As girls continue to shine in both education and employment, Melanie McDonagh explores the new reality: that under-achieving young males need help
IT TAKES fiction to do justice to reality. Contemplating the latest social research on the superiority of girls to boys in terms of literacy, exam results, university admissions, truancy, criminality and the rest, I find myself irresistibly drawn to Roald Dahl's seminal work, Matilda.
In this, the unspeakable Wormwood family, Mr and Mrs Wormwood and their son and daughter, Michael and Matilda, seem somehow to symbolise modern Britain.
"Matilda's brother Michael was a perfectly normal boy, but the sister . . . was something to make your eyes pop. By the age of one and a half her speech was perfect and she knew as many words as most grown-ups. The parents, instead of applauding her, called her a noisy chatterbox and told her sharply that small girls should be seen and not heard. By the time she was three, Matilda had taught herself to read by studying the newspapers and magazines that lay around the house. At the age of four she could read fast and well and she naturally began hankering after books." It ends up, of course, with Michael following his wretched father into a life of crime and Matilda setting up home with her nice female teacher, Miss Honeybun, set fair for a career as a brain surgeon.
In suggesting that Matilda and Michael are in some sense representative of their sexes, I am, of course, distorting reality. If Mr Dahl had known as much as we do now, he would have put Matilda's superior development even earlier than the age of one and a half. Research on the growing foetus has indicated that girl foetuses behave differently from boy ones: at an earlier stage they can be observed to move their mouths, which can be taken as proof that they have developed the important ability to suck before the boys.
But there is no getting away from the evidence of girls getting ahead of the game in important respects once they get to school. Boys' under-achievement is now getting to the point where it has become a political embarrassment. Ten years ago if we had been told that the gender gap was going to be a priority for Britain's presidency of the European Union, we would have taken it as read that this was something to do with positive discrimination for women. Now the gender gap is the problem of disaffected boys.
Quite apart from the statistics which show that girls are doing better than boys at university, there are dismal reports about the males who fall behind. Scotland Yard has warned that children aged between 14 and 16 are responsible for 40 per cent of London street crime. The majority are male, many of them illiterate. The Education Minister and member of the Government's Social Exclusion Unit, Stephen Byers, today delivers a speech in which he says that boys' under-achievement must be tackled urgently if Britain is to remain a "decent, coherent society".
It's all rather confusing. Even while the Today programme and Labour Party fringe meetings are still banging on about the preponderance of men in the judiciary and in senior positions in industry - only last week Frank Dobson was justifying his purge of NHS area managers on the grounds that he was trying to include more women - we now have to swing the great ocean liner of popular prejudice round to take account of the new reality, which is that boys are the sex to be pitied.
The reasons for the problem don't seem particularly hard to find. There are fewer manual jobs than there have ever been with the decline of labour-intensive manufacturing industry and the rise of the service sector, with its emphasis on information technology: here women are positively at an advantage in obtaining employment. Male clerks are something you come across in Dickens. So far as exams go, the greater emphasis on course work and the lesser importance attached to performing well at the last fence favour the plodders. And girls, by and large, are comparatively diligent creatures, better on the long haul than the last spurt. Think of Harriet Harman as against Robin Cook.
That brings us to the more embarrassing question: girls may do better in many areas of work than boys, but when it comes to the highest achievers, are they as brilliant? The answer to that one is still, probably, no. More men than women get first class degrees at Oxbridge, even given the present bastardised standards. There are hardly any female chess masters. And if you are to scrutinise BBC Radio 3's controversial list of the cultural elite of the 20th century, you find that 10 of the 100 are women. It may be some comfort for those crime statistics to reflect that while boys are more inclined than girls to be loutish Just Williams who don't go for books, they are more likely to be Isaiah Berlins or Picassos as well.
Dr Charles Goodhart the Cambridge scientist made a name for himself when he suggested that testosterone, the male hormone that makes for aggression and risk-taking, puts men at the extremes of society. It makes them captains of industry, or else violent criminals. You can feminise the climate as much as you like but it is more ambitious to alter men's hormonal balance.
Maybe we should stop agonising, as Stephen Byers does, about the "laddish, anti-learning culture" and simply try to stuff the House of Commons and the judiciary with as many men as possible to make boys feel better about themselves. Oh and keep that ban on women in the Armed Forces. Boys who can't keep up with girls will need some jobs kept aside for them. They're still better than we are at hitting people.
