A Bogus Lesson From the ‘Boys at School’

Emma, my 3 1/2-year-old granddaughter, noticed a broken faucet in our house and a wrench next to it, and commented that boys could fix sinks better than girls could. When I asked her why, she said, “Because boys are stronger.” I quickly explained that some boys might be stronger but there are also girls who are very strong and can fix sinks. In fact, I told her I once had a girl plumber. Emma wasn’t impressed; rather she seemed to be wondering why was it I couldn’t have done better and found a boy plumber.

Later during her visit, I was struggling with the TV remote control, trying to set it to video so we could play our yoga tape. Somehow I managed to freeze the set to one channel without getting to video. I clicked and muttered and tried a lot of things that didn’t work. Emma finally remarked, “Boys are better with television sets than girls.” I said, “No, they’re not! I am not very good at this, but lots and lots of girls are. You’ll be teaching me how all this works in a few years!” She looked dubious.

I finally asked her who was telling her this stuff about boys doing everything better than girls and she said, “Boys at school.” What’s going on with boys at school these days? The president of Harvard offered an opinion in a speech last month that innate differences might make women less capable of succeeding at math and science than men. He also expressed his belief that intrinsic gender differences, family pressures and employer demands played a larger role in limiting women’s advancement than discrimination.

I still consider myself an ardent feminist but for the last two decades I’ve relaxed a lot; I thought the battle was over and won. I no longer bristle if some guy refers to women as girls, or asks about my kids and grandkids instead of what I do. I gave up wearing Birkenstocks and started wearing torturous heels again when I dress up. And the fights of the 1970s with men who didn’t get the women’s movement -- including a father-in-law who insisted on using the awful term “women libbers” and my own father, who believed women should be put on a pedestal (prompting me to write a poem about what pigeons do to things put on pedestals) -- now seem quaint and old-fashioned, as if I’d been a suffragette.

I loved being a wife and mother and having a career, and felt perfectly capable of working those grueling hours to have it all. Now both my daughters are career women balancing babies and work. (And in a side irony, Emma’s mother got her undergraduate and business degrees at Harvard.) So it seemed to me that we’d come to the other side of a once very serious issue: equality for women. I’d been lulled into complacency thinking that the ‘70s were history. Until Lawrence Summers’ speech and my granddaughter’s remarks.

So what’s going on? I have no answer, but it is a daunting thought that Harvard’s president and a 3-year-old boy in a Los Angeles preschool are on the same chauvinist wavelength.