Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self Esteem, and the Confidence Gap

Preface

A few years after Schoolgirls was first published, a girl who identified herself only as Fish contacted me via email. Over the next few months we corresponded about her life. She was sixteen and lived in Atlanta, where she went to public school. She hoped some day to become a journalist. She wrote to me about her dreams, her plans, her friends, and her parents. She was pretty confident herself, she told me, but she worried about some of her girlfriends. One hardly ate and kept complaining that she was fat. Another, afraid that she would lose her boyfriend, had begun having sex with him even though she didn’t want to and didn’t enjoy it. A third who was bright and talented insisted she was stupid. Sometimes, Fish wrote me, she felt like she was living in a chapter of Schoolgirls.

Much has changed in the years since I wrote this book. There’s a whole new section in local bookstores filled with straight-talking guides for teenage girls on how to stay true to themselves as they navigate adolescence. Programs like Girls Incorporated and Girl Scouts foster girls’ adventurous spirit and intellectual curiosity. The Women’s National Soccer Team and the WNBA basketball league have offered an alternative vision of the female body, one that’s grounded in strength and utility rather than decoration. At the same time, it would be a mistake to assume that girls are no longer at risk. Like Fish’s friends, they continue to face significant, gender-related hurdles as they make the transition to womanhood.

The confidence gap in education hasn’t disappeared since I first visited classrooms, but it has changed. With the help of grass roots programs, and federal attention, the difference between boys’ and girls’ test scores in math and science has narrowed. But a new trend has emerged: few girls are taking computer courses, and those who do tend to enroll in data entry (the millennial version of typing) classes, while boys take advanced programming. What is it about the way we teach computer science that is discouraging girls? It’s an urgent question: in today’s technology-driven ecomony, a digital divide could have a disastrous effect on girls’ futures.

As I’ve criss-crossed the country, speaking to parents, teachers, college students, and young girls, I’ve become more convinced than ever that girls’ bodies have become the battleground for their conflicts. Hating one’s body, sometimes to the point of starvation, remains a tragic rite of passage for young women: among white girls in particular, appearance remains the most important determinant of teenage girls’ self-worth. Meanwhile, girls are under tremendous pressure to become sexual at an inappropriately young age. How do we teach them that they have the right to say no? How do we teach them that when they say yes, it should be on their own terms—not to please someone else or to keep him from walking out the door?

Sexual harassment continues to be a complex issue in schools, both pervasive and misunderstood. A few years back, the media had a field day with a story about a first grade boy in North Carolina who was suspended for kissing a girl on the playground. Clearly, pundits sputtered, things had gone too far. Obviously, the suspension was absurd, but I wondered: surveys have shown that sexual bullying affects nearly 80 percent of middle and high school girls, and nearly 10 percent have been forced to perform sexual acts in school other than kissing. More often than not, their harassers still go unpunished. Why was there so much coverage of that goofy incident in North Carolina and so little on the real, day-to-day humiliation so many girls endure?

Sometimes, during my travels, critics would enumerate to me the difficulties boys face as they reach adolescence. I would always agree, but remind them that this did not cancel out the trials of young girls. Raising our children is not a boys against the girls proposition. Nor should teaching mutual respect—in the classroom, in the home, in the workplace—be just a women’s issue.

Still, after nearly a decade of reporting on teenage girls, I feel tremendous hope. Progress, while sometimes slower than I would have liked, has been made. Things are moving in the right direction. Girls more often believe that someone cares. Over the years, I’ve often been asked how I get girls to talk to me so candidly. What are my reporter’s tricks? The truth is, I have none. I just ask a lot of questions. One of the most enduring lessons I learned while writing Schoolgirls is that young women truly want to tell us about their lives. Five years later, I still believe that as adults, taking the time to ask—and taking the time to listen—is the single most important thing we can do for our girls.

Peggy Orenstein

February, 2000

Introduction:

The Bad News about Good Girls

The bell rings, as it always does, at 8:30 sharp. Twenty-eight sixth graders file into their classroom at Everett Middle School in San Francisco, straggling a bit since this is the first warm day in months—warm enough for shorts and cutoffs, warm enough for Stüssy T-shirts.

