Gender feminists routinely claim that girls are being victimized by a biased school system. But according to Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men, the “diminished girl” crisis is a fiction. Girls typically fare quite well compared to boys.

While 12th-grade boys are generally more advanced than girls in math, girls surpass boys in reading and writing. In fact, the average girl is a year and a half ahead of the average boy in these areas.

Girls consistently surpass boys in subject grades, attendance, and educational aspirations. Even the federal government’s own Department of Education study, “Trends in Educational Equity for Girls and Women,” found that girls are by far the superior students. Another widespread myth is the “test-score gap.”

While boys do score higher than girls on standardized tests, the differences in scores should not necessarily be attributed to differences in educational opportunity. The reality is that the pool of test-takers is expanding to include less competitive girls. And college also disproves the charge that girls lack opportunity.

In 1997, 55 percent of full-time college enrollments were female and 45 percent male. The Department of Education predicts that 9.2 million women will enroll in college but only 6.9 million men will do so by 2007. Girls also graduate with Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in greater numbers than boys do.

The evidence demonstrates that girls are ahead of boys in school. The notion that girls are shortchanged emerges from political propaganda peddled as science.

For example, in 1992, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) commissioned “How Schools Shortchange Girls: A Study of Major Findings on Girls and Education.” The survey-based study reported only the percentage of girls that checked “always true” in response to “am happy the way I am,” making the misleading claim that schools shortchange girls. Boys and girls scored almost identically with responses “sort of true” and “sometimes true/sometimes false.” In reality, the study reveals far more about clever public-relations spin than the way girls are treated in school. Unfortunately, this is not the only source of these myths.

Harvard’s first professor of gender studies, Carol Gilligan, spread the myth that America’s girls are in crisis. This paved the road to a glut of laws, such as the Gender Equity in Education Act of 1994. The $360 million Act provided funds to schools and organizations to implement gender equity programs. The Act also established an Office of Women’s Equity in the Department of Education to evaluate gender policies and sponsor more than 300 publications. But as Sommers pointed out, Gilligan’s questionable data behind her publications are not publicly available, a poor basis for public policy.

In reality there is not a boys’ crisis or a girls’ crisis, but an education crisis. American high school seniors scored last among 40 countries in the Third Annual Mathematics and Science Study.

Policymakers should, therefore, divert their attention from gender myths and focus their efforts on true education reforms such as school-choice vouchers. This would allow children to escape from failing schools and provide educational opportunity for all.

– Laura Dykes

Public Policy Fellow