lower levels of academic achievement, participation in advanced courses, high school graduation, and college going. For better or worse, girls and women are outperforming boys and men across the educational spectrum, a development with enormous implications for education, marriage, families, law enforcement, the corporate world, etc. What is causing the new gender gap? Conlin says "schools have inadvertently played a big role [by] losing sight of boys - taking for granted that they were doing well, even though data began to show the opposite. Some educators feared that it was a blip that would change or feared takebacks on girls' [educational] gains." Schools have also tried to fit boys into an unnatural mold, with the reigning "sit-still-and-listen" model of teaching and the push for earlier and earlier educational achievement holding back these more boisterous and slower-developing creatures. Conlin also suggests, however, that the biggest factor causing the gap may be ideological - the insistence, never mind what is known from biology and physiology, that gender is a social construction with little or no impact on how the sexes learn and develop.
"The new gender gap," by Michelle Conlin, Business Week, May 26, 2003