boy problem? girl problem?: a century of...

BOY PROBLEM? GIRL PROBLEM?:A CENTURY OF GENDER INEQUALITY IN

AMERICAN EDUCATION VIEWED THROUGHGENERAL SOCIAL SURVEY DATA

Scott Renshaw and Roger ClarkRHODE ISLAND COLLEGE

The literature on gender inequality in American education has undergoneswitchbacks over the last century: from concern about a “boy problem” in theearly twentieth century to focus on “shortchanging” girls and women from the1960s to the 1990s to fear about the “end of men” in the early twenty first century.Using General Social Survey data since 1972, we examine the educationalachievements of birth cohorts from 1910 to 1979 to detect possible connectionsbetween public criticism and gender inequality within American education. Wefind that for cohorts born between 1910s and 1930s, there was movement towardsincreasing male advantage in achievement, but that, for cohorts born since the1940s there’s been steady movement towards female advantage, with childrenfrom low-income families always experiencing the greatest swings. We concludethat public critiques have been instrumental in creating change but sometimesslow to recognize the change they’ve engendered.

Introduction

The First “Boy Problem”

Education has been an unusually gender egalitarian institution in atleast parts of North America since European settlement. In the 1600s,Puritans wanted both males and females to be able to read the Bibleand established primary schools that enabled this (Tyack and Hansot,1990: 25). Northern industrialization during the 19th century involvedan expected division of labor by gender, but one that also entailed abelief that girls needed to be educated so that they could eventuallyraise sons as successful workers (and citizens) and daughters asintelligent mothers. Consequently, there was nearly universal literacyamong children in the Northeast and Midwest by 1850, long beforefemale literacy rates increased to this degree anywhere in Europe

80 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MODERN SOCIOLOGY

(Tyack and Hansot, 1990: 46-47, 50). As early as the 1880s, observershad begun to notice, rue and develop strategies for dealing with the“boy problem”: the perception that boys were falling behindacademically (Tyack and Hansot, 1992: 46, 53, 114, 138). In 1900, twoeducators argued, “If we are not to have a comparatively ignorantmale proletariat opposed to a female aristocracy, it is time to pauseand devise ways and means for getting more of our boys to attendhigh school” (quoted in Tyack and Hansot, 1992: 174). By 1920,women were nearly half of all college students (Solomon, 1985:63).

Though critics were more focused on poorer whites, the “boyproblem” was greatest for blacks. In the Jim Crow South, black menwho were successful academically barely improved theiremployment opportunities, but did endanger their lives. So manydropped out early. On the other hand, black women could greatlyenhance their employment possibilities, usually as teachers, witheducation (Tyack and Hansot, 1992: 88-89).

The critics gave numerous explanations for the “boy problem,”including that boys, especially working class boys, wished to becomeworkers as early as possible and felt stigmatized by other boys whenthey did study (Tyack and Hansot, 1992: 171, 177, 179). Numeroussolutions were proposed and implemented. Many of these set girlsand women back in interesting ways and for a long time. To focusgirls and women on domestic lives, for instance, high schools beganrequiring that they take home economics courses. To accommodateboys’ work and extracurricular interests, specialized technicalprograms and interscholastic sports programs were instituted (orco-opted. Boys themselves had organized the earliest interscholasticsports competitions). To attract and support male students, manycoeducational colleges changed admissions policies, curricula, hiringpractices, and athletic programs; women experienced a level ofexclusion that had been rare for decades (Kerber, 1997: 231; Kenschaft,2005: 187-89). When the GI Bill of Rights gave large numbers of malewar veterans access to college, women’s share of the college studentpopulation dropped to 30 percent (Solomon, 1985: 63).

The Girl Problem

Some of the strategies employed to deal with turn-of-the-century“boy problem” became the foci for the 1960s-to-1990s critiques ofan educational system that disadvantaged females. One of these

