In every other science course, the differences between boys and girls were slight or favored girls. To make matters worse for the AAUW, all of its other charges have been definitively refuted in a careful review of the research by Judith Kleinfeld of the University of Alaska. Prof. Kleinfeld found, for example, that there is little evidence that girls have lower self-esteem than boys or that boys get more attention in the classroom than girls. Far from shortchanging girls, the schools have been the leading edge in creating gender equity in the past generation. Indeed, many university campuses have begun to worry about gender imbalance, since men are a decided minority on virtually every campus.
Men still get a majority of professional degrees, but even here the numbers are changing fast.
At the same time that the AAUW ginned up a nonexistent crisis about girls, the press totally ignored the data on boys. Boys are far more likely to be given Ritalin for attention deficit disorder. African-Americans and Hispanics are far behind their white peers on every measure of school achievement. Alarmist rhetoric about the schools solves no problem, especially when the problem itself was invented for use in national advertisements and direct mail campaigns as a fund-raising tactic. One can only dream about what might have happened if the AAUW had focused the same amount of energy on recruiting talented women to teach in schools where minority kids are concentrated or on sponsoring charter schools for needy children.