Chapter Two

 The Fall  

            “Disturbing national statistics paint an overall picture of adolescence as ‘the fall’ for girls. . .”

                                                Dr. Barrie Thorne, Gender Play [1]  

            I dropped by my former school not long ago for a teachers’ luncheon and ran into Carolyn P. passing through the office with a soup spoon in  her hand. She’s one of those  indefatigable parent volunteers who keep our schools functioning, and both her children have been in my gifted program. Mark was the quintessential divergent boy, bright, verbal, and creative, but also immature and underachieving in his schoolwork. From what I’d heard, his work habits had caught up to him in junior high, and he’d sunk like a stone. Anne is as bright and competent a fifth-grader as you’ll find, with some of the highest test scores I’ve seen in awhile. I deliberately avoided any mention of Mark: the last time Carolyn and I had talked she had been asked to shadow him through his school day to see what the teachers were up against. That was six months ago.  

            But she brought him up.  “Mark’s turned it around this spring,” she grinned. “He’s doing great!”  

             “Well, tell him I said hello. I always thought . . . ”  

             “But I don’t know what to do about Anne.  She turned 11!” By the look on her face, you’d have thought that Anne had been arrested for drugs.  

            Anne? She had seemed just fine the last time I saw her. Carolyn turned towards the teachers’ room where she was setting up the luncheon.  “Gawd!” she blurted as the door swung open. “The things she says! I asked my mother if I ever talked to her like that. ‘You bet!’ she said.”  

            “Carolyn,” I tried. “There’s a couple books you probably should read.”  

            “Books?” She looked like I was suggesting dirty pictures. “I don’t want to read about this. I just want to get it over with.” She waved the spoon like a wand and headed through the door. “Gotta go. . . .”  

            “Carolyn!” I tried. “Give me a call sometime and . . . .”  

            Nothing but door.

 Something Happens

             Something happens to young girls as they near adolescence, and it happens to a lot of them around the age of eleven. What is it? And why that age? Many feminist scholars now believe that as a girl’s mental abilities expand near puberty, they begin to see something for the first time: it’s the culture’s tilt toward males –  the subtle, hidden messages that psychologist Emily Hancock calls “the culture’s exaltation of masculine values.” [2] It doesn’t matter what girls have heard before about equal opportunity or the culture’s idealization of women. Around the age of eleven, they begin consciously to sense the subtext of male privilege that runs just underneath the culture’s surface: girls and women are not as favored by the culture as are males and have not been for a very long time. Almost overnight, many young adolescent girls are sent reeling by a growing awakening to their second-class status.  

            Carol Gilligan of the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development describes this experience as “hitting the wall” of a consumerist, male-centered, male-voiced Western culture which has been grounded for millennia in the secondary status of its females. The messages are abundant and mostly subliminal, so embedded in the culture that they pass almost unnoticed: the scarcity of notable women included in school history texts, for instance, or the routine public disrobing of the female body to sell consumer products. They may start to notice how the “male energy” in their classrooms often monopolizes their teachers’ attention. The growing awareness of their physical vulnerability may become conscious, as images of women and girls under physical assault pass as routine plot points on the TV or in the movies they watch, where rape, assault, and abduction appear as often as Pepsi commercials. So abundant is the news of their inferior status, so normalized, that it reaches girls (and the rest of us) not as images at all, but as reality itself.

             In my mind, it’s not so much a collision, since one generally sees a wall before smashing into it. What adolescent girls experience is something akin to passing through a force field of radioactivity, altering them so imperceptibly that they may not know it’s happened. For many girls, the years of early adolescence mark a passage through force fields that fundamentally change the way they think of themselves and their possibilities.  

Force Fields  

            Cultural myths – The messages of women’s inferiority are deeply embedded in our cultural legacy. They underlie the fairy tales girls are raised on, where men boldly go forth, while the females watch, swoon, await the princely kiss that will bring them to life.  They are draped from the wall of their fifth grade classroom, with the poster of the all-male  pantheon of U.S. presidents reminding them at every glance just which gender has led their country to greatness. The history they learn is essentially a history of the achievements of white males. Men, they learn, have always held an overwhelming disproportion of power and influence in the world. It has been men, and not women, who have founded the empires, fought the battles, made the laws, invented the machines, walked on the moon, produced the science, written the classics – men, the message insists from just about everywhere that count, not women.  

