The New Nerd
How the gender gap is all about attitude
By: Sophie Theis,
YO! Youth Outlook , Jul 18, 2006
(4m 58s, mp3, 4.1MB) Download File
The nerd has persisted as a consistent character of the high school practically since the invention of group-education. We see him with frequency in our own lives and in pop culture – the nerd reliably makes an appearance in every teen-targeted blockbuster, novel or comic. We're familiar with this tension between those who work hard and those who prefer not to. What is new to us is that now, the stereotypically male nerd, is almost exclusively female. No longer is nerdiness—diligence and commitment to school—so derogatory a characteristic. In fact, now, it is socially prized…but just in young women. Male nerds? No more.
The nation is antsy about this new trend, and so are teens. "Girls are taking over!" exclaimed my boyfriend Tom, paralleling the media's hysteria over this distinctive gap in the two genders' achievement. USA Today reported that women now comprise 57 percent of American universities.
I live in Piedmont, a teensy town surrounded by Oakland. If you imagine upper-middle class—Piedmont is easily the archetype. It's white, it's wealthy, and it's wild about success. With staggeringly high expectations for its students, at least 95 percent graduate and go to college. One would think that this positive pressure would push everybody—both genders—to the heights of success, but no. Not at all.
Watching Piedmont High's graduation ceremony for the class of 2006, I pondered this "gender gap." Again, the valedictorian and salutatorian were female. Yellow tassels fluttered on the caps of many more graduating senior girls than of boys, indicating membership in the California Scholarship Federation. Females stood up to receive honors out of proportion to guys. On the published list of Piedmont matriculations, the most prestigious, coveted colleges are being attended by girls. The majority of the California State Universities and community colleges sit next to male names.
In my experience, it's true: the girls are doing it all and outdoing the boys. Females dominate the student council, clubs, and projects. The grade-worriers, the note-card makers, the hour-long studiers, the highest grade-obtainers—all female. Are girls suddenly smarter than guys? Does school just no longer work for them? No. The gender gap is all about the energy invested in school, not the intelligence.
Girls' and guys' academic attitudes vary just as much as their academic achievement does. When girls talk about grades, you hear stress and effort. They worry about competition and vocalize their anxiety over grades. When admired males talk about school, the conversation is often a contest to see who could put in the least amount of effort to do the best. Who could take a test drunk and still pull off a passing grade. Who could scratch an essay worth 15 period of his grade during the class before. It's characterized by an ostentatious carelessness, and underscored by an implicit disdain for nerdiness. Nerdiness has become girliness, and guys don't want to be feminine.
Success, however, is certainly not girly. Males still want and expect success, even as they disown any appearance of working for it. With hundreds of years of male-dominated society, a guy sees it highly likely that he too will be successful; it feels almost inevitable. However, guys now see success as unrelated to academics. School feels unnecessary—a simple, arbitrary obstacle course. To many guys, academic exertion feels too much like conformity, tolerance, and obedience.
These qualities are now expected in the modern girl. As a male peer of mine said, "School doesn't cater to girls; girls cater to school." Femininity is obedience to expectations, tolerance of hard work, and willingness to work for others, all qualities that when translated to the modern classroom enable academic success. With prideful graduation ceremonies and published matriculations, my community showers girls with praise and attention for fulfilling this societal role, which is now easily quantifiable with a simple transcript, test scores and list of extra-curriculars.
This idea of wanting to make sure you're as prepared as possible for the "real world" motivates me to take advantage of the opportunities around my community. There is no guarantee that I will end up in my dream life, but I feel that I can start taking steps now to insure it by investing effort in school. I explore my community and get involved to enrich and expand my life's perspective, but I probably would not be quite as active if there did not exist such support—and pressure—from society. On top of all this, there is the feeling that in order to be considered equal to males, us females have to be better than them. We have to prove our worth.
Society's pressures have created a new ideal female. Nerdiness—caring about school—is now mandatory for the cool female, along with the typical desired traits of attractiveness and sociability. Instead of the movies' airhead cheerleader as the popular campus queen, in the modern day, the admired female is smart, concerned about school, and active in achieving her success. Now the male role cares nothing about school, even if it ultimately hurts his chances at success. His new role is to be invincible to failure. It's all in the outlook.
Sophie Theis, 17, lives in Piedmont, CA. 1 of 1
Her perception that there is currently a male indifference to scholarly pursuits is probably correct, but it has little to do with male ego (or whatever).
