Children and the Gender Wars

Cathy Young | April 2, 2001

When Jane Fonda recently announced that she was donating $12.5 million to the Harvard Graduate School of Education for a new gender studies center, the retired Hollywood star and estranged wife of cable TV mogul Ted Turner stepped right in the middle of a new war.

While feminist academics have hailed her initiative as a major service to the cause of gender equity, conservatives have assailed it as part of an effort to promote "gender propaganda." It's clear that the proposed interdisciplinary Center on Gender and Education will pursue not only academic research but also a social agenda.

Fonda has said that she wants to help liberate children from "cultural gender norms" that "impede their healthy growth." Her guru on gender issues is feminist psychologist Carol Gilligan, a professor at the Harvard School of Education (who is moving to New York University but will serve as a consultant to the center). Gilligan argues that our patriarchal culture robs girls of their "voice," rendering them passive and docile, and damages boys by forcing them to hide tender feelings under a macho mask --- themes echoed in Fonda's remarks.

However, many researchers and theorists question Gilligan's claims and her research. Some critics such as Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and author of the recent book "The War Against Boys," assert that traditional masculine and feminine norms are far less harmful to children than are misguided attempts to dismantle these norms.

Maybe the real danger is that, in these ideological gender wars, the needs of children of both sexes will take a back seat to scoring points in the debate.

Endangered girls?

One problem Fonda wants the gender studies center to tackle is girls' loss of self-confidence in adolescence. Girls who are "bright-eyed and bushy-tailed" at the age of 9, she told an enthusiastic Harvard audience last year, are shy and unsure of themselves at 13. Such concerns are hardly new. In 1991, the American Association of University Women released a study showing a dramatic drop in teenage girls' self-esteem. (Gilligan, whose claims that girls were being stifled in a "male-voiced" culture inspired the study, had some input in designing the survey questions.)

The resulting media blitz sparked a national response, including the hugely popular "Take Our Daughters to Work Day" pioneered by the Ms. Foundation in 1993. Eager parents snapped up copies of therapist Mary Pipher's 1994 book, "Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls."

Sommers, however, offered a scathing critique of the self-esteem study in her 1994 book, "Who Stole Feminism?" Among other things, she pointed out that the AAUW's publicity focused solely on the percentages of girls and boys who answered "always true" on such survey items as "I am happy the way I am"; if those who checked "sort of true" and "sometimes true/sometimes false" are included, the gender differences turn out to be negligible.

Sommers also noted that the alarmism about a "girl crisis" ignored the fact that boys were more likely to suffer from serious behavioral disorders, to drop out of school and even to commit suicide.

No sex differences

Although the AAUW continues to defend its study, most research, going as far back as the early 1980s, fails to support the notion that girls are afflicted by plummeting self-esteem. Many studies of children and adolescents find no sex differences in self-worth and self-confidence; when girls do worse on these measures, it is typically by a tiny margin that does not widen with age.

In several studies led by University of Denver psychologist Susan Harter in the late 1990s, teenage girls were found to be at least as outspoken as their male peers with parents, teachers and classmates. Nor is there factual support for much-ballyhooed claims that girls are silenced in the classroom.

Research reported in the 1985 book "Gender Influences in Classroom Interaction" showed that girls asked and answered questions in class no less actively than boys (when boys received extra attention from teachers, it was usually in the form of scolding). In the AAUW's own study, girls at every age level were as likely as boys to say that they liked to speak in class and that teachers listened to them.

Girls do appear to be more vulnerable to emotional distress, perhaps because they tend to focus more on their feelings. In a 1997 Commonwealth Fund survey, 19 percent of adolescent girls but 12 percent of boys reported feeling stressed, overwhelmed or depressed on five or more days in the past week. However, in the same survey, the vast majority of girls --- like boys --- had a generally positive attitude toward themselves and toward life.