(so) What about the boys?

Every once in awhile the media reports on the detriment of boys in contemporary society. This past week it was Canada's national paper, The Globe and Mail, who reported that girls are outperforming boys in science fairs (traditionally an area dominated by boys) and that - gasp - boys aren't even showing up to compete!

The article reports:

Megan Hawse, 13, said many of her male peers in Mount Pearl, Nfld., would rather play sports than spend the hours she logged on evenings and weekends for her experiment on whether algae could be a sufficient source of Omega 3 for humans.

She has noticed some other factors. When she reaches Grade 11, she plans to apply for a provincial internship program that promotes women in science and engineering - but there isn't a similar program for her male classmates. And one reason no boys competed in a biotechnology fair in her area, she added, may be that girls tend to be more interested in subjects like biology, health and environmental sciences, whereas boys tend to be drawn more to physical sciences and engineering.

Tucked away near the end of the article is that anticipated jab at affirmative action programming that is often to be expected from these stories. Perhpas we've invested too much is girls at the expense of boys, is the implication, and now we've got a problem.

But while the facts in the story may be accurate, the overall picture is distorted. Men still dominate top science research and engineering positions and make up more than half of the graduate student population in these areas. They still get the top paid positions out in the "real world". Ditto for medicine -- yes, women may be outnumbering men in medical school but once out it pracitice they form the bulk of family medicine, while men take on the high paying specializations.

So my question is, what is happening to the girls between this time when they're 'shining' to a decade down the road when they enter the professional world? And why aren't wee hearing this question being asked more frequently? Of course, marriage and mothering probably play a role, along with other other factors, but we rarely see analysis of this outside of sociology of the family classes.

A bit of history: The "crisis" of boys started back when Christina Hoff Sommers wrote The War Against Boys in 2000. Since then we've heard about how it's boys - not girls like we'd been hearing in the 80s and 90s from books like Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia - that are suffering. But it's the attack on feminism that is really disconcerning, because it plays on that (untrue) stereotype that feminism pits women again men, girls against boys. The thing is, people seem to like this simplistic conflict between the sexes, which has made concepts like "reverse sexism" seem real and appealing to many. The unfortunate part is that it's standing in the way of the development of a feminist consciousness in today's girls.

Coincidently, I came across this analysis from Anglea McRobbie in her fabulous new book The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change (book review to follow as soon as I'm finished it!):

High rates of success in gaining qualifications have become the benchmark of equality as achived. It is assumed that gender inequities have now (more or less) been successfully dealt with, such that yooung men are now the losers, and they are in effect discriminated against. Thus one form the backlash against feminism takes is to argue that it has gone too far, that it has overstepped its limits and tht having succeeded in achieving equality for young women it has indirectly contributed to male under-performance through the feminisation of schooling.

This debate raises one of the most important questions for feminists and girl studies scholars today: How do we "unmask" this illusion of achieved (or perhaps, overachieved according to the Globe article) equality in order to get girls and women to understand the continued need for feminisms today?

xo, jessalynn