            Institutional biases – Men still account for the lion’s share of what’s important, if you count the number of suits that dominate the major news stories of press conferences, inaugurations, treaty signings and corporate mergers. Even with twenty-five years of Title IX, even with the surge of gender awareness of the past decade, even with the fast-track promotions of women into higher and higher places of influence, almost ninety percent of the people quoted in front-page stories of daily newspapers are men. [3]  

            Girls learn that women do not have as much earning power as men, and  come to grasp that they will live with less power and influence than their male friends. Women still account for fewer than one percent of the CEOs of the Fortune 1000 corporations (three at last count), and they represent less than ten percent of the U.S. Congress. Men apparently will be running things for some time to come, if the 1996 presidential elections were any indication: of the ten presidential candidates (nine Republicans, one Democrat) all were male.

            Young adolescent girls can’t help noticing that the media they watch is still predominantly male-centered, since male characters still outnumber females on network TV by three-to-one. All the anchors for the three major network news programs (Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather) are men, and men narrate virtually all of the commercials, and play the protagonists of most of the dramas and comedies. The message is unmistakable: men are more important, more powerful, more knowledgeable, more present –  and eleven-year-olds start to get it. A recent survey asked girls to name their ten favorite television personalities and the average list included eight males. Boys get the message too – when asked the same question, they listed no women at all.  

            Personal experience – A girl’s own experience of the culture’s tilting towards males reinforces its messages and forms a kind of mortar that seals the wall of  bias in place. She may have experienced gender bias all along. But only now, with her powers of perception heightened by a spurt of brain growth as she nears adolescence, do her experiences resonate sharply enough with cultural messages to actually rattle her self-confidence. It may happen when she notices for the first time that her softball field lacks the bleachers, the refreshment stands or even the bathrooms so copiously lavished on the nearby Little League diamond where her brother plays. [5]  

            Messages of her secondary status are reinforced in the playground patter that envelops her daily consciousness – “You throw like a girl!”  (Just last week, a  well-meaning  Little League coach told an AAUW friend of mine that her nine-year-old son swung a bat “like a girl.” But the coach told her not to worry, he’d “straightened him out.”) She sees reinforcement in the unconscious deference of the female teachers in her school to the males, or her mother to her father. (A young woman in one of my classes on teaching schoolgirls remembered that every time a male walked into her house while she was talking with her mother, the mother turned toward him and ignored her.)  

            So subtle is the process of this devaluation, so pervasive and historically embedded, that girls (and women) barely detect what is happening to them. The message is virtually transparent when it reaches them, like a friendly breeze heavy with invisible, but toxic, fumes. Only as women (and by no means all of them) do they come to suspect the enormity of the cultural enterprise that fixes their place and thinking in a subordinate position to their male friends and brothers. “Almost every woman I know has her own recollection of when the truth hit and the anger began to stir,” Joan Ryan, a sports columnist, writes of her own experience:  

            “For one, it came when she couldn't follow her brothers on to the Little League field, for another, when she once asked why she was stuck inside the house setting the table while her father and brothers shot baskets in the driveway. ‘Now don't go complaining,’ her mother intoned. Even as our anger stirred it remained largely unspoken. [7] “

Getting the Message

             What changes for girls around the age of eleven is that they begin to admit to full consciousness that they are treated differently than boys and that they are expected to develop within narrower expectations. [8] At some point, they get the hidden knowledge that, according to Gilligan, “they are not supposed to know” – that beneath the cultural mythology that “All Men are Created Equal,” there lies the undeniable reality of male privilege and female compliance.      

             When adolescent boys and girls are asked about the advantages of being male and female, both agree with the message of male privilege. [9] It’s a fact, like viral infections, or economic cycles, or like sunlight itself: this is “the way things are,” and girls will have to get used to it. A deep and troubling divide opens before adolescent girls, between what they've been told about the world ("Everything is possible") and what confronts their awareness at every turn ("It's a man's world").

             As these multiple pressures shake their belief in themselves, many girls sense that something has gone wrong at the center of their lives. But their experience is so masked by the culture that girls have no way to understand what could be going wrong. Absent any perspective on the forces at work, many girls conclude that what is wrong is them, or, more to the point, being a girl. “We were brave and eager,” Jane O’Reilly writes about herself and the women she grew up with. “And then we discovered that these were not the required traits for girls. Only boys could expect to inherit the earth.” [10]

 More Pressures

            Even more turbulence awaits girls around the age of eleven, as they begin to experience the profound physical changes of puberty. Where adolescent boys get bigger and stronger, girls change shape. Almost overnight, their bodies take on the outlines of adult women, and with them, the objectification and sexualization that accompanies being an adult female in a male-centered culture. Such abrupt and visible alterations in their bodies wrench them from the world of their childhood in ways that they view far more negatively than do pubescent boys. [11]