The students take their seats. Heidi, who wears bright green Converse sneakers and a matching cap, pulls off her backpack and shouts, Did everyone bring their permission slips? You have to bring them so we can have the pizza party.

Pizza, moans Carrie, who has brown bangs and a permanently bored expression. That has milk. I’m allergic to milk.

Heidi looks stunned. You can’t eat pizza?

The drama is interrupted as Judy Logan, a comfortably built woman with gray-flecked hair and oversized glasses, steps to the front of the classroom. She tapes two four-foot lengths of butcher paper to the chalkboard. Across the top of one she writes: MALES, across the other: FEMALES.

Ms. Logan is about to begin the lesson from which her entire middle school curriculum flows, the exercise that explains why she makes her students bother to learn about women, why the bookshelves in her room are brimful with women’s biographies, why her walls are covered with posters that tout women’s achievements and draped with quilts that depict women through history and women in the students’ own lives.

It’s time for the gender journey.

Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Logan says, turning toward the children and clasping her hands. I’d like you to put your heads down and close your eyes. We’re going to take a journey back in time.

Ms. Logan’s already soothing voice turns soft and dreamy. Go back, she tells her students. "Forget about everything around you and go back to fifth grade. Imagine yourself in your classroom, at your desk, sitting in your chair. Notice who your teacher is, what you have on, who’s sitting around you, who your friends are.

Continue your journey backward in time to third grade. Picture your third-grade teacher, your place in class. Imagine yourself in your room at home. What do you like to do when you have free time? What kind of toys do you play with? What books are you reading?

The children go further back, to the first magical day of kindergarten, then further still, remembering preschool, remembering their discovery of language, remembering their first toddling steps. Then Ms. Logan asks her students to recall the moment of their birth, to imagine the excitement of their parents. And then, when the great moment arrives …

They are each born the opposite sex.

The class gasps.

Gross, offers Jonathan with great enthusiasm.

Yuck, adds Carrie. That’s worse than being allergic to milk.

You are born the opposite sex, Ms. Logan repeats firmly, and then asks her students to imagine moving forward through their lives again, exactly as they were and are, except for that one crucial detail.

Again they imagine themselves walking on tiny, uncertain feet. Again they imagine speaking, entering kindergarten. Again they envision their clothes as third graders, their toys, their books, their friends.

I can’t do this, says Jonathan, who has braces and short blond hair. I just picture myself like I am now except in a pink dress.

This is stupid, agrees Carrie. It’s too hard.

Just try, says Ms. Logan. Try to imagine yourself in fourth grade, in fifth grade. By the time thirty minutes have elapsed, the students are back in their classroom, safe and sound and relieved to find their own personal anatomies intact.

Without talking, Ms. Logan says, I’d like you to make a list, your own personal list, not to turn in, of everything that would be different if you were the opposite sex.

The students write eagerly, with only occasional giggles. When there is more horseplay than wordplay, Ms. Logan asks them to share items from their lists with the class. The offerings go up on the butcher paper.

I wouldn’t play baseball because I’d worry about breaking a nail, says Mark, who wears a San Jose Sharks jersey.

My father would feel more responsibility for me, he’d be more in my life, says Dayna, a soft-spoken African American girl.

Luke virtually spits his idea. "My room would be pink and I’d think everything would be cute."

I’d have my own room, says a girl.

I wouldn’t care how I look or if my clothes matched, offers another.

I’d have to spend lots of time in the bathroom on my hair and stuff, says a boy whose own hair is conspicuously mussed. The other boys groan in agreement.

I could stay out later, ventures a girl.

I’d have to help my mom cook, says a boy.

I’d get to play a lot more sports, says Annie, a freckled, red-haired girl who looks uncomfortable with the entire proposition. Many of the students are, in fact, unsettled by this exercise. Nearly a third opt to pass when their turns come, keeping their lists to themselves.

I’d have to stand around at recess instead of getting to play basketball, says George, sneering. And I’d worry about getting pregnant.

