Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (35 page)

The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women coordinates activities of networks fighting sex slavery, in particular, throughout the world. The International Princess Project is devoted to restoring the dignity of women formerly enslaved in prostitution in India, by advocating for them, giving them support to heal, and starting sewing centers around the country that train them and enable them to work as free women. They make pajamas under the brand name Punjammies, and they get the profits.

But don’t imagine this is someone else’s problem. If you live in any American city, you have sexual slavery in your backyard. The United States is a major buyer of girls and women, and there are hundreds of thousands of our own homegrown underage girls forced into
prostitution in this country. Properly known as CSEC—commercial sexual exploitation of children—it is by definition involuntary, since a child cannot consent. These girls turn over their money to a man or woman who runs their lives and may, as well, formally own them. They usually have no family to go home to or came from one that is brutally abusive.

In Atlanta, where I live, the problem is bad because the airport is an international hub surrounded by neighborhoods where the most vulnerable children live. The average victim is an African-American girl between twelve and fourteen. Most of the customers are white men from the Atlanta suburbs, but many come from New York, Chicago, and other cities. They can purchase a package including round-trip airfare, pickup at the airport, and sex with a child and return home to their families in time for dinner. Some men who have been arrested had infant seats in their cars.

Ann Kruger (my wife), Joel Meyers, and their students at the Georgia State University Center for School Safety implemented a program in 2007 called Project PREVENT (Promoting Respect, Enhancing Value, Establishing New Trust). Using socioeconomic maps to locate schools in the most disadvantaged areas, they train group leaders to conduct after-school intervention sessions with sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade girls who have not been subjected to commercial sexual exploitation but—because of the neighborhoods they live in, their families and schools, and what they already know—are at high risk. The researchers do not explicitly ask about sex, but the girls spontaneously speak about it.

One said, “It’s a whole bunch of girls at Metropolitan [Avenue]. I will be at the Chevron on Metropolitan, and they will knock on people’s windows.” Another said, “They will walk up to the prettiest cars. They will think, ‘if they can afford them, they can afford me.’ Sometimes the car will take them away. The security guards don’t say nothing. They young. Like twenties.” Another said, “These girls offer something strange for a piece of change.” They talked explicitly about the “boyfriend-to-pimp” transition, one saying, “Some guys you date
will try to get you to do things and say they will never do this and that to you and before you know it you’re in the back of a car.”

What they say about their own lives is chilling. Older men lurk on the periphery of school grounds and teen recreation facilities. One girl was approached by a strange man who said, “If I were your pimp, I’d let you wear lots of makeup.” Girls used sex-industry terms to describe what happens at the Metro, a skating rink. One said that the main purpose of going there was to give boys lap dances and that if she missed a week she might lose her “regular customers.” Another described how a boy will lie on his back and a girl will “do a split” on him. They openly discussed the merits of stripping as a career, and one said, “Whatever y’all do in the adult clubs is innocent compared to what happens at Metro.” There is little to no adult supervision, lighting is low, and sexual activities predominate. When the girls leave, at three
A.M.
, there are adult men waiting to prey on them.

Georgia Care Connection estimates that 7,200 men each month pay for sex with underage girls statewide, exploiting an average of 100 girls per night. At least 400 different girls are trafficked each month. When Kruger and Meyers began their project, there was one home for girls rescued from sexual slavery: Angela’s House, one of three like it in the nation; it had six beds. Johns and pimps were rarely arrested, but girls frequently were; they were either put in juvenile detention or released back onto the street. In a moving press conference in 2007, then-mayor Shirley Franklin revealed that a friend’s father had abused her as a girl. She began the “Dear John” campaign to pursue and discourage customers.
Not in my city,
she said,
not on my watch.

Since 2009, it is mandatory to report knowledge of sexual exploitation as child abuse. In 2011, a new law made it easier to prosecute human traffickers, impose harsh penalties, and protect victims. Detained girls are no longer criminals. The state has training programs for law enforcement personnel, prosecutors, mental health workers, and medical personnel, as well as a “CSEC 101” workshop for the general public. Prosecutions and convictions of johns and pimps are up, and prison
terms are longer. In 2013, a new law required posting of the telephone number of the National Human Trafficking Hotline in places where girls are at risk.