            Also for the first time, girls begin to see themselves as they imagine that others see them, and begin to judge themselves through the lens of what scholars call the male gaze. They are now judged by boys on the basis of their physical appearance, often reduced to specific body parts. Boys gain a source of social power that girls do not enjoy, the authority to judge girls’ physical looks. Girls now depend far more on boys’ good opinions of their physical attractiveness than boys depend upon girls.’ Boys can rely on their athletic or academic achievements for status in ways that girls simply cannot. Believing that they have little choice, many young adolescent girls learn to trade on their attractiveness. The antic, freewheeling nine-year-old who didn’t care if she talked too loud now may become fixated on how thin she is.

             These are fundamental changes. They sweep over eleven- and twelve-year-olds like a weather front, pummeling them on all sides with contradictory messages about how they should act, who they are, and who they ought to be. Defined increasingly now as “female” rather than as a person, their world becomes divided more and more along gender lines. While the adolescent boy is generally encouraged to branch out and try his wings, the adolescent girl is cautioned to stay near the same parents who so readily allowed her as a nine-year-old to move freely between boyishness and girlishness. She is coaxed towards being now, rather than doing – being compliant, good-natured, ladylike, more a spectator than an actor in a world where boys and men are urged to take the risks and girls are cautioned to stand by (appealingly) and applaud.

             So the adolescent boy’s sense of  freedom expands while a girl’s contracts. As her sexuality blossoms, her physical vulnerability increases and her world becomes more dangerous in a way that it does not for boys, since nine out of ten victims of sexual assault are females. And her value seems to change, like a downturn on the stock market: once-prized skills that won her acclaim at nine –  her speed, say, or her easy way with reptiles –  now become irrelevant. Her physical strength or her audacity may seem like childhood remnants that should have been left behind. As conventions of feminine propriety overtake her social landscape, a girl’s once commendable audacity may seem an embarrassment to her or her friends, an obstacle to her popularity.  

            The manner in which these changes influence self-image also differ by gender. Polls and surveys of adolescents’ attitudes show that both boys and girls look at the changes that boys go through as positive. Girls, however, see the changes that they experience in adolescence as negative. [13] Increasingly on the lookout to please others, they may shape their actions and their feelings about themselves increasingly around what others presume they should be.

 The Plunge

             During their five-year Laurel School study of 100 girls between the ages of seven and eighteen, Carol Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown observed that for many girls their collision with the wall had set off  troubling repercussions. “Self-esteem collapses under the stress of the struggle,” they write. As their Laurel School youngsters crossed into adolescence, Gilligan and Brown began to see in many of them signs of psychological trouble, depression, and eating disorders. Despite talking about themselves as being more mature and despite getting good grades, the middle-school girls reported feeling depressed or numb and seemed at times unable to know and name their feelings and thoughts clearly. [14] The single most significant finding of the Laurel School study, according to Lyn Brown, was that “Girls can look good in school, do extremely well, and get high grades, while actually feeling bad. They are great masters at hiding their suffering.” [15]

            Adolescent boys and girls understand, if adults have forgotten, that the adolescent experience is markedly different for boys and girls, and that the overall experience, with some exceptions, favors boys. When young adolescents are asked whether advantages lie in being male or female in today’s culture, boys win hands down. One recent study of 2000 middle-school students in five states asked them to describe the best thing about their gender. [17] Both girls and boys in the survey agreed that boys can do more and are viewed as better, while the boys’ responses regarding their advantages fell into two categories: “We can do more things,” and, “Not being a girl.” “Boys clearly saw themselves as able to do more, to be more active in sports, have more fun and more opportunities,” while the most common responses of the girls when asked the best thing about their gender were distressing: “I don’t know.” “Can’t think of any.”

             And asked the worst thing about their gender, middle-school girls commonly replied, “I don’t get to do boy things.” “Men don’t think we can do anything.” “People don’t think we are as good as boys.” “Being ladylike.” “Getting treated unequally.”’ When the boys were asked what was the worst thing about their gender, their most common answer was especially telling:  “Nothing.” [18]  

Girls’ Losses  

            So much depends upon our sense of self-worth – the friends we seek out, the courses we take, the careers we plan, the dreams we dare to have. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise to find that many studies find measurable declines among girls around the age of eleven in several significant areas of self-concept, health, and performance. These include:  