Men/boys have been the dominant sex in Western culture for, oh, all 5,000 years or so of recorded history. I find it hard to believe that only now has that dominant position led to lazy intellects. It is much more likely that (and this is where Ms. Theis' geographic location plays in) high school boys would have been raised during the misguided parenting period of the past decade which insists on positive reinforcement regardless of actual performance. And, as boys are more coddled, get more attention, and engage in more competitive activity, they've been sabotaged by overly supportive parents.
In this case, the disparity in parenting between boys and girls has benefited the girls.
So, coddled white boys got lazy, and less coddled white girls picked up the slack.
I think it's great that Ms. Theis feels so empowered by her and her peers' scholastic performance. I think it's rather petty and short-sighted to declare victory over what is clearly a passing trend.
that they don't need to put in the extra effort will some day wake up asking themselves why they are stuck in some job they really don't care for,
working for some woman who they don't feel is qualified to be their boss! HA HA HA !
ur country needs everyone to develope their brain
power to solve the world's problems and stop acting like dogs or monkeys who's clothes don't fit and they can't keep their pants on in public.
Last opinion: Going to the most prestigious schools is not necessarily important, though it gets you noticed. The critical factor is taking full advantage of all opportunities to make the most of your individual talents so that your family and community can be as proud of you as you hopefully will be of yourself.
Nerdiness isn't about chasing validation, it's about chasing the intellectual at the expense of the physical, the social, the emotional.
Staying up until four in the morning the day before a final because you just *have* to know who wrote the lyrics for Mr. Belvedere's theme song? That's nerdy.
Reading white papers on the USB 1.1 specification because you want to know if hi-speed is a marketing term or technical? Nerdy.
Conforming, kow-tow'ing for kudos, etc? That's just responding to direction; by that definition, guys in the military would be nerds.
Furthermore, how can you possibly ignore the fact that the media is covering this everywhere. This is not to say, however, that there are not hard working guys in high school, in fact, i would consider myself among them.
It just seems, nowadays, girls are more willing to go the extra step to do something productive and/or something for college acceptance. I would assert women, perhaps as a result of societal pressure and DOUBT, push themselves harder to achieve more than their male counterparts. What some guys aren't realizing, is they may be taking some of the roles generally coveted by men, like the aforementioned saludatorian and valedictorian.
Additionally, i think facts are her strongest argument. You saw the facts, 57% of college graduates are now women. Are you kidding me? How can you be so bold in your criticism when women actually ARE acheiving more in the classroom than men on the OVERALL scale.
Ultimately, i don't care what other guys do. If they want to pretend as if school doesn't matter or whatnot, that's up to them, but it won't stop me from excelling. I feel like you probably wish for success in the future as i do. I won't be held back by some idiots who couldn't care about their futures.
Lastly, i hope we never see eachother, cause i would kick your ass for being such an obnoxious, prententious, and nescient prick.
I wrote to share my personal knowledge of the rising trend, confined to my own experience. How is it in your area? Let me know—I have no idea about what it’s like elsewhere, but I can impart upon you a truthful observation: in my high school, the gap in achievement between guys and girls is blatant and huge. I simply wanted to explore where this may be coming from. I didn’t mean to apply my thinking to every region in the world; more references to “in my community” would have made it clearer that I was only focusing on my community and the weird thing that’s so distinct here.
You’ve misunderstood my thinking on the new male gender role: it is definitely not for failure. Instead, the ideal attitude seems to be to pretend you’re invincible to failure, that you’re too smart to need to go through school’s ridiculous menial tasks. (That’s another issue in itself—that school can feel so unnecessary and worthless.) It seems to me, in my community at least, that guys get especially turned off by school tasks that seem pointless, but girls are able to stay committed because doing well in school (nowadays, and maybe only in my community) is fulfilling a societal role. It’s not that guys want to fail, obviously. The “cool guy” still expects to be successful but doesn’t relate that kind of success (wealth, career—all later in life) to high school success, the kind that many girls are now doing so well at achieving.
Of course, gender roles are the ideals of society. Obviously not everyone adheres to them, but many try, and the rest may be indirectly influenced by these pressures and expectations. I’m not trying to predict the future through this piece—that is a lame criticism that misses the point. And while this may not be happening everywhere, it’s not just in Piedmont. Type in “gender gap” into Google and check out all the different media sources that have commented on the trend.
Try being specific and/or constructive in your next criticism. It does no use to try to undermine an article that doesn’t make half of the assertions you attack.