Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 11, 1992 TAG: 9203110338
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Yes, women here have greater opportunities than in most other countries for social, political and economic advancement. But to achieve any of this, it seems they must overachieve. Their accomplishments must be visibly greater, their skills obviously higher, than those of males they compete with.
Women have come a long way, but the distance to go is far. They won the vote in 1920. But still only a handful serve in Congress and state legislatures. Men still dominate political power.
Women work in almost every business and industry alongside men. But on average, women with five or more years of college are paid only 56 cents for every dollar paid to men with comparable schooling. They've gained only a token presence in board rooms.
They won recognition of other career and social-role aspirations in the '70s, but saw the Equal Rights Amendment fall short of enactment. And women still do most housework, even if they hold a job outside the home.
Now a political backlash threatens other recent gains. It may be no coincidence that there is also an ugly upsurge of violence by men against women, of which rape is only one manifestation.
Against this shabby backdrop, it comes as no surprise that females still are shortchanged in America's classrooms. A comprehensive study by the American Association of University Women says that girls do not receive equal education in the public schools.
This apparently owes to an assumption - shared, it seems, by many members of the female-dominated teaching profession - that they cannot do as well in certain academic pursuits as boys, and that it is unseemly for them to try.
The AAUW's first national study, in 1885, attacked the assumption of a century ago that higher education harmed women's health. That myth is gone, but a hardier one persists: that even in college, women are, by and large, unsuited to lofty scholastic achievements in, say, math and science. Those are for men, and few are the females who scale those barricades.
Drawing together the results of many studies, the AAUW report documents the bias girls face from preschool through 12 grade, in their textbooks, tests and teachers. Girls do not emerge from our schools with the same degree of confidence and self-esteem as boys. The "glass ceiling" women encounter in the work place is a successor, the studies suggest, to a "class ceiling" they encountered in school.
The fact, for instance, that teachers call on boys more than on girls is only a symptom, if a revealing one, of an attitude that prevails in most of our supposedly egalitarian society. It has prevailed for thousands of years.
This attitude, according to which it isn't as important for females as for males to develop their brainpower, might have been easier to ignore when women did not take part in the remunerative labor market in such numbers. It is unacceptable when the country needs, more than ever, a well-educated labor pool, including more scientists and engineers; and when more families are headed by single women.
The populace may be weary of reminders of how far short the country falls of its ideals and promises. The AAUW's broad-based 34-point program - a combination of proposed state and federal actions, plus business involvement and organized consciousness-raising - runs counter to the temper of the age.
But all of such a program need not be imposed from on high. The effort needs to be taken up at the grass roots - and with a sense of urgency, for the report's findings suggest more than offensive unfairness. The world has become too competitive a place to underutilize the potential of half the country's young people.
by CNB