And bad boys are not products of macho socialization. The prevailing myths regarding boys and girls are products of deliberate promotion, Sommers reveals. In 1990 Carol Gilligan, professor of gender studies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, announced that girls were being educationally victimized and psychologically stifled. So did organizations with feminist agendas. Only years later did it emerge that these studies were biased against boys and erroneous.
Girls outnumber boys in all extracurricular activities except sports.
Girls are more interested in school and spend far more time on homework. Boys increasingly lag in reading and writing. And in a historic reversal, far more girls than boys now attend college. Far more adolescent boys than girls commit suicide. To help boys, Sommers argues, we must repudiate the partisanship distorting discussions of sex differences among schoolchildren and objectively, fairly analyze the causes of those differences.