These soundbites from The War Against Boys tell, in Christina Hoff Sommers own words, how professional-feminists in Massachusetts have deceived the American public. The headlines are by the staff of Massachusetts News.

Wellesley Report Was Huge 'Success' in 1992 - Despite Many Errors
Despite its anti-boy bias and factual errors, the campaign to persuade the public that girls are being diminished personally and academically was a spectacular success. As the American Association of University Women's exultant director, Anne Bryant, told her friends, "I remember going to bed the night our report was issued, totally exhilarated.  When I woke up the next morning, the first thought in my mind was 'Oh my God, what do we do next?'" Political action came next, and here, too, the girl advocates were successful.

As a Result, Feds Give Millions to 'Help' Girls 
In 1994, the allegedly low state of America's girls moved the U.S. Congress to pass the Gender Equity in Education Act, which categorized girls as an "under-served population" on a par with other discriminated-against minorities. Millions of dollars in grants were awarded to study the plight of girls and learn how to cope with the insidious bias against them. At the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, members of the American delegation presented the educational and psychological deficits of American girls as a pressing human rights issue.

The Truth: Girls Were Flourishing in 1990s
Contrary to the story told by Gilligan and her followers, by the early 1990s American girls were flourishing in unprecedented ways. To be sure, some ... felt they were drowning in the sea of Western culture. But the vast majority of girls were occupied in more constructive ways, moving ahead of boys academically in the primary and secondary grades, applying to colleges in record numbers, filling the more challenging academic classes, joining sports teams, and generally enjoying more freedoms and opportunities than any young women in human history.

Wellesley Report Was Released by $150,000 PR Campaign
[A new study, How Schools Shortchange Girls,] carried out by the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and released in 1992, asserted a direct causal relationship between girls' (alleged) second-class status in the nation's schools and deficiencies in their level of self-esteem. Carol Gilligan's psychological girl crisis was thus transformed into a pressing civil rights issue: girls were victims of widespread sexist discrimination in our nation's schools. "The impli-cations are clear," said the AAUW; "the system must change."

"Recess - the one time during the school day when boys can legitimately engage in rowdy play - ...may soon be a thing of the past." Atlanta has eliminated all recesses in its elementary schools and has even built a school without a playground on purpose. 

No one would do such a thing if it hurt girls, says Prof. Sommers because "they would immediately face a storm of justified protests from women advocates." But she warns, "Boys have no such protectors."

Education Week reported that the AAUW spent $100,000 for the second study and $150,000 promoting it. With great fanfare, How Schools Shortchange Girls was released to uncritical, even enthusiastic, media. The promotion proved to be spectacularly successful, generating more than 1,400 news reports and a flurry of TV discussions of the "tragedy" that had struck the nation's girls. 

Susan Chira's 1992 article for The New York Times was typical of media coverage throughout the country. The headline read "Bias Against Girls Is Found Rife in Schools, with Lasting Damage." The piece could have been written by the AAUW's publicity department. Indeed, the entire Times article was later reproduced by the AAUW and sent out as part of its fund-raising package. Chira had not interviewed a single critic.

In March 1999, I called Ms. Chira and asked her about the way she had handled the AAUW report on diminished girls. There was a long silence. "I don't want to talk about this," she finally said. I tried delicately to broach the question of why she had not sought out critics. "I see where this is going.... I wish you the best of luck. Goodbye," she said, taking the journalistic equivalent of the Fifth Amendment. 

But she called back a few hours later, saying she was prepared to answer my questions. Would you write it the same way today? I asked. No, she said, pointing out that we have since learned so much more about boys' deficits. Why had she not canvassed dissenting opinions? She explained that when the AAUW study had come out, she had been traveling and was on a short deadline. Yes, perhaps she had relied too much on the AAUW's report. She had tried to reach Diane Ravitch, the former assistant secretary of education and a known critic of women's advocacy "findings," but had not been able to. 
Had Chira been able to reach Ravitch, or any number of other experts on sex differences in education, she would quickly have learned that the report was at the very least unbalanced: it highlighted studies in support of the "shortchanged girl" thesis and downplayed studies that contradicted it. 

Six Years Later, NY Times Told the Truth
Six years after the release of How Schools Shortchange Girls, The New York Times ran a story that, for the first time, questioned the validity of the report. By then, of course, most of the damage to the truth about boys and girls was irreparable. This time the reporter, Tamar Lewin, did reach Diane Ravitch, who told her, "The AAUW report was just completely wrong. What was so bizarre is that it came out right at the time that girls had just overtaken boys in almost every area."

