The more the right wing conservatives control this country and its media, the more examples one can sense of their real attitude toward women. We all sense they want to limit women’s control over their bodies in the reproductive area, and the conservatives are not shy about saying so. Other women control areas are a bit more subtle such as women with children in the workforce. Related somewhat to this latter point, I saw a piece on CBS news tonight which I can not help but believe is part of this right wing conservative attempt to put women back where they belong like they were in the 1800.
The segment can be seen on this link to CBS news. Take a look at the story and the related video. Come back here after reviewing this material.
Does anyone else besides me sense this is also part of the right wing anti-women’s rights campaign? How dare those girls do better than boys in school! Who do they think they are? Don’t they know that the bible has chosen men to be the head of the household and the bread winners. If women do too well in school and subsequently in the workplace, this goes against the bible and must be wrong. Can’t have that. Maybe there really is discrimination so those majority female teachers must be to blame. What to do, what to do.
I wish I could prove/find out who is really behind this lawsuit and this campaign by this kid and his father. Now maybe I am too paranoid in my sense here, but IMO it is subtle messages like this combined with the not so subtle messages related to reproductive freedoms that could allow progressives to capture huge numbers of women voters if they were exposed properly and simply. If these anachronistic views of women by the conservative right could be made into a clear campaign message and a clear platform plank was included to counteract such, I believe the stage would be set to win the vast majority of the women’s vote down the road.
Heh. Apparently back when they were coming up with standardized IQ tests girls were routinely scoring higher than boys. This was tremendously upsetting to everyone, so they had to keep adjusting the tests until the boys scored higher — because everyone knows that “boys are smarter than girls.”
But that kid bringing the lawsuit scares me. Another individual with a total inability to accept responsibility for himself. He’s probably spent hours frittering away time on computer games etc, but the reason he did not do as well in school? Oh it’s cuz the institution is biased against him. Yeah, right. And I suppose the rape victim deserved to be raped cuz she was pretty.
As a person who has studied the history of cognitive ability testing, I’ve seen no evidence that what you say about IQ testing is true. It is not! Boys and girls have always scored the same on the average. But the distribution at the extremes has not been the same for boys and girls.
However, the issue here is not IQ – it is achievement. And achievement is only partly predicted by IQ. Most of achievement is predicted by other factors, including socioeconomic status of family, literacy background, quality of education, sex, and other things including much that we do not know about. And none of these things operate in isolation from the other factors.
I got the info about the development of IQ tests from a book by Ruth Knier called “Gender and Science,” or it may have been called “Science and Gender” (I read it a long time ago) I don’t know what her sources were, but she is a respected academic, as far as I can tell.
I am not defending the IQ tests, BTW, as being an accurate measure of anything. I am merely pointing out the fact that they can be configured to give the results the testers want to see.
If women are surpassing men in academic achievement, it is in spite of, not because of, cultural bias. And I admit to being miffed that girls’ achievement is being characterized by some as being due to nothing more than “bias” instead of thier own hard work in a culture where things are very rarely biased in thier favor.
And thus the almost expected conservative backlash in today’s developing theocractic environment
You are likely referring to Ruth Bleier’s works, Gender and Science, or Feminist Approaches to Science. They are great feminist pieces, which I highly recommend, esp. to the doctoral students that I have in my lab and classes. Bleier was no fan of the way that many (mostly male) scientists thought about gender and cognitive functioning. Certainly people skilled at test construction can do a lot of things with their tests. However, specifically altering tests to insure males scored higher than females was not part of the original plan, intention, or deliberate development of IQ tests.
But no matter, I don’t want to discuss IQ tests, either – gender biases in current politics are much more important, IMO. We are in complete agreement that much in science and in ordinary life is done as a matter of belief. If someone believes women are stupider than men, they will often choose to look only for evidence that supports that belief, and they’ll ignore what does not confirm their belief.
I think that may be a part of what has also been observed in research studies of classroom behavior: When boys/men get a question wrong, they are encouraged to try harder – in other words, males are assumed to have the ability to do the work, but they just need sufficient effort when they don’t succeed.
On the other hand, if girls/women do well, they are often assumed to have done so by virture of their strong effort, not ability. So if a female student messes up, teachers/profs may be inclined to think “Well, she worked so hard; this is as good as she likely could do.”
Over the long haul, this can produce males who work hard at appearing to succeed without much effort (though they may really work very hard). And it can produce girls who are mystified when their high achievement is traced to visible hard work rather than ability, and may also be labelled “overachievement”.
