Engendering anger
I want the official weight listed on my medical records reduced by 20 pounds. The current number does not reflect the real me. I would be thinner today if girls had been encouraged 40 years ago to run as many laps around the gym as boys.
I also want my employer to delete from my job evaluations all references to my weaknesses as a team player. It is not my fault that I work better alone. I was in high school before Title IX; I did not learn the group bonding skills that the boys picked up on the playing fields.
Come to think of it, if those evaluations say anything about my inability to take direction, I want those remarks expunged, as well. According to Doug Anglin, I have a learning disability: I am a female who does not readily do what she's told.
In the curious worldview of this 17-year-old Milton High School student, my well-documented problem with authority makes me an anomaly among females. The same stubborn defiance in boys is hard-wired, apparently, setting them up for the systemic gender bias that Anglin insists begins in kindergarten when girls line up when the bell rings and boys refuse to climb down from the jungle gym. Anglin has filed a federal complaint challenging the purportedly discriminatory practices of his suburban secondary school. The inequitable treatment he cites includes requiring boys to sit still, pay attention, do their homework, and abide by the rules. Those unrealistic expectations put boys at an obvious disadvantage, Anglin contends, because girls are naturally passive and obedient while boys are restless and rebellious.
Teachers favor female students because girls are docile. Girls, it turns out, like to decorate their binders while boys prefer to punch each other on the arm. I guess biology is destiny, after all.
Lost in our amusement at this silly publicity stunt is the reality that there are serious questions about gender and the classroom that cannot be answered with shopworn stereotypes about boys and girls. Why are boys diagnosed disproportionately with attention deficit disorder and medicated at dramatically higher rates than girls? Why are teenage girls more likely to have depression and teenage boys more likely to be violent? Why do so many girls lose their enthusiasm for mathematics and science as they progress through school? Why do so many single-sex schools have better outcomes for both boys and girls? How much do we still need to learn about the different maturation rates of girls and boys?
Those questions are not the concern of Anglin, or more accurately of his attorney-father who drafted the complaint filed with the US Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. Their proposed remedies and their failure to acknowledge that it is women, not men, who suffer lifelong economic disadvantages because of a persistent, discriminatory disparity in pay and promotions betray their lack of seriousness.
The Anglins are not interested in reevaluating how we structure high school to benefit all students. They just want boys' grades inflated retroactively to compensate them for an allegedly hostile educational environment. They do not want to get boys to read; they want to get them credit for shooting hoops.
They do not want to examine why men forgo classroom teaching for more lucrative careers. They just want fewer female teachers. [Here's an idea: maybe all those well-compensated male school superintendents could change places, and paychecks, with all those underpaid female classroom teachers.]
Maybe this is just convention-bound female thinking on my part, but I suspect this complaint will not improve Anglin's chances of getting into the College of the Holy Cross, his heart's desire. An opportunity that his anemic academic performance foreclosed, his frivolous legal complaint and a few cameos on the network news are unlikely to restore. He might try Harvard, though. Larry Summers, the university's president, has equally peculiar ideas about gender and academic achievement.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 