U.S. News Belatedly Found the Truth
One of the many things the report was wrong about was the "call-out" gap [which counts who volunteers or "calls-out" during class]. According to the AAUW, "In a study conducted by Myra and David Sadker, boys in elementary and middle school called out answers eight times more often than girls. When boys called out, teachers listened. But when girls called out, they were told to 'raise your hand if you want to speak.' "

One reporter who belatedly decided to check on some of the AAUW's data was Amy Saltzman, then of U.S. News & World Report. She asked David Sadker for a copy of the research backing up the celebrated eight-to-one call-out claim. Sadker explained that he had presented the finding in an unpublished paper at a symposium sponsored by the American Educational Research Association; neither he nor the Association had a copy. Sadker conceded that the eight-to-one ratio he had announced might have been inaccurate. Saltzman cited an independent study done by Gail Jones, an associate professor of education at the University of North Carolina, who found that boys called out answers twice as often as girls. Whatever the accurate number may be, no one has even shown that permitting a student to call out answers in the classroom confers any kind of academic advantage. What does confer advantage is a student's attentiveness. Boys are less attentive - which could explain why some teachers might call on them more or be more tolerant of call-outs. 

Girls Were Doing Better Than Boys
In the July 7, 1995 issue of Science, Larry Hedges and Amy Nowell, researchers at the University of Chicago, observed that girls' deficits in math were small ... Of boys' writing skills, they wrote, "The large sex differences in writing ... are alarming. The data imply that males are, on average, at a rather profound disadvantage in the performance of this basic skill." Hedges and Nowell go on to warn, "The generally larger numbers of males who perform near the bottom of the distribution in reading comprehension and writing also have policy implications. It seems likely that individuals with such poor literacy skills will have difficulty finding employment in an increasingly information-driven economy. Thus, some intervention may be required to enable them to participate constructively." 

Hedges and Nowell are describing a serious problem of national scope, but because the focus has been exclusively on girls' deficits, it is not a problem Americans know much about or even suspect exists. It is very hard to look at the school data on adolescents or the most recent data on college students without coming to the conclusion that girls and young women are thriving, while boys and young men are languishing.

AAUW Ignored 1995 Study
In 1995, perhaps in reaction to criticism - from an increasing number of unpersuaded scholars - the AAUW commissioned a more serious scientific study of gender and academic achievement. That study, The Influence of School Climate on Gender Differences in the Achievement and Engagement of Young Adolescents, by University of Michigan professor Valerie E. Lee and her associates, was released without the fanfare the AAUW usually lavishes on such publications. This is not surprising. Lee's study strongly suggests that earlier reports of a tragic demoralization and shortchanging of America's schoolgirls have been greatly exaggerated. 

Lee and her associates analyzed data on the educational achievement and engagement of more than nine thousand eighth-grade boys and girls and found that the differences between boys and girls were "small to moderate." Moreover, the pattern of gender differences is "inconsistent in direction." In some areas, females are favored; in others, males are favored. The study showed that the girls were more engaged academically than the boys: they were better prepared for class, had better attendance records, and evinced more positive academic behavior overall.

Lee's temperate conclusions, in research sponsored by the AAUW, were based on U.S. Department of Education data and were fully consistent with the findings of Hedges and Nowell. But they are at odds with the disturbing picture that the AAUW earlier so successfully sold to the American public and Congress. Lee concluded, "The public discourse around issues of gender in school needs some change ... Inequity can (and does) work in both directions." As far as I have been able to ascertain, Valerie Lee's responsible and objective study was not mentioned in a single newspaper.

The AAUW did not spend $150,000 promoting Lee's study, nor did it tone down its own partisan rhetoric. On the contrary, dissenting views provoked the organization to anger and abuse. In the spring of 1997, the AAUW newsletter AAUW Outlook attacked the "gender bias revisionists" who "like John Leo, Christina Hoff Sommers, or your local columnist" had questioned the myth of the fragile girl: "We have all heard of revisionist history. There will always be some individuals who will insist that the Holocaust did not happen.... The revisionists often distort the facts so thoroughly that their take on history loses all semblance of reality."

1997 Study Contradicted Wellesley
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.

During a three-month period in 1997, 1,306 students and 1,035 teachers in grades seven through twelve were asked a variety of questions about gender equity. The MetLife study was not produced by a feminist advocacy organization; it had no doctrinal ax to grind. What it found contradicted most of the pet "findings" of the AAUW, the Sadkers, and the Wellesley Center for Research on Women. It politely said as much: "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." 