BOY PROBLEM? GIRL PROBLEM?: A CENTURY OF GENDER INEQUALITY... 81

strategies, as we said, had been to establish physical education classesand interscholastic sports teams to tie boys and men to schools andcolleges via loyalties to and participation on athletic teams; anotherwas to rewrite textbooks so that they appealed particularly to boys’and men’s interests (Tyack and Hansot, 1992: 179-200). Part of the1960s second-wave feminist critique focused on the inequities ineducation that had been created by these strategies. The NationalOrganization for Women (NOW), for instance, adopted a platformat its first national conference in 1967 that said “ . . . the right ofwomen to be educated to their full potential equally with men[should] be secured by Federal and state legislation” (Boles, 1989:643). This helped lead to the passage of Title IX and its use in levelingthe athletic playing field for women and girls. The second-wavecritique also pointed to the extraordinary degree to which womenand girls were neglected or stereotyped in preschool books (Weitzmanet al., 1972), elementary school textbooks (Weitzman, 1984; Purcelland Stewart, 1990), high school and college history and art historytextbooks (Trecker, 1971; White, 1976), and textbooks of most otherdisciplines, including sociology (Ferree and Hall, 1990; 1996).

As indicated above, the emphasis on male advantage continuedwell into the 1990s. At this point there was an acknowledgementthat girls were getting higher grades than boys in reading, writingand mathematics in elementary school (e.g., Lindsay, 1996: 272), evenwhile teachers were paying elementary-school boys more attentionand emphasizing their intelligence (e.g., Sadker and Sadker, 1994).But there was lamentation about how much, and why, girls’ relativeacademic achievement decreased during adolescence. The AmericanAssociation of University Women (1992) and Peggy Orenstein (1994)pointed to a severe drop in self-confidence that occurred as girlsproceeded to middle school and beyond. This was associated with arelative decline in academic achievement, especially in math, buteven in reading and writing. Some (e.g., Koehler, 1990; Anderson,1993) argued that peer pressure was responsible for girls’ hidingtheir intellectual abilities, especially in subjects like math that weresupposedly masculine areas of expertise.

The Second “Boy Problem”

The critical literature began to change its emphasis at the turn of thecentury, especially with the publication of two books, Kindlon and


Thompson’s (2000) Raising Cain and Christina Hoff Sommers’ (2000)The War against Boys. Soon both the explanandum—now, why boysand men were doing more poorly in school than girls and women—and the explanans—overview in the following paragraphs—hadchanged. In her 2012 The End of Men, for instance, Hanna Rosin,echoing concerns that had been expressed a century earlier, worriedthat reversals in education would lead to reversals of other genderhierarchies, with better-educated women running the world, leavingmen behind.

The explanations for the new “boy problem” in grade schoolthrough high school have generally fallen into three categories: thosefocused on biology, some, on socialization and gender stereotypingand some, on teacher biases (Buchman, Diprete and McDaniel, 2008:313-14). The relevant biological differences have been difficult totease out from social factors and do not lead to any hard-and-fastconclusion, though it does seem as though girls may have greaternatural verbal fluency than boys, on average (Spelke, 2005). Thestereotyping/gender socialization connection is illustrated byEntwisle et al.’s (2007) finding that the early reading gap amongchildren of poorer families is related to parents’ lower expectationsfor boys. Additional detail is supplied by Lopez’s (2003) Hopeful Girlsand Troubled Boys and Morris’s (2012) Learning the Hard Way and.These two books provide ethnographic studies of three lower incomehigh schools—one of second-generation Caribbean immigrants, onein a former Appalachian coal town, one in an inner city, blackneighborhood—schools in which definitions of masculinity lead boysto focus on athletic and other leisure activities and to devalueacademic work. There is also some evidence that girls may do betterwith female teachers than boys (e.g., Dee, 2006), but this conclusionis disputed (e.g., Sokal et al., 2007).

The comparative educational advantage enjoyed by womentoday shows up, at least in terms of degree achievement, not so muchin secondary education, but in post-secondary education. Girls mayget better grades than boys in all high school subjects, includingmath and science, but their high school graduation rates are onlyslightly higher than those of boys: in 2006, 10.3% of boys droppedout of high school, while 8.3% of girls did (National Center forEducation Statistics, 2007a). By 2006, however, women received 62%of associate degrees, 58% of bachelor’s degrees, 60% of master’s


