The article exposes many claims opposing and supporting the thesis that boys have an advantage in and outside the classroom. On page 15 the author refers to the MetLife study saying, "...boys are at an advantage over girls in school, girls appear to have an advantage over boys in their future plans, teachers' expectations, everyday experiences at school and interactions in the classroom." This suggest that both sexes have advantages in different aspects of life. I believe that no matter what sex you are,, you have control over these type of situations. The opposing argument to this is that sexual discrimination is still evident in the current society.
I completely agree with you Jared. If people are having problems in school, it is up to them to fix it. I do not think that gender has much of an impact on how well you will do in school.
I also agree with you. It may be that in general, boys are better in some aspects of life and girls are better in other aspects of life but it is up to each individual. If you want to become successful or good at something, it is up to you to try and work hard. I think if you have the motivation to improve some aspect of your life, like how well you do in school for instance, you can, regardless of gender.
In the article, Sommers includes how "in 1997 college-full time enrollments were 45% male and 55% female. The department of education predicts that the proportion of boys in college classes will continue to shrink". I feel like this is because men have always been superior over women. Men have always gotten the upper hand and I feel like women see that as unfair and feel the need to want to succeed and prove themselves. Women still earn less for doing the same job men do. Reading the article I found myself disagreeing a lot with the author so for a second I kept thinking, am I feminist?
I kept thinking am I feminist because I found myself disagreeing a lot also! That is true that men earn more for doing the same thing as women so I'm curious to see how Sommers would have addressed this since her article is "The War Against Boys". I still believe that women and men excel in different areas because I feel that there are more women are teachers and there are more men helping at tech stores such as Apple.
I agree with what you're saying about how men and women excel in different areas. But I feel like that's solely because society has shaped the way we see certain areas of occupations. Some being more feminine and others seen as more masculine.
The article talks a lot about Carol Gilligan and her study that led to publication that "announced that America's adolescent girls were in crisis." Later in the article, Sommers mentions that there was a "great discrepancy between what Gilligan says she discovered about adolescent girls and what numerous other scientists say they have learned." I do not understand why everyone would readily accept Gilligan's theory even though she had no clear evidence that American girls actually are in a crisis. I get that she is some sort of celebrity in the world of gender studies, but why would people keep on believing what she was saying despite having any evidence to back it up?
This is also one of the claims I had stumbled across when reading the article. I had the same questions when reading her work. Yet people still follow her sayings without having concrete evidence to support it.
You're right that many people sided with Gilligan's claim; however there's a part in the article that shows many don't believe her claims. When Gilligan released the book, In a Different Voice, "Many academic psychologists, feminist and non-feminist alike, found Gilligan's specific claims about distinct male and female moral orientations unpersuasive and underground in empirical data."
On page 2, first paragraph it says "Girls are treated as the second sex in school and consequently suffer, that boys are accorded privileges and consequently benefit". I disagree with this or at least don't feel this way because through my experience I've seen the opposite. I've always seen boys suffer because some are not as driven or care as much as other boys or girls. Also, through my experience I feel that teachers will treat students based on how much they care about their class and how respectful they are. Not based on sex unless they're sexist. On the same page it says, "The typical boy is a year and a half behind the typical girl in reading and writing; he is less committed to school and less likely to go to college". I was wondering if this could be associated to what people say about girls being more mature than boys at an earlier age. Overall, I feel that boys and girls have different advantages in different areas and that the author lacked credibility/evidence. I found myself agreeing and disagreeing or even thinking "oh shut up" at times to be completely honest.
YESS! I completely agree that the author lacked credibility/ evidence! His arguments were not supported well, it just seemed like he was trying too hard to be right and make everyone else seem wrong. I might be biased though because I disagree with most of his arguments so that may contribute to my doubt in him!
In the article it talks about Gilligan conducting three studies: the "college student study," the "abortion study," and the "rights and responsibilities study." The article goes on to say that little is know about these studies and almost no information is available. Elizabeth Bowen ended up calling Gilligan's offices and they told Elizabeth that the information is unavailable because it is to sensitive. They also told Elizabeth that the information will be placed in a Harvard Library and that soon enough the information will be available. However, the information was never publicized. Brenda Maher later says that it would be extraordinary if information was deemed to sensitive for other to see. He states that there is a certain way that information is kept confidential, yet the researcher must disclose scores, how subjects were chosen, and what methods were used to receive the data. Are these three studies that Gilligan performed flawed to the point that she hid them from the public? Did these studies actually take place? Why is this information considered to be sensitive?