Raoul offers the final, if most obvious comment, which cracks up the crowd. I’d have to sit down to go to the bathroom.

At this point the bell rings, although it is not the end of the lesson. The students will return after a short break to assess the accuracy of their images of one another. But while they’re gone, I scrutinize the two butcher paper lists. Almost all of the boys’ observations about gender swapping involve disparaging have tos, whereas the girls seem wistful with longing. By sixth grade, it is clear that both girls and boys have learned to equate maleness with opportunity and femininity with constraint.

It was a pattern I’d see again and again as I undertook my own gender journey, spending a year observing eighth-grade girls in two other Northern California middle schools. The girls I spoke with were from vastly different family structures and economic classes, and they had achieved varying degrees of academic success. Yet all of them, even those enjoying every conceivable advantage, saw their gender as a liability.

Sitting with groups of five or six girls, I’d ask a variation on Ms. Logan’s theme: what did they think was lucky about being a girl? The question was invariably followed by a pause, a silence. Then answers such as Nothing, really. All kinds of bad things happen to girls, like getting your period. Or getting pregnant.

Marta, a fourteen-year-old Latina girl, was blunt. There’s nothing lucky about being a girl, she told me one afternoon in her school’s cafeteria. I wish I was a boy.

Shortchanging Girls:

What the AAUW Survey Reveals

Like many people, I first saw the results of the American Association of University Women’s report Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America in my daily newspaper. The headline unfurled across the front page of the San Francisco Examiner: Girls’ Low Self-Esteem Slows Their Progress, and the New York Times proclaimed: Girls’ Self-Esteem Is Lost on the Way to Adolescence.¹ And, like many people, as I read further, I felt my stomach sink.

This was the most extensive national survey on gender and self-esteem ever conducted, the articles said: three thousand boys and girls between the ages of nine and fifteen were polled on their attitudes toward self, school, family, and friends. As part of the project the students were asked to respond to multiple-choice questions, provide comments, and in some cases, were interviewed in focus groups. The results confirmed something that many women already knew too well. For a girl, the passage into adolescence is not just marked by menarche or a few new curves. It is marked by a loss of confidence in herself and her abilities, especially in math and science. It is marked by a scathingly critical attitude toward her body and a blossoming sense of personal inadequacy.

In spite of the changes in women’s roles in society, in spite of the changes in their own mothers’ lives, many of today’s girls fall into traditional patterns of low self-image, self-doubt, and self-censorship of their creative and intellectual potential. Although all children experience confusion and a faltering sense of self at adolescence, girls’ self-regard drops further than boys’ and never catches up.² They emerge from their teenage years with reduced expectations and have less confidence in themselves and their abilities than do boys. Teenage girls are more vulnerable to feelings of depression and hopelessness and are four times more likely to attempt suicide.³

The AAUW discovered that the most dramatic gender gap in self-esteem is centered in the area of competence. Boys are more likely than girls to say they are pretty good at a lot of things and are twice as likely to name their talents as the thing they like most about themselves. Girls, meanwhile, cite an aspect of their physical appearance.⁴ Unsurprisingly, then, teenage girls are much more likely than boys to say they are not smart enough or not good enough to achieve their dreams.⁵

The education system is supposed to provide our young people with opportunity, to encourage their intellectual growth and prepare them as citizens. Yet students in the AAUW survey reported gender bias in the classroom—and illustrated its effects—with the canniness of investigative reporters. Both boys and girls believed that teachers encouraged more assertive behavior in boys, and that, overall, boys receive the majority of their teachers’ attention. The result is that boys will speak out in class more readily, and are more willing to argue with my teachers when I think I’m right.⁶

Meanwhile, girls show a more precipitous drop in their interest in math and science as they advance through school. Even girls who like the subjects are, by age fifteen, only half as likely as boys to feel competent in them. These findings are key: researchers have long understood that a loss of confidence in math usually precedes a drop in achievement, rather than vice versa.⁷ A confidence gap, rather than an ability gap, may help explain why the numbers of female physical and computer scientists actually went down during the 1980s.⁸ The AAUW also discovered a circular relationship between math confidence and overall self-confidence, as well as a link between liking math and aspiring to professional careers—a correlation that is stronger for girls than boys. Apparently girls who can resist gender-role stereotypes in the classroom resist them elsewhere more effectively as well.

