EVENING. Health.

`Confidence Gap'

November 11, 1994|By Elinor J. Brecher, Knight-Ridder/Tribune.

If you're an American female on the far side of high school, you probably recall 8th grade with as much fondness as your first bout of PMS. Boys, suddenly awash in hormones, crossed new frontiers of obnoxiousness almost daily.

Math and science classes taught you more about insecurity, intimidation and failure than you learned about square roots or the periodic table.

You hated your body, your hair, your wardrobe, your parents and, depending upon who had a crush on whom, maybe even your best friend.

You were 13 or 14, and life was hell. To paraphrase humorist/cartoonist Lynda Barry, 8th grade put women in a bad mood for the next 20 years.

Perhaps it's possible to muster a measure of grim humor about it two decades after the fact, but the damage done to girls by their schools, their peers and their parents at a critical stage in their emotional development is anything but amusing. According to writer Peggy Orenstein, girls get pushed into a "confidence gap," and many can't climb back out.

For her new book, "School Girls: Young Women, Self Esteem and the Confidence Gap" (Doubleday, $23.50), Orenstein, a 32-year-old San Franciscan, spent an academic year attending 8th grade at two schools in California: the predominantly white, middle-income "Weston Middle," and the predominantly poor, minority "Audubon Middle" (she changed the names of the girls and their schools to protect their privacy).

Orenstein concludes that "although all children experience confusion and a faltering sense of self at adolescence, girls' self-regard drops further than boys' and never catches up. They emerge from their teenage years with reduced expectations and have less confidence in themselves and their abilities than do boys."

During her yearlong return to the 8th grade, Orenstein observed teachers at both schools who routinely ignored girls' raised hands to lavish attention on boys who yelled out answers. Boys then were rewarded for aggressiveness, girls for passivity.

Orenstein followed girls to homes where parents had different standards of behavior and personal freedom for their sons and daughters that generally fell along these lines: Boys will be boys-but girls have to be perfect.

In school she found that the quaint annoyance of hallway bra-strap snapping has progressed to grabbing, pinching, fondling. She heard boys taunt girls with every imaginable sexually derived insult-"ho" being a favorite-and found that when girls complain, they often find themselves in trouble for making trouble.

None of this is confined to just the two California schools. In South Florida, when Orenstein visited Norland High School in north Dade, she met with 50 middle school and high school girls, almost all of them black. What she heard wasn't any different from what female students had said to her everywhere:

The "popular" boys are the worst sexual harassers.

Boys who have sex are considered studs, girls who do are seen as sluts.

Girls can be meaner to each other than boys ever can be.

"If you ask them what's easy about being a girl, they say, `Nothing.' What's easy about being a boy? They had a lot to say about that."

Such as:

"Boys get away with everything."

"Girls get pregnant, and boys say it's not theirs."

"Boys get to stay out late, and their parents trust them more."

"You ever see a girl on a football team?"

"Girls have to struggle more. It's a man's world."

But the girl who made that last remark was quick to assure Orenstein that boys sexually harass only those who allow it to happen. It is that assertiveness that places black teenage girls at the top of the female self-esteem totem pole.

"The black girls always say: `If you respect yourself, people will respect you,' " Orenstein said later.

"There's a very big cultural difference. It's not that (black girls) don't experience sexism and racism. It's that they have cultural reserves to draw on that white girls don't have."

As for Hispanic girls, Orenstein writes that "without the personal self-esteem of black girls or the academic opportunities enjoyed by many white girls, the consequences of silence and marginalization . . . are especially dire. In their teenage years they have more negative body image, are at greater risk for attempting suicide and report higher levels of emotional stress-anxiety, depression, nervousness, insecurity or exhaustion-than any other group of children, male or female, of any race or ethnicity.

"Latina girls are particularly vulnerable to gang membership and are twice as likely as white girls to become teenage mothers . . . the least likely to be called on or speak out in class, the least likely to be recognized as gifted and the least likely to believe they can achieve their dreams."