I'm not really sure but I think the studies were conducted but results were not in line with what Gilligan was trying to prove but nevertheless Gilligan chose to go ahead with her claims. I feel as though the author should have contacted Gilligan at some point to see her point of view. All throughout the article it is evident that Sommers is not a fan of Gilligan and she expresses her opinion to the point where the article comes off as biased against Gilligan.
Sommer criticizes much of the information that Carol Gillian provides. One of the arguments that intrigued me was the section on different types of parenting. Gillian believes that the pressure from culture norms for boys to separate from their mothers may be a cause for the gender gap in education. Sommer refutes her argument and states that it is actually the absence of the father figure that has more effects on the gender gap scale. I thought both of their arguments had made good points and found it a bit silly for Sommer to be trying so hard to make Gillian sound completely wrong. This discussion also made me wonder if girls are affected in the same way that boys are according to the studies in the absence of either mother or father.
I think that even though girls as a whole are doing better in school than boys, it is not genetics that is making it this way. Seeing that boys back in the day used to do better helps to prove that genetics are not the cause of girls doing better. It is just a shift in what is going on currently. I did find it interesting however that many people in the United States actually believe that women are disadvantaged in school currently. In addition, I also find it interesting that even with women doing better in school currently, they still as a whole do not make as much as men do.
What do you think this shift is? I agree with you that genetics doesn’t play a role in future/academic success but why do you think it is that boys and girls are so distinct in academic areas?
It is interesting that women don't make as much as men do as a whole. Why do you think this is? Is it a trend for women to work as hard but get rewarded less in our society?
Sommer shows that girls are more likely to want to go to college and get a better education compared to boys. I personally know a lot more girls that went to college than guys. I also noticed that a lot more girls know what they want to do in life, when a lot of guys are still undecided. Some statistics show that girls are doing a lot better in school compared to boys, which is very interesting to me. Not that I thought boys were doing a lot better, but I thought it was somewhat even for the most part. I believe it has to do more with how much time and effort are put into things rather than what gender someone is.
I agree with everything you said in this comment. I always thouhht everything was even too and that it just depends on how much time and effort is put into school. I thought this article was more of a fight against feminism than making a point about education
I agree with how you reacted to this article, the last sentence you said really sums up my opinion on this subject. I think comparing genders is just making up excuses and trying to justify why some people are excelling more than others.
I noticed that in a lot of places in the article that the author is a stern critic of Carol Gilligan's claims about girls in general. The author did a good job in proving her point that Gilligan makes powerful claims without sufficient empirical evidence to back them up. All throughout the article I was mostly on the author's side when I noticed this statement on page 10 "Whatever the accurate number is, no one has shown that permitting a student to call out answers in the classroom confers any kind of academic advantage. What does confer advantage is a student's attentiveness. Boys are less attentive which could explain why some teachers might call on them more or be more tolerant of call outs." Is this statement really true? Are boys less attentive than girls? Where in the article does Sommers provide support for her claim? I thought Sommers was being hypocritical when she made this statement since she committed the same actions she is critiquing against Gilligan.
Perhaps Sommers is making that claim that boys are less attentive than girls based on the evidence or statistics she brings up that boys toy top out the lists of dropout, failure, and learning disability. If so, then boys being less attentive in school do coincide with boys dropping out and failing, not sure about learning disability though. Yet again though, Sommers does not provide empirical evidence to her statement of boys topping out the dropout, failure, and learning disability lists.
One thing that I kept in mind while reading this article is that this article was published in 2000. So I am pretty sure that presently the situation is much different or perhaps even the same. One thing I was able to connect with was when Sommers stated that more girls than boys go on to college. I noticed that from most of the classes I have taken at CSULB, the majority of the class has mostly been females. One thing that I I did not understand is why "The pollster asked 3,000 children (2,400 girls and 600 boys in grades four through ten) about their self-perceptions." The findings were that girls of 8 or 9 age feel confident or authoritative of themselves but then go on to feel less confident, poor self image, etc when moving into adolescence. Of course then more girls than boys will feel this way because more girls than boys were polled, it just does not make sense. In addition, when Sommers sates that "Boys dominate dropout lists, failure lists, and learning disability lists," could it be possible that there are just more boys than girls? If there are more boys than girls in high school, then that could be a reason for why boys dominate such "lists."