degrees and 48.9% of Doctorates (National Center for EducationStatistics, 2007b). Explanations, especially for women’s greaterchances for completing college, have focused on three kinds offactors: family resources; academic performance; and incentives andreturns of college (Bachman, DiPrete and McDaniel, 2008: 316-319).Buchman and DiPrete (2006) showed that the influence of familybackground has changed enormously over time, especially forfamilies where parents have the least education and/or are poorest.For cohorts born before the mid-1960s, such families tended to favorthe college education of males; for cohorts born later, though, andespecially for those born into the increasingly large contingent ofsingle-parent families, the advantage switched to females. Theacademic preparation and habits that benefit girls before college seemalso to enable their attainment of better grades in college and ofcollege completion (Goldin et al., 2006, Buchman and Diprete, 2006).Yet their lesser likelihood of majoring in mathematics, physicalsciences, engineering and computer science, subjects in which lowgrades are more common than in the humanities, social sciencesand the life sciences (the more likely majors for females), seems toaccount for a substantial amount of their relative success (Alon andGelbgiser, 2011). In terms of incentives and returns of college,research (e.g., Perna, 2003) suggests that, while wage returns haveincreased for both females and males, they have actually increasedeven more for males, due to decreasing opportunities in high-wagemanufacturing jobs that previously sustained high school educatedmales. But DiPrete and Buchman (2006) have argued that when oneuses a broader basis for evaluating returns—one that includes notonly earnings, but getting and staying married, standard of livingand staying out of poverty, women may actually enjoy greater overallincentives to complete college.

We use General Social Survey (GSS) data since 1972 to examinechange in the achievement of secondary and post-secondary degreesby gender. In particular, we examine the degree achievements ofcohorts born in the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.Our review of the literature leads to five major expectations. First,for cohorts born between the 1910s and the 1930s, we expect therewill have been a gradual increase in male advantage in educationalachievement, largely as a result of programs instituted to deal withthe turn-of-the-century “boy problem” and the GI Bill. Second, this


increase in male advantage will have been greatest for children fromfamilies with the least income, partly because these programs(including the GI Bill) will have affected their educational behaviorsmost. Third, females will have had a greater relative advantageamong blacks than among whites for all cohorts, with the possibleexception of those affected by the GI Bill (perhaps that of the 1920s).Fourth, for cohorts born between the 1940s and the 1970s, there willhave been a decrease in male advantage, thanks to consciousnessraising and policy changes beginning in the 1960s, but that a femaleadvantage will only have been achieved by the 1970s cohorts, sinceit was only in the 2000s that the literature began to focus on a new“boy problem.” Fifth, this reversal of male advantage will have beenespecially noteworthy for those from lower-income families, wherenew definitions of masculinity will have inhibited boys’ and men’sacademic achievement.

Method

We use GSS data to compare the educational achievements of menand women aged 30 or more (old enough, in most cases, to havecompleted their educational careers) from seven decades of birthcohorts: the 1910s (1910 to 1919), 1920s (1920 to 1929), 1930s (1930 to1939), 1940s (1940 to 1949), 1950s (1950 to 1959), 1960s (1960 to 1969)and the 1970s (1970 to 1979). There will be some unknowablemeasurement error due to attrition by death, especially of membersof the earliest age cohorts, and due to the fact that not all members,especially of the later cohorts, will have completed their educationsby age 30.

To measure educational achievement, we used the GSS questionabout “highest year of school completed” divided into fivecategories: 0-11 (less than high school), 12 (high school), 13-15 (somecollege), 16 (college), 17-20 (graduate). The measure of strength ofassociation used between gender and academic achievement isGamma. Gender is used as a dummy variable, coded 1 for males, 2for females. Consequently, a negative Gamma indicates that menhave achieved, on average, more education than women, while apositive Gamma, that women, more education than men.

We measured the income of respondents’ families of origin bytheir subjective assessment of that income through a GSS question,asking them whether their family income at age 16 was “far below


average,” “below average,” “average,” “above average” or “farabove average.” Probably because most people are unable ordisinclined to see their birth families as having been “far aboveaverage” in income, the number of respondents assigning themselvesto this category is generally very small, so we have recoded the“above average” and “far above average” categories into one “aboveaverage” category. The subjectivity of assessing relative familyincome is a weakness of the measure, we realize, but it does permitthis measure, and not some alternative available measures of socialclass—like mother’s or father’s education—to be comparable for alldecades under study here.

We also measured respondents’ race in terms of their own self-assessment. The GSS survey asks respondents, “What race do youconsider yourself” and provides three categories: white, black andother. The content of the “other” category changed significantlyduring the twentieth century and we have therefore compared only“whites” and “blacks” in the following analysis.

