I highly recommend that all parents and teachers read or reread Deborah Tannen’s 1990 bestseller, You Just Don’t Understand (HarperCollins Publishers: New York). (Buy it for a penny plus postage.)
The book describes the different world views of girls and boys, women and men. Girls and women value rapport, connection, intimacy, and balanced communication and relationships. Boys and men, on the other hand, are tuned into status and power and participate in asymmetrical and agonistic relationships.
Tannen’s book illustrates how men and women relate and communicate. Men see the world as ordered by a status hierarchy, but women yearn for close relationships. Men prefer “report talk” but women prefer “rapport talk.”
Perhaps Tannen’s work can give us some answers to the gender gap we are currently seeing in school. Twenty years ago men were graduating college at a higher rate than women, but Sarah D. Sparks of Education Week (April 27, 2011) reports that this is no longer true, and the difference is not close. “36 percent of women ages 25 to 29 held a bachelor’s degree or better, versus only 28 percent of the men in the same age group.” Similarly, Cecilia Simon of the New York Times’ Education Life Magazine (July 27, 2011) reports that “as a proportion of the population, the growth among women has been particularly striking, although they still lag behind men at the highest [professional and PhD] levels” (P.18). There are now more women than men (age 25-64) with bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and this has happened during a time of stagnating opportunity for the less educated. We can look at Education Life’s conclusion another way. Men have not significantly grown their numbers with a bachelor’s degree--a pitiful 2.7 percent in 19 years. Women have grown their numbers 6.0 percent over the same time period.
Anecdotally, I remember a shortage of available dates as a male heterosexual Cal undergraduate, 1978 to 1982. My problem may have had its roots in the college demographics and not just because I needed to learn better social skills! Cal was predominantly male. As of October, 2010, however, the ratio of men to women has changed: 53 percent female and 47 percent male (U.C. Berkeley Facts at a Glance). At Sonoma State University, less than an hour away, the numbers are skewed even more: 62 percent women, 38 percent men (CSU Mentor). Women are increasingly dominating the undergraduate pool at college campuses. We are seeing what women can do when societal barriers are removed. Unfortunately, it appears that at the same time that women are exceeding, men are failing, starting early on. Language and reading deficits appear in grade school. Twenty years ago boys would catch up by high school, but that is no longer true.
What is going on with the boys? “Scientists have said that boys are born with smaller language centers in their brains—and larger spatial centers—than girls and that boys develop language abilities at a slower rate, though eventually they catch up” (Straus, 2005). This biological explanation does not explain why boys have performed worse over the last 20 years. Perhaps video games are the culprit. “A new study suggests owning a video game system could hinder academic development, at least for young boys” (Rettner, 2010). On the face of this research, it appears that limiting electronic media, especially video games, may improve boys’ school performance.
Yet Deborah Tannen’s analysis of women and men in conversation may reveal deeper reasons why boys are underperforming in school. Boys are always aware of the pecking order—who is in charge and when they get to be in charge. (See Tannen, pp. 203-204.) They have chaffed for 150 years under the authority of public school teachers and administrators, and have tried to escape situations in which they were the “man down.” What has changed is the introduction of electronic media and its corrosive effect on school performance. Girls are accomplishing much more in school, and many boys are achieving less. The boys, ever cognizant of their status, notice that they are "losers," and everyone knows. They have lost this competition. Since they feel they can’t win, many boys quit and retreat even further in to the fantasy world of video games.
I recommend that we parents and teachers work together to eliminate or limit the use of video games and replace that leisure time with real-world competitive games in school: sports, music and the arts, chess, robotics, and small business. Over time we may see a more equitable graduation rate between the sexes.
Bibliography
CSU Mentor, http://www.csumentor.edu/campustour/undergraduate/24/Sonoma_State_University/Sonoma_State_University5.html
Rettner, Rachael, Video Games May Hinder Learning for Boys, Live Science.com, March 16, 2010, www.livescience.com/10965-video-games-hinder-learning-boys.html
Simon, Cecilia Capuzzi, Return on Investment. Does Grad School Pay Off? The New York Times’ Education Life Magazine, July 27, 2011, pp.18-19
Sparks, Sarah D., Census: More Adults Earn a Diploma, More Women Earn a Degree, Education Week, April 27, 2011, http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/inside-school-research/2011/04/census_more_adults_with_diploma.html
Straus, Velerie, Educators Differ on Why Boys Lag in Reading, The Washington Post, P. A12, March 15, 2005, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35057-2005Mar14.html
Tannen, Deborah, You Just Don’t Understand, 1990, HarperCollins Publishers: New York
U.C. Berkeley Facts at a Glance, http://berkeley.edu/about/fact.shtml