I never had this perspective that girls and boys were distinctly motivated to do good in school until I read this article. As much as I wanted to argue this, I just always thought that somehow boys were smarter than girls because of all the test results that would show a higher score in boys. I found this article really interesting because of all the results Sommer included such as all the test score outcomes. So why is it that all these results show that girls are doing better yet society still follows along the belief that men are smarter?
This article stood out to me because I never really considered girls as a higher gender or lower gender before. I never associated girls to "winning the World Cup" or guys to the shooting at Columbine High like Sommer said. I think regardless of gender, boys and girls will always have the same potential if they are given equal opportunities. I cannot relate to this article much because in all of my schooling I've only had one teacher that favored boys or gave boys more attention and help, but that's out of 13 years of schooling.
I can relate to you, I never had any teacher that favored boys or girls. But throughout many years of schooling I have been told by teachers constantly that statistics shows females out preform males in academics. I often found myself agreeing to that statement at least in my classes it seemed to be true. Most of the males in my class would often think of class as a place to play and have fun with their friends. That didn't seemed to be the case with females in my classes. Basically, I can see what Christina Hoff Sommers tried to say in The War Against Boys.
This article was very interesting for me to read. I was interested to learn how people believe that now society thinks men have it harder in life than women. It used to be society believed women had a harder life. Now that that phase is over teachers think men have it harder. More women are getting into colleges because they prove to work harder in class. I think that is fair for them. Why do women work harder in school? Do they care more? Do they see how women were treated in the past and want to change it?
After reading the article I noticed that it wasn't one of the articles I'm used to reading. I felt that the author was a little more towards the female perspective but tries to express her thoughts through facts. I have also noticed that all of her writing consist about woman's role in history.
This article really opened my eyes to how much times have changed. It makes me think to my history class where we are learning about WWII and how women just started making strides in the work force. And now women have taken over and taken advantage of the opportunities they are given. However I don't think girls are given an unfair advantage at all. Boys and girls are all given the same amount of opportunities, and women still get the short hand of the stick in the aspect where they get paid less for doing the same jobs as men. In this article I feel as the author is making excuses for why less boys are excelling in school.
The article exposes many claims opposing and supporting the thesis that boys have an advantage in and outside the classroom. On page 15 the author refers to the MetLife study saying, "...boys are at an advantage over girls in school, girls appear to have an advantage over boys in their future plans, teachers' expectations, everyday experiences at school and interactions in the classroom." This suggest that both sexes have advantages in different aspects of life. I believe that no matter what sex you are,, you have control over these type of situations. The opposing argument to this is that sexual discrimination is still evident in the current society.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you Jared. If people are having problems in school, it is up to them to fix it. I do not think that gender has much of an impact on how well you will do in school.
DeleteI also agree with you. It may be that in general, boys are better in some aspects of life and girls are better in other aspects of life but it is up to each individual. If you want to become successful or good at something, it is up to you to try and work hard. I think if you have the motivation to improve some aspect of your life, like how well you do in school for instance, you can, regardless of gender.
DeleteIn the article, Sommers includes how "in 1997 college-full time enrollments were 45% male and 55% female. The department of education predicts that the proportion of boys in college classes will continue to shrink". I feel like this is because men have always been superior over women. Men have always gotten the upper hand and I feel like women see that as unfair and feel the need to want to succeed and prove themselves. Women still earn less for doing the same job men do. Reading the article I found myself disagreeing a lot with the author so for a second I kept thinking, am I feminist?
ReplyDeleteI kept thinking am I feminist because I found myself disagreeing a lot also! That is true that men earn more for doing the same thing as women so I'm curious to see how Sommers would have addressed this since her article is "The War Against Boys". I still believe that women and men excel in different areas because I feel that there are more women are teachers and there are more men helping at tech stores such as Apple.
DeleteI agree with what you're saying about how men and women excel in different areas. But I feel like that's solely because society has shaped the way we see certain areas of occupations. Some being more feminine and others seen as more masculine.
DeleteThe article talks a lot about Carol Gilligan and her study that led to publication that "announced that America's adolescent girls were in crisis." Later in the article, Sommers mentions that there was a "great discrepancy between what Gilligan says she discovered about adolescent girls and what numerous other scientists say they have learned." I do not understand why everyone would readily accept Gilligan's theory even though she had no clear evidence that American girls actually are in a crisis. I get that she is some sort of celebrity in the world of gender studies, but why would people keep on believing what she was saying despite having any evidence to back it up?
ReplyDeleteThis is also one of the claims I had stumbled across when reading the article. I had the same questions when reading her work. Yet people still follow her sayings without having concrete evidence to support it.