Findings

Our first hypothesis was that the male advantage in educationalachievement increased between the 1910s and the 1930s cohorts.Table 1 shows that this expectation is borne out by the GSS data.Thus, while the percentage of females who had at least some collegeeducation was just under 6 percent lower than the percentage ofmales in the 1910s cohorts, it was just over 10 percent for the 1930scohorts. And Gamma, which had been a -.06 for the 1910s cohorts,indicating that males were, on average, slightly more educated thanfemales, was -.14 for the 1930s cohorts, indicating that the male

Table 1Educational Achievement of 1910s and 1930s Cohorts by Gender

1910s 1930s

Males Females Males Females

Less than High School 48.4% 47.6% 27.5% 26.8%High School 27.2% 33.8% 29.3% 42.2%Some College 12.3% 11.1% 18.5% 16.6%College 6.0% 4.7% 11.4% 8.6%Graduate 6.2% 2.9% 13.1% 5.9%Total Number 1476 1760 2436 3054

Gamma= -.06 p<.001 Gamma=-.14 p<.001


advantage had increased between those two sets of cohorts. Thischange in the gender advantage is statistically significant at the .001level (and much lower) when one compares the difference indifference of proportions tests for males and females achieving morethan a high school education for the two periods.

Our second hypothesis was that the increase in male advantagebetween the 1910s and 1930s cohorts was particularly great forchildren from low-income families. This hypothesis is also borneout by the GSS data. Figure 1, for instance, shows that for adultsborn between 1910 and 1919 and describing their family income at16 as “far below average,” the Gamma was .09, indicating that femaleachievement outstripped male achievement, but that for comparableadults born in the 1930s, the Gamma was -.23, indicating a strongmale advantage. This negative change in Gamma (-.32) is far greaterthan the second greatest negative change (that of -.07 for childrenfrom families with “average” and “above average” incomes). Wenote, however, that, despite concerns about a generalized “boyproblem” that continued until the 1930s1, we find no evidence thatfemales generally outperformed males in academic credentialingeven in the 1910s cohorts.

Figure 1: Gammas for Relationship between Educational Achievement andGender, by Decade of Birth (1910s to 1930s) and Income of Family at 16


Figure 2 enables examination of our third hypothesis: thatfemales will have had a greater relative advantage among blacksthan among whites for all cohorts, with the possible exception ofthat affected by the GI Bill (perhaps those of the 1920s). The cohortsfrom the 1920s are the only ones in which black females did notenjoy more of an advantage over their male counterparts than whitewomen. A difference of difference tests indicates no significantdifference between blacks and whites born in the 1920s.

Figure 2: Gammas for Relationship between Educational Achievement andGender, by Decade of Birth and Race

Our fourth hypothesis was that for cohorts born between the1940s and the 1970s, there was a decrease in male advantage, butthat a female advantage will only have been achieved by the 1970scohorts, since it was only in the 2000s that the literature began tofocus on a new “boy problem.” The first part of this hypothesis isaffirmed through data displayed in Figure 3 which shows, overall,the cohorts from the 1940s to the 1970s enacting a monotonic marchtowards female advantage (see the “all” columns). The second part,that an actual female advantage will not have emerged until thechildren of the 1970s completed their educations is, however, notsupported. The children of the 1960s were actually the first to haveenacted a female advantage.


Figure 3 also enables the evaluation of our fifth hypothesis, thatthe reversal of the male advantage will have been especiallynoteworthy among children from low-income families. It shows thatthe greatest reversal occurred among children from families with“far below average” incomes. For children from “below average”and “average” income families, the achievement of a femaleadvantage had also been achieved by the cohorts of the 1960s. Onthe opposite end of the income spectrum, there was a substantialdecrease in male advantage for children from families with “aboveaverage” incomes, yielding a substantial female advantage for thecohorts of the 1970s.

Conclusion

We have found support for the idea that when opinion makers settheir minds to it, they can change the course of gender inequalitywithin the American educational system. Rather like an ocean liner(and not a smaller vessel), however, such inequality has considerablemomentum and is not easily maneuvered. It lumbers this way, thenthat, for decades. Remarkably, though, and perhaps unlike genderinequality in other American institutions, it has hovered aroundsomething like near equality for over a century.

