Girls rule! Oh, no, it's the end of the world as we know it!

I just read this great dissection of a BusinessWeek cover story entitled "The New Gender Gap" [site registration required to access article] and, even though it's a few weeks old, I have to repost it (courtesy of Bitch magazine online):

Smart Girls Are Scary!

In true "anything you can do, I can do better" fashion, girls across America are rapidly becoming the stars of academia, ruling their schools as honor-roll members, heads of student government, and captains of academic clubs. To most of us, this sounds like a good thing, but you wouldn’t know that from reading BusinessWeek’s May 26 cover story, "The New Gender Gap," which wrings its hands in concern over a "female lock on power" in America’s educational system that’s turning our nation’s boys into underachievers. The article asserts that schools have lost sight of boys, "taking for granted that they were doing well, even though data began to show the opposite." Boys, BW worries, have become "the second sex."

Though the article does concede that men still dominate in the highest-paying fields of employment—engineering, investment banking, and high tech—and that boys still score higher than girls on standardized tests, its Chicken Little-like tone predicts big trouble if girls are allowed to flourish and—horrors!—become powerful women leaders. What should be good news for America—a rise in young girls’ self-esteem, and an attendant rise in their academic achievement—is used instead as the fear factor in this call for education reform gone awry.

If BusinessWeek’s point is that boys deserve the same educational benefits as girls—well, no argument there. But the article’s references to declining male wages, a new white marriage gap, and a "loss of (men’s) talent and potential" make another point entirely: Don’t let the girls surpass the boys or their fearsome power could, 20 years down the line, lead to nothing less than the destruction of society. These views might seem par for the course in a nation whose president is currently trying to undermine 30 years of progress for girls by questioning the effectiveness of Title IX; but in these times, as Susan M. Bailey of the Wellesley Centers of Women says in the article, "It would be dangerous to even out the gender ratio by treating women worse. I don’t think we’ve reached a point in this country where we are fully providing equal opportunities to women." We’d say that’s putting it mildly.

Let BusinessWeek know what you think: Contact Managing Editor Michael Mercurio at mike_mercurio@businessweek.com.

—Christina Cathcart, Bitch magazine

So then I went and read the BW article and found that, if anything, the article Ms. Cathcart is commenting on is even more sexist and misogynistic than she makes it out to be in that it pretends to present multiple viewpoints but then essentially dismisses them all to validate the main point that "girls are taking over our schools (and that's bad)!" I'm sure the BW editors loved the article writer all the more for that. Are these people blind, or just emboldened by the current political-social climate? (*shakes head in disbelief*) No matter how far the pendulum swings one way, it always goes back just as far the other way.

To expand the argument a bit, I must say that the BusinessWeek writer does make some good points about how many schools pathologize kids' behavior -- she keeps it specific to boys to bolster her "oh these poor downtrodden boys" argument, but really the US school systems and much of our culture tries to stamp out any energetic, curious, noncompliant behavior whether it's girls or boys displaying it:

"While every nerve in his body tells him to run, he has to sit still and listen for almost eight hours a day. Biologically, he needs about four recesses a day, but he's lucky if he gets one, since some lawsuit-leery schools have banned them altogether. Hug a girl, and he could be labeled a "toucher" and swiftly suspended -- a result of what some say is an increasingly anti-boy culture that pathologizes their behavior.

"If he falls behind, he's apt to be shipped off to special ed, where he'll find that more than 70% of his classmates are also boys. Squirm, clown, or interrupt, and he is four times as likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. That often leads to being forced to take Ritalin or risk being expelled, sent to special ed, or having parents accused of negligence. One study of public schools in Fairfax County, Va., found that more than 20% of upper-middle-class white boys were taking Ritalin-like drugs by fifth grade."

Again, though, it's not just schools against boys -- it's schools against "disobedience," and between that and all the ridiculous "zero-tolerance" policies it's starting to look like the 1950s hype over "juvenile delinquence." I'll go for the argument that, overall, boys tend to be more rambunctious than girls (whether by nature or nurture or both), hence their proclivity for getting into "trouble" in a system that refuses to accommodate anyone who won't sit still and listen -- a system that needlessly represses girls' as well as boys' creative energies. But to snag her (mostly male) readers' attention and get them riled up to read the rest of the article, the BW writer falls into the same "either-or" trap that keeps our attention focused on the boys-versus-girls wars and just keeps that pendulum swinging widely, back and forth, with no middle ground or creative resolution.

You'd think people would get tired of getting riled up all the time about manufactured problems. Guess not.