DeleteYou're right that many people sided with Gilligan's claim; however there's a part in the article that shows many don't believe her claims. When Gilligan released the book, In a Different Voice, "Many academic psychologists, feminist and non-feminist alike, found Gilligan's specific claims about distinct male and female moral orientations unpersuasive and underground in empirical data."
DeleteOn page 2, first paragraph it says "Girls are treated as the second sex in school and consequently suffer, that boys are accorded privileges and consequently benefit". I disagree with this or at least don't feel this way because through my experience I've seen the opposite. I've always seen boys suffer because some are not as driven or care as much as other boys or girls. Also, through my experience I feel that teachers will treat students based on how much they care about their class and how respectful they are. Not based on sex unless they're sexist. On the same page it says, "The typical boy is a year and a half behind the typical girl in reading and writing; he is less committed to school and less likely to go to college". I was wondering if this could be associated to what people say about girls being more mature than boys at an earlier age. Overall, I feel that boys and girls have different advantages in different areas and that the author lacked credibility/evidence. I found myself agreeing and disagreeing or even thinking "oh shut up" at times to be completely honest.
ReplyDeleteYESS! I completely agree that the author lacked credibility/ evidence! His arguments were not supported well, it just seemed like he was trying too hard to be right and make everyone else seem wrong. I might be biased though because I disagree with most of his arguments so that may contribute to my doubt in him!
DeleteIn the article it talks about Gilligan conducting three studies: the "college student study," the "abortion study," and the "rights and responsibilities study." The article goes on to say that little is know about these studies and almost no information is available. Elizabeth Bowen ended up calling Gilligan's offices and they told Elizabeth that the information is unavailable because it is to sensitive. They also told Elizabeth that the information will be placed in a Harvard Library and that soon enough the information will be available. However, the information was never publicized. Brenda Maher later says that it would be extraordinary if information was deemed to sensitive for other to see. He states that there is a certain way that information is kept confidential, yet the researcher must disclose scores, how subjects were chosen, and what methods were used to receive the data. Are these three studies that Gilligan performed flawed to the point that she hid them from the public? Did these studies actually take place? Why is this information considered to be sensitive?
ReplyDeleteI'm not really sure but I think the studies were conducted but results were not in line with what Gilligan was trying to prove but nevertheless Gilligan chose to go ahead with her claims. I feel as though the author should have contacted Gilligan at some point to see her point of view. All throughout the article it is evident that Sommers is not a fan of Gilligan and she expresses her opinion to the point where the article comes off as biased against Gilligan.
DeleteSommer criticizes much of the information that Carol Gillian provides. One of the arguments that intrigued me was the section on different types of parenting. Gillian believes that the pressure from culture norms for boys to separate from their mothers may be a cause for the gender gap in education. Sommer refutes her argument and states that it is actually the absence of the father figure that has more effects on the gender gap scale. I thought both of their arguments had made good points and found it a bit silly for Sommer to be trying so hard to make Gillian sound completely wrong. This discussion also made me wonder if girls are affected in the same way that boys are according to the studies in the absence of either mother or father.
ReplyDeleteI think that even though girls as a whole are doing better in school than boys, it is not genetics that is making it this way. Seeing that boys back in the day used to do better helps to prove that genetics are not the cause of girls doing better. It is just a shift in what is going on currently. I did find it interesting however that many people in the United States actually believe that women are disadvantaged in school currently. In addition, I also find it interesting that even with women doing better in school currently, they still as a whole do not make as much as men do.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think this shift is? I agree with you that genetics doesn’t play a role in future/academic success but why do you think it is that boys and girls are so distinct in academic areas?
DeleteIt is interesting that women don't make as much as men do as a whole. Why do you think this is? Is it a trend for women to work as hard but get rewarded less in our society?
DeleteSommer shows that girls are more likely to want to go to college and get a better education compared to boys. I personally know a lot more girls that went to college than guys. I also noticed that a lot more girls know what they want to do in life, when a lot of guys are still undecided. Some statistics show that girls are doing a lot better in school compared to boys, which is very interesting to me. Not that I thought boys were doing a lot better, but I thought it was somewhat even for the most part. I believe it has to do more with how much time and effort are put into things rather than what gender someone is.