Our analysis started with the birth cohorts of the 1910s, when,by our measure, gender inequality in educational achievement was

Figure 3: Gammas for Relationship between Educational Achievement andGender, by Decade of Birth (1940s to 1970s) and Income of Family at 16


small, though somewhat surprisingly, given then-extant critiquesof a “boy problem,” slightly tilted in favor of males. Even the birthcohorts of the 1910s, our oldest cohorts, however, are likely to havehad their educational careers affected by programs advocated bythe authors of those critiques. It is conceivable that if we had beenable to take our analysis back to cohorts born in the nineteenthcentury, we would have detected an inequality that indeed favoredwomen.

But, of course, our measure is but one that can be used. It tapsthe extent to which boys and girls, men and women, achieve differenteducational levels—high school, some college, college degrees,graduate work. It does not tap, for instance, various dimensions ofqualitative performance, such as grades attained, test scoresachieved, or courses of study. GSS data don’t admit of this kind ofanalysis, a kind that future analysts may be able to pursue.

Within their limitations, though, our data do suggest that in thecohorts born in the 1910s through the 1930s, one can find evidenceof a trend towards greater male advantage, in response—wespeculate—to efforts to address a generally perceived “boyproblem.” Our data suggest that for the cohorts of the 1910s, boyand girl high school graduation rates were similar, but that men’scollege achievements significantly outstripped those of women. Thecohorts of the 1920s and 1930s showed more of the same, only withevidence of even greater male advantage.

Our data also suggest that the movement towards greater maleadvantage was particularly pronounced among children whodescribed their family (of origin) income as “far below” average.The 1910s cohorts from this group actually displayed a substantialfemale advantage in educational achievement—analyses not shownhere show that males were considerably less likely to graduate fromhigh school in this group as well as in that coming from “below”average incomes. The male advantage of this group’s 1930s avatar,however, was greater than that of any other income group. Thestrategies aimed at the “boy problem”—preferentially hiring maleteachers, adding physical education to curricula and interscholasticsports, choosing books that featured male protagonists and rewritingtextbooks to feature examples that appealed to males, experimentingwith all-male classes and schools, making the content of educationeven more gender-specific, even changing college admissions


practices (Tyack and Hansot, 1992: 179-200; Kerber, 1997: 231;Kenschaft, 2005: 187-89)—had been primarily aimed at working classchildren, and that seems to have been where they were also mosteffective.

Almost certainly the relative female advantage among blacks,compared to whites, born in the 1910s reflected a history that madeeducation relatively unattractive for men and conducive toemployment as teachers for women. That this relative advantagepersisted throughout the 20th century, with the exception of thecohorts born in the 1920s, is somewhat more surprising. Whether itis simply due to attitudes and behaviors rooted in a history ofdiscrimination is beyond the scope of our data to determine. It seemslikely that the exception, the cohorts of the 1920s, is related to thespecial help soldiers—even black soldiers—received through the GIBill of Rights. Their experience points to the power of national policyon gender inequality in education.

So, of course, does the changing experience of birth cohorts sincethe 1940s. In the 1960s, second wave feminists raised objection tothe male advantage provided by American education and supplieda rationale for changing the course of gender inequality in education.This not only changed minds, but also led to policy changes, perhapsmost visible in the passage of Title IX. This helps account for theradical diminution of male advantage that occurred in theexperiences of birth cohorts between the 1940s and 1950s, as well asthe subsequent emergent pattern of female advantage. In fact, a smallfemale advantage in educational achievement seems to have beenachieved by the cohorts of the 1960s, suggesting that the literature’scontinued emphasis on barriers faced by girls and women in the1990s may have been slightly misplaced.

Or at least not based upon the observation of what washappening among low-income families. Because, again, it was theexperiences of these families that led the way in the reversal of themale advantage of the 1940s cohorts. The children of “far below”average income showed greater male advantage than any othergroup among 1940s cohorts. But they showed far greater femaleadvantage among the 1960s cohorts than any other (though childrenfrom “below” average income families showed a large femaleadvantage as well). It is likely that definitions of masculinity (e.g.,Lopez, 2003, and Morris, 2012), as well as changes in institutional


opportunities for women, are implicated in the highly alteredexperience of educational gender inequality for children from low-income backgrounds.

The literature of the early 2000s caught up with the changes ofthe last half-century and has led to recommendations for changesthat are reminiscent of recommendations made at the turn of thelast century. Whether the implementation of such recommendationswill have the same effects that their counterparts did a century agoremains to be seen. Institutional momentum is a ponderous thing.But it is not irresistible.

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