Misleading suggestions of data suppression. Sommers suggests that the feminist researchers she criticizes have suppressed their data and inconvenient findings. For example, she insinuates that Myra and David Sadker have mysteriously failed to publish or make available their study that found that boys called out unsolicited answers eight times more than girls (107, 126n5). In fact, the Sadkers have acknowledged that the 8-to-1 callout ratio, based on preliminary findings, was erroneous. They have published a more comprehensive study superceding their symposium presentation, which found a lower callout ratio still favoring boys--consistent with the 2-to1 ratio reported by Sommers own source (107). This study confirmed the far more important finding of their preliminary report, that teachers tend to reward boys callouts with positive interactions, but discourage girls callouts by correcting their conduct (Sadker and Sadker 1984, 114). By failing to report that the Sadkers have made public available their final, complete, and corrected study, Sommers misleadingly suggests that they are trying to hide something.
Sommers accuses the AAUW of failing to publish data that show that students perceive that teachers favor girls over boys. Yet, in reporting this data herself, she cites an AAUW publication (124)! Although she falsely labels the data unpublished, what she really means is that the AAUW did not report this data in their executive summary of their published study. Sommers thinks this is damning, because she accepts students perceptions of antiboy bias at face value. She is mistaken. Although students perceive that teachers compliment, pay more attention to, and call on girls more often than boys, objective measures of teacher interaction, reported in numerous studies, reveal that teachers tend to favor boys on these criteria (Sadker, Sadker, and Klein 1991, 294304). If even the relatively little attention girls receive from teachers is seen as favoring girls over boys, this is evidence, not of a classroom climate favoring girls, but of sexism on the part of students.[2]
Sommers claims that the AAUW failed to publicize a study it commissioned from Valerie Lee (Lee, Chen, and Smerdon 1996), because it supposedly contradicted their earlier, highly publicized study that found the schools shortchange girls (117). Lee herself has publicly repudiated this charge, observing that she did not authorize the AAUW to publicize her study because she and her fellow researchers retained the copyright, so they could publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals (Lee 1996). Sommers contribution to SFE reprints work she published in 2000. Thus, in SFE she makes an unfounded, malicious accusation for the second time, although she had years to correct herself.