I think some teachers/profs who make these sort of attributions about male and female success are aware of their biases. They’ve been carefully socialized/taught, and may just be doing what they have seen done, without really thinking much about it.
I am wondering what the study actually says. Sound bites on TV are often highly inaccurate reports of what research has found.
What is the case, seen in other studies, is that some aspects of education do favor girls, whereas other aspects strongly favor boys.
Girls have advantages in some things, not necessarily because of teachers liking girls better or curriculum being oriented to girls. These aspects favoring girls are related to much of socialization of girls by parents and society in general, as well as some possibly temperamental factors e.g. conforming to directives, being neat and tidy, tending to be less physically aggressive. And there is the ever-present issue of “crowd control” in the classroom, that is more likely to involve nonconforming boys than girls.
The result in early grades is favoring girls doing better in an environment that is pretty unnatural for young children’s bodies: sitting still for hours, being quiet, being neat, taking turns. These things are much harder for boys as a group, (not necessarily for particular individuals). As a result, more boys have trouble with reading, a leading indicator of future problems (obviously, there are other factors that contribute to reading problems as well.)
The down side for girls by fitting into the “crowd control” needs of a large classroom is that there is likely some loss of creativity, more favoring of dependence, less valuing of initiative, suppression of individuality in favor of the group’s needs. As boys are less likely to behave as girls do, they are less likely to suffer these negative outcomes – not that they won’t be criticized for their non-conformity.
Worst of all for girls/women may be how teachers & professors interact with girls/women when boys/men are present. If males are in class, females tend to get asked fact questions. Males get asked thought questions, rather than fact questions, so they are pushed to think about things on a more advanced level. Furthermore, when men are introduced into a previously all female classroom, the male/female type of questioning begins to take hold. As a case in point, some years ago, Lesley College in Massachusetts was all female. When they began to admit men, they noticed that their pattern of asking questions changed to the gender-specific form I’ve just described. These patterns have been observed whether women or men are the teachers.
That is sad.
Yes, I appreciate what you have written and likely agree with it. However, this is after all a political blog, and the suit issue as part of the vast right wing conspiracy (which clearly does exist IMO) in an attempt to re-elevate males in our society to their biblically ordained higher position through government-special action is what was the main point for the dairy! What do you think about that as the basis for this story in the first place???
As to your broader point about the political backlash against women, we had quite the controversy here in St. Paul a few weeks ago. At the commencement of a small Catholic university here in town, the male student who spoke was pontificating about how selfish we as a culture have become. His example of selfishness was women who use birth control!!! Happily, his remarks did cause quite a stir and I guess a lot of people at the event actually got up and walked out.
I bet that male student is not very successful with the women on campus…
Yes, exactly. Now from a political strategic point of view, if the Santorums of the world get Roe and maybe Griswald overturned, how many millions and millions and millions of women will be so outraged over their sudden slave-like status that they will be eager to vote for a women’s freedom party/agenda. If the Dems have Reid and Casey in office facilitating this demise of women’s freedoms, then what party looks good abnd has a political advantage. Am I the only one seeing these longer term scenarios????????
I’ve just read the report – which I like very much. It’s quite consistent with good research (my personal “gold standard”).
I do think that much of this “boys crisis” is coming from the right, and aimed at finding people who are in sympathy with conservative viewpoints.
Girls count for less, period. How many centuries and decades of work did it take to get the vote? To get access to birth control? To get something approaching equal standing before the law (approaching it, not there, obviously)? To get something approaching parity in athletic expenditures? To get equal pay for equal work – oh, I forgot, we haven’t gotten close to that one, have we? And none of these – well, maybe we’ll get to keep the vote – appear secure at this point.
Were people highly concerned whenever boys’ achievement outstripped girls? Not so much. But if girls score higher than boys, even the tiny number of points seen in the longitudinal data that this report discusses, flares of anxiety go up.
Of course the patriarchy is concerned! When I hear of these kinds of things, my memory instantly goes back to my junior year in high school. I overhear an elder at our church talking to my mother.
“It is such a waste that your girls are so smart, too bad they couldn’t have been boys. . ..
to the PDF file for the full report. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to watch the video; I can’t figure out how the hell to configure either Safari, Firefox or Netscape to watch it, even though I have RealPlayer installed. I hate websites where you need a ton of whistles and bells to use them… š