'Female Advantage' at College: Just Another Fake Gender Crisis

The New York Times ought to be ashamed. A series of articles about the supposed "boy crisis" and "women leaving men in the dust" in college is the latest gender pseudo phenomenon generated to raise fear and profits. Anything about male-female competition upsets a lot of people. It sells books, newspapers, tends to generate a lot of angst-filled e-mailing and often gets me into a lot of trouble too -- especially with people who don't really read what I've written. Anyway, consider this.

Tamar Lewin, author of "At College Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust," describes enrollment numbers that "tilt toward women," which has some selective private colleges giving men a boost. Notice the words "tilt" and "some" and "selective private colleges." Female authors are being added to reading lists, she tells us. This long overdue condition certainly has people shaking. At Harvard, 55% of women graduated with honors this spring and they just admitted 52% women to their freshman class. That 5% honors difference and 2% extra women difference is supposedly part of what the New York Times refers to as "the new gender divide." Give me a break!

If you read past the title of this article and those of the NYT series, you'll find such observations as: "Over all, the differences between blacks and whites, rich and poor, dwarf the differences between men and women within any particular group," says Jacqueline King, a researcher for the American Council on Education's Center for Policy Analysis and the author of the forthcoming report."

And the line we're supposed to skim in Lewin's earlier article "Boys are No Match for Girls in Completing High School" reads that the supposed new gender gap "is far more pronounced among minorities" thus skewing the results.

As if making much ado (a series) about very little (especially about the kids to whom the conclusions actually pertain) weren't enough for the once-called "newspaper of record," New York Times op-ed writer John Tierny followed in his editorial "Let the Guys Win One" with the excessive generalization that (1) men are now an "underachieving minority on campuses," and the bogus conclusion that (2) therefore Title IX protections of women's sports ought to bite the dust so boys can at least succeed in that domain.

I had to reread that piece a few times looking for the "Ha ha, just kidding," but it wasn't there. Based on a bogus title about findings generalized to the wrong population, we now have an attack on women's sports. As if we see a lot of media coverage of those.

All of this nonsense pales by comparison to what is actually going on in our world. But, for the sake of balance on an issue given too much attention, let me just say what I've observed in my years of teaching college. College is where the playing field is largely leveled. Success is more predictable than it is in most aspects of life. If you study you can get reasonably good grades. Rarely, if ever, do college professors think to themselves, "This student is a woman, I'll grade her lower than her exam results."

But, on the other side of graduation there is the political landscape of work. It swallows naïve men and women, but women face an especially long, hard road if they think that the kind of work that got them college grades is going to be enough to get them ahead on the job. Once young women pass through the "cute-and-little phase" of their lives when they threaten no one to the levels where they do, success is a matter not only of competence but of politics as well. If a female advantage does exist right now at the college entry level because they put in the hours of study, it usually disappears at this later level in those fields where women do not predominate.

So many women who've been through the confusion of sorting out the political landscape of their jobs without the mentoring often more readily available to men, are telling their daughters to accrue as much of an advantage at every stage as humanly possible. The word on the street for some time has been that women must be twice as good at what they do to be hired and promoted in jobs where men dominate. Sour grapes? Some think so. And it isn't always true. But it is often enough.