One of the very important ideas put forward (and fiercely attacked by the feminist interest groups) by Christina Hoff Sommers in The War against Boys is that, while we have bent over backwards to compensate girls for the inequalities of the past, real and supposed, boys have suffered. Schools in particular have in many instances been feminized.


Mona Charen recently had a piece on the move to ban SAT aptitude tests (endorsed by author and scholar Charles Murray) and how this would be bad for boys:



Additionally, Murray doesn’t account for the important male-female difference in test performance, particularly on aptitude tests. (Cards on the table: I write as a mother of three boys.) For whatever reason, during the past 30 years, our society has seen girls outperform boys at every level of education. The average high-school GPA for girls is 3.09. For boys, the average is 2.86. About one quarter more boys than girls drop out of high school, and boys are three times as likely to be expelled. Girls do significantly better at reading proficiency in all grades. And in math, traditionally a male preserve, the two sexes are tied. Women now earn 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 60 percent of master’s degrees in the U.S. …



In 2010, a total of 382 students scored a perfect 2400. Of these, 206 were boys and 176 were girls. (If the writing test is omitted, 1305 students got a 1600 – 820 boys and 485 girls.) Among those who scored a 2350, 341 were boys, and 266 were girls. The same rough ratios hold (with one exception) for all of the scores in the top ten percentiles. At the 90th percentile and below, some of the girls’ scores are higher than the boys’. And in the middle range, it’s a mixed bag.



So long as college requires mental ability, the SATs will remain a signal that boys with less-than-perfect high-school records may be late bloomers, or perhaps were ill served by their schools. But scrapping one of the few remaining avenues for talented boys to show their aptitude seems unwise.