Shared Hope International is a Christian abolitionist group that has a Protected Innocence Challenge. It rates states based on “41 key legislative components that must be addressed in a state’s laws in order to effectively respond to the crime of domestic minor sex trafficking.” Georgia’s grade was raised from 75 (C) in 2011 to 82 (B) in 2013, ranking 11th in the anti-CSEC fight. So if you were feeling holier-than-thou compared to Georgia as you read about this, I suggest you check whether your state is one of the ten ahead of us or one of the thirty-eight behind us (one was tied with Georgia). You might be surprised. California, for instance, got a 50 (F); New York got a 66.5 (D); Ohio scored 72.5 (C); Massachusetts, though, was just behind us, at 81. A’s went only to Washington State, Tennessee, and Louisiana; Texas was next best, with 87.5. In 2013 California recognized Georgia as a leader and a model for statewide action.

Georgia, at least, is getting better every year. In January 2013, a state trooper stopped a car for speeding and, because he had been trained to see it, recognized that the adult man driving was holding the passenger, a young girl, against her will. The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
reported, “The deputy separated the young girl from the driver, and she told him that she was being sold for sex. The girl was rescued. She told GBI agents later that she had prayed to be rescued, and she felt God had answered her prayers.”

All these legal efforts are important, but at least equally important is the effort to raise the self-esteem of girls at risk and to restore it to those who have been exposed to this grievous harm. This is an uphill fight against a hugely lucrative criminal enterprise taking advantage of men’s lust and girls’ vulnerability, but in the last decade new recruits and new weapons have made it a fight we can win. New digital technologies have also been deployed; girls who can’t call the hotline can text to “BeFree.”

It may seem, after these crimes against women and girls, a luxury to talk about their roles in STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—but this is critical going forward; issues relating to self-esteem are holding girls and women back, and that is a general feature of situations where women lag behind men.

In the 1990s, social psychologist Claude Steele launched a new field of research by showing how easy it is to worsen the test scores of African-Americans just by activating, however obliquely, their belief that blacks don’t test as well as whites. You didn’t need to say anything about testing, just highlight racial awareness or change the race balance of the classroom. It is called stereotype threat, and it turns out that these same processes apply to women. A 2008 analysis by psychologists Hannah-Hanh Nguyen and Ann Marie Ryan found confirmation in many studies, but interestingly, subtle cues, like giving a pretest questionnaire, hurt women’s performance more than explicit ones, like stating that men do better on the test.

Today, studies probe subtle factors that increase or decrease threat, and test interventions to reduce it. Analysis of seventeen years of research in 2013 by educational psychologist Katherine Picho and her colleagues showed that the impact of stereotype threat is greater in countries with less gender equality and that it declines between high school and college. Sociologist Andrew Penner had already shown that countries differ greatly in the size of the gender gap in high performance; for example, the Czech Republic and Norway have about three times the gender gap of the United States at the ninetieth percentile of a commonly used math test. This national difference cannot have a biological explanation.

An ingenious 2013 experiment by psychologist Emily Shaffer and her colleagues revealed that framing has a major impact. College students were given one of three bogus news articles to read before taking a math test. In one (the Balanced Condition), the article was called “Recent Study Shows Men and Women Nearly Equal in STEM”; an expert was quoted as saying that women had gained a lot of ground
and were just as able as men in STEM. She made reference to a Fields Medal in mathematics supposedly won by a woman—no woman had then won this “Nobel Prize of math,” although one did in 2014—and other positive statistics. In the second (Unbalanced Condition), the article was the same
except
the expert went on to say, “However, it is important to realize that women haven’t yet achieved equality to men. I hope that a future study reveals even more progress made by women in STEM.” This article ended with “more strides need to be made.” The third article (Control Condition) was just a brief history of the college.