° Lowered Self-esteem – Girls’ self-confidence begins to drop in early adolescence at two to three times the rate for boys.  Psychological research has long found that adolescent girls’ self-esteem was at greater risk than that of boys the same age. In 1991, the American Association of University Women published a poll of 3000 boys and girls that documented that loss and brought it to the attention of the national media. The steepest drop in self confidence occurred around the age of eleven, during the middle-school years. [19] Echoing Gilligan and Brown, the report concluded: "Girls aged eight and nine are confident, assertive and feel authoritative about themselves. They emerge from adolescence with a poor self-image, constrained views of their future and their place in society, and much less confidence about themselves and their abilities." [20] The poll received enormous media attention and stirred controversy because it challenged the notion that twenty-five years of  a women’s movement had made the culture a safe and healthy environment for girls to grow up in.  

             A more recent twenty-year study at the University of California at Berkeley found similar results. [21] Following a group of 100 boys and girls beginning at the age of three, it found that between the ages of fourteen and twenty-three, one-half of the girls showed declines in self-esteem, compared to just one-fifth of the boys. It concluded that, “there was a decided tendency for males to increase and females to decrease in self-esteem from early adolescence to young adulthood.” And it added that their findings were consistent with cross-sectional research that shows there are more girls than boys with low self-esteem in early adolescence, and that this difference grows larger by late adolescence.

 ° Increased Food Disorders – Eating disorders begin to appear in girls around the onset of adolescence.  More than ninety percent of young people with eating disorders are girls. One study showed that 18 percent of Minnesota high-school girls were at high or very high risk for developing eating disorders compared to just two percent of the boys. [22] One significant contributing factor may be the unrelenting pressure they feel about their physical appearance, especially to conform to an idealized body type which fits only about five percent of adult females.

           What begins as a fixation can become life-threatening for the estimated one million teenage girls who suffer from anorexia. It is estimated that twenty percent of college women may suffer from it. [23] (See Chapter Nine for more details.)  

° Lower Emotional Resilience – Girls begin to experience increased emotional problems at the beginning of adolescence. The emotional hardiness of nine-and ten-year-old girls is one of the more lamentable casualties of their collision with the wall. Mary Pipher points out that she rarely sees preadolescent girls in her practice and those who do appear come because of specific abuses or deprivations, like divorce, physical abuse, or the death of a parent. And even under such harrowing circumstances these girls still displayed a surprising courage and resilience. “It’s amazing,” she observes, “how little help these girls needed from me to heal and move on.” [24]  

          It isn’t until after girls reach adolescence that their emotional stability gives way to the onset of stress-related disorders. Just in the past few years, Pipher found her own practice becoming filled with “girls with eating disorders, alcohol problems, post-traumatic stress reactions to sexual or physical assaults, sexually transmitted diseases, self-inflicted injuries and strange phobias, and girls who have tried to kill themselves or run away.” [25]  

          Girls seem especially prone to the pressures of early adolescence. Before puberty, for instance, boys and girls are equally likely to report that they are depressed. But as they move into their teens, twice as many girls report symptoms of depression as do teenage boys. [26]   High school girls are also diagnosed much more often than teenage boys as being clinically depressed. ^[27] More chilling, one out of  four adolescent girls attempts suicide. [28] This is four to five times the rate of boys, although more boys, who choose more lethal methods, actually kill themselves. [29] Pipher cites a health department survey which showed that forty  percent of all the girls in her Midwest metropolitan area had considered suicide during the previous year.  

° Reduced Sports Participation – During the onset of adolescence, girls drop out of team sports at six times the rate of boys.

 ° Drops in Achievement Testing  – Girls begin their schooling testing higher than boys across the curriculum, but a gender gap opens up around middle school in science and math that places girls, especially high-achieving girls, at a disadvantage.

 ° Diminished Career Expectations – Beginning in high school, girls career ambitions and life dreams begin a decline that continues into college, while boys’ career ambitions steadily increase.  

°Adult  Underachievement – Gifted women do not achieve as highly in the workplace as do gifted men even though girls and women perform better throughout their schooling. Self-doubt is cited as one of the primary reasons for their underachievement. [30]   A brief glance at “Professional Women at the Millenium” on pages 136 and 137 make it clear that the full and equitable use of women’s talents in our society remains a long way off. After almost two decades studying the lives and careers of high-achieving professional women, Dr. Sally M. Reis of the  University of Connecticut concluded,  

            Few questions can be raised about whether or not the underachievement of bright women exists; the fact remains that in almost all professional fields and occupations, men overwhelmingly surpass women in both the professional accomplishments they achieve and the financial benefits they reap. [31]

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