SOURCE: “Jack Versus Jill.” Wilson Quarterly 24, no. 3 (summer 2000): 103-04.

In the following review of The War against Boys, the critic summarizes Sommers's central arguments about the status of boys in the American education system.

A decade ago, Harvard University's Carol Gilligan, author of the influential In a Different Voice (1982), announced that America's adolescent girls were in crisis. Soon, with the help of two studies by the American Association of University Women, it became the conventional wisdom among educators that schools shortchange girls. Yet there is almost no solid empirical support for that conclusion, asserts Sommers, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Who Stole Feminism? (1994). [In The War against Boys] she contends that it is adolescent boys who are the troubled sex.

“The typical boy is a year and a half behind the typical girl in reading and writing; he is less committed to school...