Women in the Balanced Condition did better relative to men than women in the Control Condition, and better than women did in the Unbalanced Condition, while men showed no differences. Yet both the Balanced and the Unbalanced Conditions called attention to gender differences, which usually hurts women’s performance. What was new here was the framing: “Calling attention to women’s success and subsequent equal representation in STEM was clearly beneficial for women without harming the math performance of men.” This suggests an intervention strategy.

Research around the world (that is, around our species) shows what works. In a 2013 study by cognitive psychologist Annique Smeding and her colleagues, French middle school girls did worse than boys on a math test but not on a verbal test if the math was given first, while there was no sex difference on either test if the
verbal
was given first. Psychologists Melanie Steffens and Petra Jelenec studied ninth graders and college students in Germany in 2011 and found that implicit stereotypes held women back in math even when they were not aware of them, suggesting that addressing implicit beliefs will help. And a 2012 study in Uganda showed that women in single-sex schools were not affected by stereotype threat while women in coed schools were.

The impact of single-sex schools remains controversial; there have been many studies, but they don’t all find a difference. There is an argument to be made that they are better for girls
and
boys, which is surprising given that not long ago “separate but equal” was considered the
ultimate hypocrisy. Now that girls do better than boys in school, however, proponents argue that boys can’t thrive in the female-forward environment of coed schools. Yet some of those who are looking out for girls’ interests see an advantage for them, too: in an all-girls school, every role model, every success story, be it in elections, sports, science, or math, is female.

Israel offers a unique take in two studies in different populations. Educational sociologist Hanna Ayalon published a paper in 2002 called “Mathematics and Sciences Course Taking Among Arab Students in Israel: A Case of Unexpected Gender Equality.” It is clear that Israeli Arabs, although citizens, are not equal citizens. But ironically, because course offerings in Israeli-Arab high schools are thin in social sciences and humanities, girls take almost as many math courses as boys, and almost as many as Jewish
boys
do in
their
schools. So in math and computer science, Jewish girls lag behind Arab girls and all boys.

Except for one group of Jewish girls. Sociologist and anthropologist Yariv Feniger, studying more than twenty thousand Israeli high school students in 2010, found that girls at all-female religious schools, while they did not enroll very much in math, physics, or biology, were far more likely to take computer science than girls in coed schools. Again, it was a question of opportunity. Late in high school, boys in same-sex religious schools were deepening their religious studies, while families were urging girls to learn computer science. A friend of mine, a nonreligious Israeli-American with two Ph.D.s (one in physics) and a career in computers, insisted that her American daughter (now an architect) learn how to program. “My mother’s mother,” she said to the young woman, “told my mother that if she learned to sew she would never go hungry. I’m telling you this for the same reason.”

Whatever the reason, girls should be taking computer science, physics, math, engineering, everything. And increasingly, they are. A 2013 book by Amy Sue Bix—
Girls Coming to Tech!—
documents the history of women at the three top institutes of technology in the United States: Caltech, MIT, and Georgia Tech. Just before World War II,
around 1 percent of the students at these schools were women. In 2013, 45 percent of the undergraduates and 31 percent of the graduate students at MIT were women. Bix writes, “Before 1952, Georgia Tech had no undergraduate women; in 2011, Georgia Tech led the nation in granting engineering bachelor’s degrees to women. In early 1970, Caltech had zero female undergraduates; in 2011–2012, women comprised 39 percent of undergraduate enrollment.”

Nationwide, most engineering schools lag behind these three trendsetters, but other programs are following their lead. The more that do, the more models there are for the next generation, and the next. The nonprofit organization Code.org has in about a year reached thousands of K–12 teachers and millions of their students with programs like An Hour of Code. Both sexes are eligible, but the nonprofit says it has reached more girls in the past year than have learned to code in all of previous history. With the support of tech industry leaders, Code.org mounts teacher-training programs to keep up students’ interest, which has been keen, and offer many online learning experiences.