This is an update to the FM series about women in America. Links to previous chapters appear at the end.
- The Shriver Report, Center for American Progress, October 2009 — “A Women’s Nation Changes Everything”
- “The myth that schools shortchanged girls“, Judith Kleinfeld (Prof Psychology, U Alaska), Men’s Insight Magazine, 1998
Excerpts
(1) The Shriver Report, Center for American Progress, October 2009 — “A Women’s Nation Changes Everything” — From the opening by Maria Shriver:
Women say they feel increasingly isolated, invisible, stressed, and misunderstood.
Yes, Ms. Shriver. So do men. From the Executive Summary, about the “new normal”:
This report describes how a woman’s nation changes everything about how we live and work today. Now for the first time in our nation’s history, women are half of all U.S. workers and mothers are the primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families. This is a dramatic shift from just a generation ago (in 1967 women made up only one-third of all workers). It changes how women spend their days and has a ripple effect that reverberates throughout our nation. It fundamentally changes how we all work and live, not just women but also their families, their co-workers, their bosses, their faith institutions, and their communities.
Quite simply, women as half of all workers changes everything.
(2) “The myth that schools shortchanged girls“, Judith Kleinfeld (Prof Psychology, U Alaska), Men’s Insight Magazine, 1998 — Excerpt:
Women’s advocacy groups have waged an intense media campaign to promote the idea that the “schools shortchange girls. ” Their goal is to intensify the image of women as “victims” deserving special treatment and policy attention. Their sophisticated public relations campaign has succeeded. The idea that girls are victimized by the schools has become the common wisdom, what educated people just assume to be true.
But the idea that the “schools shortchange girls” is wrong and dangerously wrong. It is girls who get higher grades in school, who do better than boys on standardized tests of reading and writing, and who get higher class rank and more school honors. It is young women who enter and graduate from college far more frequently than young men. It is women who have made dramatic progress in obtaining professional, business, and doctoral degrees. The great gender gap of the 1960s in advanced degrees has almost closed, especially in the professional fields to which ambitious women aspire. In the view of elementary and high school students, the young people who sit in the classroom year after year and observe what is going on, both boys and girls agree: Schools favor girls. Teacher think girls are smarter, like being around them more, and hold higher expectations for them.
… The myth that the schools shortchange girls is dangerously wrong because it has diverted policy attention from the group at genuine educational risk‹African-American boys. This is the group that scores lowest on virtually every educational measure. This is the group where an enormous gap does exist between males and females. But the African American gender gap favors females, who are pulling far ahead of males in college graduation rates and in obtaining professional degrees.
Where did the notion that the schools shortchange girls come from? And how do advocacy groups manage to convince people that it is girls who are victimized in the schools? What data do they use and what data do they ignore?
In this paper, I examine the charges made in a highly publicized report, How Schools Shortchange Girls, published by the American Association of University Women (1992). I show how the findings in this report are based on a selective review of the research and how findings contrary to the report’s message were suppressed. These contrary findings indeed appear in studies the AAUW itself commissioned, but the AAUW not only did not include these findings in their media kits but made the data difficult to obtain.
For more information from the FM site
- The Real Revolution in Military Affairs (it’s not what you think), 14 November 2005
- Women dominating the ranks of college graduates – What’s the effect on America?, 7 July 2009
- A better answer to “why women outperform men in college?”, 8 July 2009
- Women as soldiers – an update, 25 August 2009
- Yes, it is a “mancession”, with men losing more jobs than women. Just like all recessions., 5 October 2009
Afterword
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