Where the Boys Are Is America shortchanging male children? By Cathy Young
One day last September, there were two back-to-back events in adjacent rooms at the Na-tional Press Club in Washington, D.C. "Beyond the ‘Gender Wars,’" a symposium organized by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), was followed by a rejoinder from the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), "The XY Files: The Truth Is Out There About the Differences Between Boys and Girls." Each event largely followed a predictable script. On the AAUW side, there was verbiage about "gender, race, and class" and hand-wringing about the "conservative backlash"; despite an occasional nod to innate sex differences, "gender equity" was pointedly defined as "equal outcomes." On the IWF side, there were affirmations of vive la différence and warnings about the perils of trying to engineer androgyny; despite some acknowledgment that there are not only differences between the sexes but much overlap, the old-fashioned wisdom about men and women was treated as timeless truth. And yet both discussions shared one major theme: the suddenly hot issue of boys—to be more specific, boys as the victimized sex in American education and culture