Where the Girls Aren’t

In May, the American Association of University Women announced the good news that the much-ballyhooed “boys crisis” is a myth. In its study, entitled "Where the Girls Are: The Facts About Gender Equity in Education," the AAUW reports that both girls and boys are doing better in American schools compared with 30 years ago. Gender gaps in academic achievement are generally small and getting smaller, according to the association. The report has received prominent coverage in all major American media, including Education Week, and the coverage has been almost universally positive. ("AAUW Sees No Educational Crisis for Boys," June 4, 2008.)

But there are substantial holes in the picture the AAUW is trying to paint. Over the past seven years, I have personally visited more than 200 schools around the United States, usually as a provider of professional development related to gender issues. I believe the AAUW report missed the point. There is a real gender gap, and it’s growing rapidly, but that gap has little to do with graduation rates or college-entrance rates, parameters that are given great emphasis in the report. The real gender gap is not in ability but in motivation—not in what girls and boys can do, but in what girls and boys want to do: specifically, in what they want to learn, and how they want to learn it.

Consider: The absolute number of young women studying computer science and physics has fallen by more than 50 percent in the past 20 years. That drop may seem puzzling at first, since the past 20 years has been an era in which girls have been encouraged from kindergarten through grade 12 to be physicists, engineers, and the like. Results have been disappointing. In one recent study, researchers asked high school girls who were earning top grades in math or science whether they planned to study physics or engineering at college. Nationwide, boys who earn top grades in math and science often answer yes when asked this question; but girls today almost unanimously answer it NO. The investigators found that these girls have no doubts about their ability to excel in physics or engineering. They know that they are perfectly capable of doing physics or engineering; they just don’t want to.

How come? It turns out that the best way to teach physics to girls is different from the best way to teach it to boys. With boys, you start with kinematics and momentum: race cars accelerating, football players colliding, that sort of thing. That approach is less reliably effective with girls. With most girls, a better place to start is with a riddle involving the nature of things: What is the nature of light? Is light a wave? Or is light made up of particles? The girls then discover that light is both a wave and a particle. I just returned from visiting girls’ schools in Australia and New Zealand; it’s my third visit in three years to single-sex schools in that part of the world. I was impressed, once again, by how well the girls’ schools there understand these differences.