Among its most intriguing findings, the AAUW survey revealed that, although all girls report consistently lower self-esteem than boys, the severity and the nature of that reduced self-worth vary among ethnic groups. Far more African American girls retain their overall self-esteem during adolescence than white or Latina girls, maintaining a stronger sense of both personal and familial importance. They are about twice as likely to be happy with the way I am than girls of other groups and report feeling pretty good at a lot of things at nearly the rate of white boys.⁹ The one exception for African American girls is their feelings about school: black girls are more pessimistic about both their teachers and their schoolwork than other girls. Meanwhile, Latina girls’ self-esteem crisis is in many ways the most profound. Between the ages of nine and fifteen, the number of Latina girls who are happy with the way I am plunges by 38 percentage points, compared with a 33 percent drop for white girls and a 7 percent drop for black girls. Family disappears as a source of positive self-worth for Latina teens, and academic confidence, belief in one’s talents, and a sense of personal importance all plummet.¹⁰ During the year in which Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America was conducted, urban Latinas left school at a greater rate than any other group, male or female.¹¹

Self-Esteem: Cutting Through the Hype

Although ideas about the importance of self-esteem have been knocking around academic literature since the late nineteenth century, the phrase has become the buzzword of the 1990s, helped by the ascendance to best-seller status of Gloria Steinem’s Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem. Like Steinem, I started out a critic of the self-esteem evangelists. I was suspicious of any movement that stressed personal transformation over structural change, especially for women. Self-esteem sounded to me like another way to blame the victim, warm fuzzy style. We do girls a disservice, I reasoned, if we encourage them to feel good about themselves rather than targeting the overarching institutions, policies, and cultural attitudes that make them (understandably) feel worthless. And self-esteem by what means? By whose measure? Wily advertising executives dangle improved self-esteem as enticement to join one of the diet industry’s two billion dollars’ worth of weight loss programs or to risk the dangers of plastic surgery. How terribly clever, I thought: the people who robbed women of their self-esteem now want to sell it back to us! I believed that the sole feminist work that needed to be done was on the politics of the external. But spending time in the world of girls (and reflecting on the world of women) convinced me that the internal need not, and indeed should not, be ignored.

Self-esteem has been defined in many ways by psychological theorists, as well as by Madison Avenue. For the purposes of this book, I employ the definition put forth in the work of Susan Harter and Morris Rosenberg. To them, self-esteem is derived from two sources: how a person views her performance in areas in which success is important to her (so if appearance is more important to a girl than academic success, gaining a few extra pounds may damage her self-esteem more than an F in math) and how a person believes she is perceived by significant others, such as parents, teachers, or peers.¹² In their book Lifeprints, writer Caryl Rivers and psychologists Grace Baruch and Rosalind Barnett, put women’s self-esteem on continuums of confidence and inferiority, competence and incompetence, pride and shame.¹³

Girls with healthy self-esteem have an appropriate sense of their potential, their competence, and their innate value as individuals. They feel a sense of entitlement: license to take up space in the world, a right to be heard and to express the full spectrum of human emotions. The fact that, in study after study, women and girls are less likely to feel those things than men and boys should be no surprise. We live in a culture that is ambivalent toward female achievement, proficiency, independence, and right to a full and equal life. Our culture devalues both women and the qualities which it projects onto us, such as nurturance, cooperation, and intuition. It has taught us to undervalue ourselves. Too often we deride our own abilities. We denigrate our work and discount success. We don’t feel we have the right to our dreams, or, if we achieve them, we feel undeserving. Small failures may confirm our own sense of inevitable failure, making us unable to take necessary risks. We learn to look outward for markers of acceptability and are particularly vulnerable to putting our self-esteem in the hands of lovers or husbands, to believing that only someone else’s approval can confer worth.

