Boys, Girls, Students

My sister and I are about as close to each other as two humans can biologically be; we came from the same parents, and we're Irish twins (which means not that we're Irish - we're Scottish - but that we're same age for part of the year). We both have the same cowlick, the same dry sense of humor, and the same giggle (courtesy of Granny). When we're in the same room, it's eerie how often we finish each other's sentences.

However parts of who we are couldn't be more different. Sally's a talented artist; I can't draw anything beyond stick figures. Sally's up until 2:30am and still sleeping at 1pm; I'm in bed by 9pm and up at 5:30am. Sally has three children, the oldest of whom is a college senior; I have a two-year-old daughter. Sally's a girl; I'm a boy.

Similarities and differences, girls and boys - educators and psychologists have been exploring the similarities and differences between girls and boys for years. They have come up with myriad ways that girls have been marginalized and boys have been falling behind. They cite reams of scientific and pseudo-scientific studies, they write best-selling polemics, and they jump to conclusions that prove their hypotheses.

Carol Gilligan's 1982 book In a Different Voice started it all. She hypothesized that girls have been marginalized because they possess an innately different moral compass than do boys. According to Gilligan, women tend to value relationships over rules, caring over justice, and similarities over differences. She theorized that all of this puts females at a disadvantage in a male-centric world based on laws instead of social relations.

In the same vein as Gilligan's book was Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia, published in 1994. Pipher believes girls "are coming of age in a more dangerous, sexualized and media-saturated culture. They face incredible pressures to be beautiful and sophisticated, which in junior high means using chemicals and being sexual." Suffering from under extreme social pressure to be thin, attractive, and popular, girls often fall prey to depression, addiction, and other unhealthy activities such as anorexia/bulimia, which has reached epidemic proportions in some geographical areas.

Recently there has been a kind of popular backlash against Gilligan and Pipher's focus on girls. This movement is best exemplified by Christina Hoff Summers' book published in 2000, The War Against Boys. Summers asserts that girls are doing much better than boys in school, that they constitute a higher percentage of college students, and that boys are the ones who are being mistreated and ignored by a society intent on feminizing males.

There are a number of other books that tackle the differences between girls and boys, and while some tend to be hysterical, they are all ostensibly well-intentioned. Their purpose is to make parents, teachers, and society more aware of the ways in which girls and boys differ.

While all this fervor certainly leads to increased book sales and perhaps to some more attention being paid to gender differences, the problem with all these books is that they speak in vast generalizations. I know lots of girls who are social and boys who are aggressive, but I also know scores of boys who are emotional and girls who are silent.

If parents, educators, psychologists, and society insist on continuing to perceive girls and boys not as individuals but as abstractions and generalizations, we will continue to fail our children, for I have yet to meet a single girl or a single boy who is either an abstraction or a generalization.

--Steve McKibben
3/12/06