Every few months the American Association of University Women sends me a letter asking me to join. They enclose a letter explaining how America's schools are shortchanging girls, remind me that the battle for equity in education is far from over, impress upon me that sexual harassment is rampant in high schools and that teen-aged girls suffer terribly in the self-esteem department. And then they invite me to become a member. On a separate sheet with the header I want to be Part of the Solution!, I am, if all has gone according to plan, to check the box marked "YES! Enter me as an AAUW member today! It's high time we break the code of silence that perpetuates gender inequality in America! I want to be part of the solution that will help every girl in school today become anything and everything she wants to be. I support AAUW's work to end gender discrimination once and for all! I understand that if I respond by [insert date], I will receive all the benefits of AAUW membership at a special price! Sign me up today!" Then I am supposed to dash off a check and wait for my money to put an end to the terrible oppression of American girls. Presumably, during the interim, I will recover from the embarrassment of having my membership depend on my willingness to ventriloquize cheesy rhetoric.

I never join and I can't imagine that I ever will. It's not just that I recoil from the prospect of becoming "Part" of a "Solution!" that involves "breaking the code of silence"--as if exclamation points were activism, and as if feminism were some kind of cabalistic espionage. And it's not just that I hesitate to support an organization that loudly touts the work it has done to raise gender awareness and then addresses me as "Mr. Oconnor"--as if "Erin" were somehow less clearly a girl's name than Mary or Jane. The reason I do not join the AAUW is that I dislike the way they use skewed statistics to scare us into thinking that the situation of girls and women in American education is much worse than it is (this goes back a decade, to their famous Hostile Hallways study on sexual harassment in schools and finds its most recent incarnation in their 2001 study A License for Bias). The AAUW's argument that girls are at a major educational disadvantage has been thoroughly challenged by Christina Hoff Sommers and others. And in 2000, the U.S. Department of Education came up with some numbers that differed dramatically from the AAUW's. But still the AAUW insists on its ideological spin, and still policymakers and pop psychologists and feminist theorists listen. The results are beginning to be devastating.

While the AAUW has been effectively shaping public opinion and even determining public policy (witness the 1994 Gender Equity in Education Act), boys have been falling off the map. The Department of Education's "Trends in Education Equity for Girls and Women" shows that not only are girls closing in on boys in math and science and rapidly outpacing them in reading and writing, but they are also going to college in much higher numbers. 55% of full time college enrollments in 1997 were female. By 2007, the Department of Education predicts, 9.2 million women will enroll in college while only 6.9 million men will. In other words, 57% of college freshmen will be women; 43% will be men. Already, according to the study, women are earning more Bachelor's and Master's degrees than men. The pattern is expected to continue. So, while the AAUW has had us all in a tizzy about girls' self-esteem and the need to break the code of their silence, boys have begun dropping out of school altogether at a rate that promises to have profound and lasting effects on the shape of American culture and--dare I say it?--the self-esteem of boys. Boys are fast becoming second-class citizens even as they are being raised to believe they are de facto oppressors who must be sensitized to the special needs of the fragile, marginal girls around them.

The skewing effects of AAUW-style doublethink are becoming glaringly obvious in some academic spheres, and my own field of English is one of them. Few disciplines besides women's studies embrace the style of feminism espoused by the AAUW as warmly and consistently as English does. And yet few disciplines have so much readily available evidence that there might be a problem with it. Women have been earning the lion's share of Ph.D.'s in English for a while now. One study shows that as far back as the early 1980s, women were earning 53.5% of Ph.D.'s in English, as compared to men's 46.5%. Today, the numbers are far more dramatic. At www.phds.org you can search to find both the percentage of women enrolled in English Ph.D. programs, and the percentage of women who earn Ph.D.'s from those programs. The numbers come from 1994, which is the most recent year for which such data are available, and they are striking. Some examples: At Rice, 77% of English Ph.D. students are women; 84% of the English Ph.D's they grant go to women. At Tufts the numbers are 75% and 74%; at UMass Amherst 70% and 67%; at Ohio State, 61% and 74%; at Brown 67% and 63%; at Berkeley 60% and 62%; at Princeton 57% and 60%.

The better the program, the closer the numbers are to parity: at Harvard, the numbers are 52% and 46%; at Stanford, 46% and 54%; at Yale 56% and 51%. But bear in mind that these are mid-90s numbers, and that new studies may well show a yawning gender gap at even the top programs. At Penn, for example, 60% of English Ph.D.'s awarded over the past eleven years have gone to women. Even more dramatic are the compositions of Penn's entering classes of English Ph.D. students, which have over the past five years regularly included three or four women for every man (this year, for example, of the nineteen students admitted, four were men). Sometimes the imbalance is even more dramatic--in the fall of 2000, for example, there was only one man in a first-year Ph.D. class of ten. Penn's numbers may not be representative, but there is no reason to think they are not. Penn is a top program that takes its pick of the hundreds of applications that come in every year. These are the demographics that come with that pick.

I am not a statistician. But it does look as though English has become a women's profession. For whatever reason, men are not becoming English professors at anything near the rate that women are. Maybe they aren't applying to grad school; maybe they are applying but are not getting in. It doesn't matter all that much, ultimately. What matters is that there is not a discussion within English about the fact that men are disappearing from it. What matters is that the rhetoric of oppression, of the need to achieve gender parity in the face of the field's overwhelmingly white male profile, remains very much in place. Numbers get crunched in order to fuel this rhetoric: there is much discussion of the fact that the upper ranks of English professors are dominated by white men; there is no discussion of what the field will look like once these men retire. No doubt some like the feminization of English just fine. But I find the transformation of the field into something halfway between a women's college and a sorority to be terribly impoverishing (I will count the ways in a future blog). And as AAUW-style rhetoric about women's marginalization and men's special privilege continues to set the tone for English, I question both the procedural ethics and the collective intelligence of my discipline.

So no, AAUW, I won't be sending you a check. It's my way of being Part of the Solution!

Yours,

Mr. Erin Oconnor