You just can't blame the 'that girls'

You know her. She sits in the second row, right side. She could have been another anonymous Smithie in one of your classes. But she's not. She's not just a peer, she's not just a classmate. You will never ask to borrow her notes, you will never actually listen to what she says without snickering in your head.That girl.

Every class has one. Study of women and gender classes have an average of four. She raises her hand at every question. She joins every discussion. She has an opinion on everything, and she has no inkling that every time she speaks, her classmates die a little inside.

"That girl" is a not just a Smith phenomenon. She is an archetype produced by the American education system, a product of educational gender bias. You can resent her, but you can't blame her.

American K-12 public education has come under fire in the past decade as exceedingly gender biased. Teachers who claim to give equal attention to both sexes have been videotaped calling on boys more frequently. Single-sex education at the elementary school level has garnered both support and ire from feminists and more conservative families. Opponents liken it to pre-Brown v. Board of Education "separate but equal" policies. Supporters claim that it gives young girls a better environment in which to learn, without having to compete with boys.

That is, of course, the central issue of single-sex education: competition. In her book Schoolgirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap, Peggy Orenstein observes and interviews girls who are coming of age in two different coed middle schools. What she finds is that boys dominate the classroom: demanding attention at high volume, shouting out answers - whether or not they are correct - and generally disrupting the classroom. Meanwhile, their female classmates sit quietly, too fearful of answering incorrectly to volunteer answers, raising their hands and being ignored or overshadowed by their more vocal male peers.

This is, undoubtedly, because of how girls are socialized. We are taught to be quiet, polite and demure. The games and toys we are given as children underscore the things we are supposed to learn or take responsibility for as adults: we play with dolls that teach us how to get along with others and engage in acceptable social pastimes - arranging rooms, decorating, shopping, etc. - and with toy kitchens that tell us someday we will cook for a family. We read books with lengthy descriptions of hygiene routines and ensembles - anyone who read The Babysitters' Club series will vividly remember Claudia Kishi's wild and crazy get-ups. The figures of authority in the lives of girls and young women convey values of cleanliness, demureness and obedience.

There are two types of "that girls," and they are both created through this phenomenon. There is first the girl who understood at a young age that in order to be academically competitive with her male peers, she had to embrace their behavior. This girl was in your high school English class, picking fights about "fate" as a factor in novels or going on lengthy tangents about somewhat related but unassigned reading she had recently done. In order to compete, she upped the ante of extracurricular studying to outsmart the boys. She was very vocal. She didn't always raise her hand, but she was a little bit pretentious and secretly wanted to move to (fill in romantic European country here). She wore sweaters every day.

Most of these girls go to coed colleges. Actually, most girls go to coed colleges. But the ones who ended up at Smith haven't yet lost the mindset from high school that makes them seem so glaringly obnoxious in class. You want to tell her to lower her voice, to speak slower.

The other "that girl" has only become vocal since being at Smith. She was quiet, too weird, too shy to speak up in her high-school classes. But at Smith, everyone in her First Year Seminar listened to everyone else and listened to her, and her confidence swelled terrifically. She trusted her own opinions, but she still couches them in uncertain language, learned throughout 12 years of coed education. She says, "Well, I think maybe..." or "To me it seems like." to start her contributions, but she still contributes a lot. She is making up for lost time.

So what can we do about "that girl"? Nothing, really. She is a product of a flawed system, flawed biases, flawed thinking. Once again, you can resent her, but you cannot blame her. Let her have her say.

But once in a while, if she says something particularly worthless, maybe raise your hand and say, "Well, I disagree." Everyone needs some humility.

For further reading on this subject consult "The Trouble With Single-Sex Schools" by Wendy Kaminer '71 from the April 1998 issue of The Atlantic or "Teaching Boys and Girls Separately" by Elizabeth Weil, which appeared in The New York Times on March 2, 2008.