Gender equity in recent AAUW research and findings

Gender Equity

The Women's Freedom Network, the Educational Equity Center and the AAUW all agree on one thing. They agree that women have made great strides in the educational arena. What they don't agree on is how the advancement of women in the education arena has affected men. Some believe that there is an effect while others don't.

The AAUW believes that women have made great strides over the past years but this success has not come at the expense of the men (Where the girls are, n.d.). Educational achievement is not a zero-sum proposition, in which a gain for one group consequences in a corresponding loss for the other. If girls' success comes at the expenditure of boys, one would expect to see boys' scores go down as girls' scores rise, but this has not been the case. I agree that just because women are beginning to succeed in education that men are not suffering. The same opportunities, that have always been available to men and still there. It is just that now more opportunities are opening up for women and they are taking advantage of these.

The Women's Freedom Network believes that not only are women taking advantage of the educational opportunities that are now available to them but they are doing more things with them than the men are. They say that it is girls who get better grades in school, who do better than boys on standardized tests of reading and writing, and who get higher class rank and more honors in school. It is young women who get into and graduate from college far more often than young men. It is women who have made spectacular advancement in getting professional, business, and doctoral degrees (Kleinfeld, 1998.). I am not sure that I completely agree with this notion. Women may be doing very well with the educational opportunities that are presented to them, but I'm not sure that men are really doing any worse than they were prior. I think that this is disparity has to do with the fact that they have never had the women's accomplishments to compare the mens to in the past. There must be a period of time looked at in order to establish a baseline and then some extended period of observation in order to see what the true differences are.

The Educational Equity Center on the other hand believes that boys are socialized from early childhood to conform to a societal idea of what it means to be a man. While suitable boundaries for girls' choices and behaviors have greatly expanded over the past several decades, boys remain with a model of masculinity that limits their emotional and relational development. This group feels that teachers and parents are well aware that the consequences of operating outside the box. Boys who do so are labeled in ways that leave them feeling secluded, humiliated, and susceptible to teasing and bullying. In turn this has led to boys suffering in their education (Raising and educating healthy boys, 2005).

I don't agree with this idea at all. I don't think that boys are any more stigmatized by social issues that girls are. Girls and boys have to undergo the same amount of societal condemnation. Girls have things that they have to go through as they grow up the same as boys do. I don't think that either sex is any more or less affected by this. As far as this concept goes I feel that both genders are on equal footing.