Are My Pants Lowering Your Test Scores? Blaming Girls and Girls’ Empowerment for the “Boy Crisis” in Education

Abstract

Drawing on participatory research in a high school implementing single-sex classes, this article demonstrates how single-sex education masks racialized economic inequality by framing low academic achievement among low-income youth of color as a function of gender, thereby scapegoating girls for a supposed “boy crisis” in education. We demonstrate this with data collected by and from students, as well as from educators and parents, delineating how girls of color were held accountable for boys’ sexual and even academic behavior. We argue that this misattribution of blame succeeds by capitalizing on entrenched gender roles that cast girls/women as responsible for boys/men and on neoliberal rhetoric trumpeting postfeminist, commercialized “girl power” and the virtue of personal responsibility. We focus particularly on how girls’ supposed newfound empowerment is folded into the long-standing discourse of girl blame by posing girl power as a problem for boys.