Another 1997 Study of 100,000 Children: Wellesley Study Was False
At another session, "How Do the Academic Experiences of Boys and Girls Differ?," Nancy Leffert, a child psychologist at the Search Institute in Minneapolis, reported the results of a massive survey she and her colleagues had recently completed of more than 99,000 sixth-through-twelfth-graders. The children were asked about their "developmental assets." The Search Institute has identified forty critical assets ("building blocks for healthy development"). Half of these are external - for example, a supportive family, adult role models - and half internal - motivation to achieve, sense of purpose in life, interpersonal confidence. Leffert explained to the ... audience, somewhat apologetically, that girls were ahead of boys in thirty-four of the forty assets! On almost every significant measure of well-being, girls had the better of boys: they felt closer to their families, they had higher aspirations and a stronger connection to school - even superior assertiveness skills. Leffert concluded her talk by saying that in the past, she had referred to girls as fragile or vulnerable, "but if you look at [our survey], it tells me that girls have very powerful assets."

The original AAUW study, so successfully promoted by AAUW, had been based on a survey of three thousand children. The Search Institute research that Leffert summarized was incomparably more reliable - it was based on a survey of nearly a hundred thousand students. This massive study definitively showed that the shortchanged-girls premise -on which the ... conference was based- was false.

Prof. Gilligan Is Famous . . .
Gilligan is Harvard University's first professor of gender studies. Journalists routinely cite her "landmark" or "ground-breaking" research on women's distinctive moral psychology. She was Ms. magazine's Woman of the Year in 1984, and Time magazine put her on its shortlist of the 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."

. . . But Scholarly Reputation Is In Doubt
Gilligan's reputation as a media figure is not in doubt. Her scholarly reputation, however, is quite another matter. "Transforming the paradigm for what it means to be human" would certainly be a feat of great historical importance. But any such achievement would, at the very least, require a great deal of empirical evidence in support of the new paradigm. Gilligan, who compares her methodology to Darwin's, presents very little in the way of data to back up her claims. Most of her published research consists of anecdotes that are based on a small number of interviews. Apart from these interviews, her data (as we shall see) are unavailable for review, giving rise to some reasonable doubts about their merits and persuasiveness.

Despite the glaring lack of published data, Gilligan's conclusions have largely gone unchallenged. The skeptical judgments of the many scholars who don't take Gilligan seriously are buried in obscure academic journals. Meanwhile, her bold theories and the "groundbreaking" empirical research that presumably backs them up are widely referred to and routinely celebrated in the popular media.

NY Times Praised Her
In January 1990, The New York Times Magazine published a flattering feature story on Gilligan. The article, entitled "Confident at 11, Confused at 16," reported that Gilligan had tracked the psychological development of girls as they entered adolescence and had uncovered the dismaying phenomenon of girls' being silenced, "going underground," and no longer knowing what they once knew. The piece mentioned in passing that Gilligan's research "provoked intense hostility on the part of academics" but provided few details. The message that came through was that an eminent Harvard scholar had made a shocking and important empirical discovery: as girls move into adolescence, our society pushes them into the background.

Once again, pathological science had met credulous journalism. This New York Times Magazine profile quickly generated a panicky concern for girls that would profoundly affect education policy in the 1990s. The alarming "discovery" that America's girls were suffering a loss of voice and a drain of confidence was similar to the electromagnetic-field scare in producing "considerable paranoia, but little insight." At a time when an educational gender gap was opening up with girls well in the lead, boys became objects of neglect as the educational establishment kept on looking for ways to compensate the afflicted girls.

'Take Daughters to Work' Day Was Born
The mood at Ms. [in 1990] was tense but excited. What should be done to help stem the terrible drain of girls' self-confidence? It was in pondering this question that Wilson, Gilligan, and Nel Merlino, a public relations specialist, hit on the idea of a school holiday exclusively for girls. What became Take Our Daughters to Work Day would achieve two purposes. First, an unprecedented girls-only holiday (the boys would stay in school) would raise public awareness about the precarious state of girls' self-esteem. Second, it would address that problem by taking a dramatic step to alleviate the drain of confidence girls suffer. As Ms. explained: for one day, at least, girls would feel "visible, valued and heard."

Looking back to the beginnings of a school holiday now observed by millions, Wilson and Gilligan are understandably self-congratulatory: "Miracle of miracles, seven women and a fax machine at the Ms. Foundation for Women pulled off the largest public education campaign in the history of the women's movement. In a nutshell, that's how Take Our Daughters to Work Day was born."