The educational gender gap (continued)

Joyce Howard Price has another of those opeds in the Washington Times today – Academic underachievers – filled with more stats on the growing scholastic gender gap between girls and boys. Every time I blog about this, I get a plethora of comments (almost always from men) that there are no women Einsteins, that what you learn in school isn’t ultimately that important, etc., etc.

Well, I’m not so sure it’s that simple. I think we may be seeing massive changes in our society in the next twenty years that Gloria Steinem couldn’t have predicted in her wildest dreams. (Indeed, people like Steinem … and, say, Jesse Jackson … depend on there not being real change. But that’s a different argument.) A comparison between the gap between boys and girls in math (small in favor of boys) and in reading (large in favor of girls) may only be a minor indication of what’s going in. We may be witnessing a tectonic shift in all technically advanced societies.