ReplyDeleteI agree with everything you said in this comment. I always thouhht everything was even too and that it just depends on how much time and effort is put into school. I thought this article was more of a fight against feminism than making a point about education
DeleteI agree with how you reacted to this article, the last sentence you said really sums up my opinion on this subject. I think comparing genders is just making up excuses and trying to justify why some people are excelling more than others.
DeleteI noticed that in a lot of places in the article that the author is a stern critic of Carol Gilligan's claims about girls in general. The author did a good job in proving her point that Gilligan makes powerful claims without sufficient empirical evidence to back them up. All throughout the article I was mostly on the author's side when I noticed this statement on page 10 "Whatever the accurate number is, no one has shown that permitting a student to call out answers in the classroom confers any kind of academic advantage. What does confer advantage is a student's attentiveness. Boys are less attentive which could explain why some teachers might call on them more or be more tolerant of call outs." Is this statement really true? Are boys less attentive than girls? Where in the article does Sommers provide support for her claim? I thought Sommers was being hypocritical when she made this statement since she committed the same actions she is critiquing against Gilligan.
ReplyDeletePerhaps Sommers is making that claim that boys are less attentive than girls based on the evidence or statistics she brings up that boys toy top out the lists of dropout, failure, and learning disability. If so, then boys being less attentive in school do coincide with boys dropping out and failing, not sure about learning disability though. Yet again though, Sommers does not provide empirical evidence to her statement of boys topping out the dropout, failure, and learning disability lists.
DeleteOne thing that I kept in mind while reading this article is that this article was published in 2000. So I am pretty sure that presently the situation is much different or perhaps even the same. One thing I was able to connect with was when Sommers stated that more girls than boys go on to college. I noticed that from most of the classes I have taken at CSULB, the majority of the class has mostly been females. One thing that I I did not understand is why "The pollster asked 3,000 children (2,400 girls and 600 boys in grades four through ten) about their self-perceptions." The findings were that girls of 8 or 9 age feel confident or authoritative of themselves but then go on to feel less confident, poor self image, etc when moving into adolescence. Of course then more girls than boys will feel this way because more girls than boys were polled, it just does not make sense. In addition, when Sommers sates that "Boys dominate dropout lists, failure lists, and learning disability lists," could it be possible that there are just more boys than girls? If there are more boys than girls in high school, then that could be a reason for why boys dominate such "lists."
ReplyDeleteI never had this perspective that girls and boys were distinctly motivated to do good in school until I read this article. As much as I wanted to argue this, I just always thought that somehow boys were smarter than girls because of all the test results that would show a higher score in boys. I found this article really interesting because of all the results Sommer included such as all the test score outcomes. So why is it that all these results show that girls are doing better yet society still follows along the belief that men are smarter?
ReplyDeleteThis article stood out to me because I never really considered girls as a higher gender or lower gender before. I never associated girls to "winning the World Cup" or guys to the shooting at Columbine High like Sommer said. I think regardless of gender, boys and girls will always have the same potential if they are given equal opportunities. I cannot relate to this article much because in all of my schooling I've only had one teacher that favored boys or gave boys more attention and help, but that's out of 13 years of schooling.
ReplyDeleteI can relate to you, I never had any teacher that favored boys or girls. But throughout many years of schooling I have been told by teachers constantly that statistics shows females out preform males in academics. I often found myself agreeing to that statement at least in my classes it seemed to be true. Most of the males in my class would often think of class as a place to play and have fun with their friends. That didn't seemed to be the case with females in my classes. Basically, I can see what Christina Hoff Sommers tried to say in The War Against Boys.
DeleteThis article was very interesting for me to read. I was interested to learn how people believe that now society thinks men have it harder in life than women. It used to be society believed women had a harder life. Now that that phase is over teachers think men have it harder. More women are getting into colleges because they prove to work harder in class. I think that is fair for them. Why do women work harder in school? Do they care more? Do they see how women were treated in the past and want to change it?
ReplyDeleteAfter reading the article I noticed that it wasn't one of the articles I'm used to reading. I felt that the author was a little more towards the female perspective but tries to express her thoughts through facts. I have also noticed that all of her writing consist about woman's role in history.
ReplyDeleteThis article really opened my eyes to how much times have changed. It makes me think to my history class where we are learning about WWII and how women just started making strides in the work force. And now women have taken over and taken advantage of the opportunities they are given. However I don't think girls are given an unfair advantage at all. Boys and girls are all given the same amount of opportunities, and women still get the short hand of the stick in the aspect where they get paid less for doing the same jobs as men. In this article I feel as the author is making excuses for why less boys are excelling in school.
ReplyDelete