Seeking the Source:

Entering Girls’ Worlds

When I first read about the AAUW survey, I felt deeply troubled. This was a report in which children were talking directly to us about their experience, and I didn’t like what I heard. Like the girls in Judy Logan’s class, these girls had internalized the limitations of gender. As a feminist, I took this as a warning. As a journalist, I wanted to find out more. According to the survey, middle school is the beginning of the transition from girlhood to womanhood and, not coincidentally, the time of greatest self-esteem loss.¹⁴ So, with that in mind, I went back to eighth grade.

I chose to work on this project in California, which has the largest school system in the country. California, along with Minnesota and several other states, has been on the cutting edge of both gender-fair and multicultural education and perhaps there is less bias here than there might be elsewhere. But I wanted to see what was working in classrooms as well as what was not.

School administrators are leery of journalists, and teachers even more so. It was not easy to find educators (or parents) who were willing to put up with a year’s scrutiny, even though, since I was writing about children, I promised to change the names of everyone involved.* I interviewed over one hundred and fifty girls and spoke with nearly a dozen administrators before settling on two schools, fifty miles apart, in which I would spend the 1992–93 school year. My criteria were simple: I chose the schools based on their racial and economic makeup and the willingness of the administrators, teachers, and students to participate. Both of the schools’ student handbooks included written sexual harassment policies, and some teachers in each school were aware of a bias in favor of boys and were struggling with solutions. Among the girls, I strove for a cross section of ethnicity, class, and family structure, although I also knew that, inevitably, someone would be excluded. The AAUW survey focused on the country’s largest ethnic groups—Caucasians, African Americans, and Latinos. I have also stayed within those parameters. The Latinas in the AAUW study were predominantly Mexican American. Likewise, the Latina girls in the schools I visited were largely Mexican American and Central American. Also, none of the girls I interviewed expressed (or were willing to express) sexual feelings toward other girls during our conversations. An emerging lesbianism or bisexuality in a relentlessly heterosexual world would add another strand to a girl’s developing sense of self. Like the AAUW survey, I focused on coeducational public institutions, in part because of the belief that to effect true change, we must alter the way we raise our boys as well as our girls.

Initially, I had hoped to find schools whose student population was racially and economically diverse. But California’s education system, like that of other states, has become increasingly segregated in the last twenty-five years. By one measure, California’s is among the top five most segregated school systems in the country for African American and Latino students.¹⁵ Most schools I visited were divided not only by race but by economic class as well. Inevitably, the schools I chose reflect that system-wide inequity. Weston is a suburban middle school with a reputation for excellence. Although its student body is overwhelmingly white, I was attracted by its broad class range. Audubon Middle School serves a beleaguered urban community that is nearly 90 percent ethnic minority, mostly poor or working poor. The circumstances of the girls at Audubon cannot reflect the entirety of the experience of girls of color, any more than the Weston girls reflect every aspect of white girls’ experience. However, I found it especially important to include young women who are devalued by class and race as well as gender. The popular research on girls has too often addressed only the needs of white and privileged girls, or assumed that while there are vast differences between boys and girls, the ethnic and economic differences among girls are irrelevant. But since nearly one third of the students in our public education system are children of color, and they are disproportionately concentrated in urban schools,¹⁶ it is essential to include their experiences.

During the spring of 1992, principals, counselors, and teachers at each school submitted the names of girls who might be willing to participate in a long-term, in-depth project. I met with them in small groups, usually of three to five girls. I asked specific questions about their favorite classes, as well as more open-ended questions, such as to complete the phrase The best thing about being a girl is … I asked if they would be willing to be interviewed alone, throughout the next school year, and requested parental permission from those who agreed. From that smaller group, I tried to select girls who represented a range of family configurations, educational engagement, personality styles, and perspectives on femininity; girls who, although their stories are very specific, could offer windows into a collective experience.

Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America concentrated on the ways in which the education system—often unwittingly—inhibits, restricts, diminishes, and denies girls’ experience. As I delved into my research, though, I found my own vision broadening. The strands that make up the self are intricately interwoven. They include school, but they also include family life. They encompass the ways boys treat girls as well as girls’ reaction to emerging sexual desire and new consciousness of sexual exploitation and abuse. It seemed to me that the girls in the AAUW survey were telling us that, at adolescence, at the moment of transformation from girlhood to womanhood, they learn in a new and profound way that boys are still central in every aspect of the culture. I began to wonder, if girls feel a reduced sense of self, how is that expressed in their attitudes toward all the vital threads of their lives?

