The Paradox of Girls’ Success
ally tough on themselves for even the slightest deviation from what they deem to be the social or academic norm; many take life so seriously that it is impossible for them to feel a sense of satisfaction or fulfillment. They so fearfully dread academic humiliation that they resign themselves to taking few risks in the learning process. They learn how to “work the system,” as one young woman readily explained, and in doing so fail to focus on discovering their own sense of self. For most girls, it now seems to me, the real challenge is encouraging and teaching them how to identify, disengage from, and take decisive ownership of the external expectations they are all too often blindly obeying. In other words, girls often need to be encouraged to find their own voice, make their own decisions, and be more skeptical of all the external expectations consciously and subconsciously placed upon them. I think it may be helpful to step back for a moment and analyze the situation broadly. It is not at all obvious why girls should be struggling as they are. In fact, by many measurable standards of achievement, girls are doing amazingly well today. In our office, we work with many girls who are driven, motivated, and inspired to go above and beyond. Many junior high and high school principals flatly acknowledge that the majority of the top students in their classes are female. Compared to their male counterparts, young women perform better on standardized tests, outnumber men in colleges and have better college graduation rates, and now frequently outearn young men in the marketplace.1 As Jennifer Delahunty Britz, the former director of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, notes in her New York Times op-ed piece “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected,” the demographic reality is that many colleges now find that the stats of their female applicant pool outranks their male pool and that subsequently “the standards for admission to today’s most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men.”2 In the workforce, women in their mid-twenties are, on average, making more money than their male counterparts—something that would have been unheard of thirty or forty years ago.3 (It should still be noted that recent research shows women still make about seventy-seven cents for 3
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