In school, I wondered how educators were trying to combat girls’ flagging self-confidence, and what they were doing—consciously or unconsciously—to undercut it. What forces, in particular, inhibited girls’ achievement in science, where the gender gap looms widest, as well as in math, where girls’ confidence dwindles regardless of ability. What role did boys, and girls’ attitudes toward them, play in diminishing girls’ self-regard? What benefits did black girls derive from a stronger sense of self, and what were the sources of their academic loss of faith? How did the self-esteem crisis deepen for Latinas?

I wondered, too, how girls were absorbing the lessons of their mothers’ lives. What were girls learning at home about a woman’s place? How were they affected by the second shift that sociologist Arlie Hochschild has so eloquently described: the month of twenty-four-hour days a year more than her mate that a working wife will spend on housework and child care?¹⁷ What were parents’ aspirations for their daughters?

As they entered adolescence, I also wondered how girls were negotiating their relationships with their bodies. How did girls feel about the way they looked (an aspect which is still central—too central—to girls’ self-esteem). Did girls feel entitled to an appetite for food? Did they feel entitled to their emerging sexual appetites or, as Simone de Beauvoir has said, do teenage girls’ bodies still become Other to themselves?¹⁸ Were adolescent power relationships between boys and girls, especially those revolving around sex and desire, changing?

During the 1992–93 school year, I spent four days a week with the girls I had chosen to follow. I sat in their classrooms, visited their homes, went to school dances and plays, to athletic events and community centers. I interviewed parents, teachers, and friends. I ate school lunches. From the outset I emphasized that I was a journalist, a temporary observer of their lives, and, as such, could not give them advice. I also promised to keep our conversations confidential during the course of the reporting, although, as the reader will see, I could not always keep that promise.

I developed great affection and concern for all of the girls, although our relationships, as well as my access to them, varied tremendously. The hectic nature of both school and personal life at Audubon, as well as the students’ distrust of adult authority—especially white adult authority—made establishing trust especially difficult at that school. The girls there were reluctant to allow me to observe them with peers, although they were happy to speak to me in private. Their parents, too, were less willing to talk to me. Several had no phones, making contact difficult. When we could arrange interviews, they were hesitant to meet at home, concerned about my safety in the housing projects where they lived.

The girls at Weston often inquired about their counterparts at Audubon, although the reverse was not true. They asked whether I was frightened in the hallways of what they called an inner-city school and wondered if all of the students there were on drugs or in gangs. Although that vision was sadly distorted, the issues in the urban girls’ lives were, in fact, quite different from those of the suburban girls. The pressures of poverty, discrimination, and the inadequacy of education facing all students at Audubon often overshadowed the gender differences reported in the AAUW survey. Nonetheless, the strategies children pursued to maintain self-esteem in such an atmosphere were frequently dictated by gender. As the school year progressed, I found that the schism in the lives of the girls at the two schools pervaded my reporting and it became part of my story as well.

I was astonished by how consistently articulate and insightful the girls were, including those who were doing poorly in school. Much of the time, as I followed them through their eighth-grade year, the girls seemed happy, successful, faced squarely toward productive futures. And I found that heartening and hopeful. But there was something else there, too even for the most successful girls. One girl repeatedly dismissed her academic triumphs but willingly embraced her failures. Another’s paralyzing vision of perfection made her afraid even to cough in class. A third had suffered a bout of bulimia. Yet another carried the burden of her mother’s unhappy marriage. And another’s waning interest in school corresponded to her increasing desire to join a gang. Both images were true, the excitement of progress in young women’s lives as well as the defeat of stasis. Too often, I realized, our eagerness to see the first can prevent us from truly seeing the second.

Double Vision: Confronting Myself

I was unprepared for how much the journey into gender would become a journey into myself, how much the voices of the