Last week, Fonda announced that she would donate $12.5 million to the Harvard Graduate School of Education to support a gender studies center, which, among other things, would look at how boys and girls are trained to accept gender norms, and would develop new curriculums to help combat sexism and encourage children to think outside the gender box.

Fonda's gift was given in honor of Carol Gilligan, the Harvard social psychologist whose 1982 book, "In a Different Voice," Fonda says, made her cry. Gilligan has posited that girls and women have a distinct "moral voice" that is routinely "silenced" in a "male-voiced" culture.

An endowed professorship will be named in Gilligan's honor at the new gender center, though Gilligan herself plans to leave Harvard for New York University in 2002.

Gilligan's work has been influential in the increased focus on the different learning styles of boys and girls, as well as in the creation of educational programs designed to correct the perceived damage done to girls by an educational system that some say favors male learning styles to the detriment of girls, who become second-class citizens.

It would probably not be an overstatement to call Christina Hoff Sommers, author of "Who Stole Feminism?" Gilligan's nemesis. Sommers, also the author of "The War Against Boys," strongly disagrees that girls are treated as the "second sex" in schools. In fact, says Sommers, after 10 years of feminist-influenced curriculum aimed at righting the perceived educational biases against girls, it is boys who have become the second sex in America's schools.

In her book, Sommers seeks to refute that the "girl crisis" ever existed. She challenges the methodology used by researchers such as Gilligan and William Pollack and claims that boys lag far behind girls in reading and writing skills, and are less likely to go to college.

(A month after Sommers' book was excerpted in a May 2000 cover story for the Atlantic Monthly, Gilligan responded to Sommers' attack on the Atlantic's letters page.)

Now, in the wake of Fonda's generosity, Sommers gives her opinion on the planned gender studies center. Not surprisingly, she has very little praise for Gilligan and Fonda and even less for their convictions.

Jane Fonda has donated $12.5 million to Harvard to fund a center on gender and education. Given that she made the donation in honor of Carol Gilligan, a Harvard psychologist whose work you have publicly criticized, what is your reaction to this center?

I think that Jane Fonda was badly advised. Carol Gilligan's research should not be promoted by Harvard University any more than it already has been. She has failed to produce the data on which her celebrated research for "In a Different Voice" was based. She says it's too sensitive to share with others. That is simply unacceptable in empirical research. You have to show others your original data, and she hasn't done this for the three studies on which she based her claims.

She claims that girls suffer a precipitous loss of self-esteem in adolescence, but no one has been able to corroborate this. She's very good at using anecdotes, but that's the problem -- one of the greatest indicators of pseudoscience is a reliance on anecdotes rather than data. When researchers like Susan Harter at the University of Denver tried to test Gilligan's hypotheses, she was unable to find this dramatic loss of voice and self-confidence and self-esteem in girls.

This new boy-centered rhetoric of Gilligan's worries me because it appears to be compassionate: We want to help boys, we want to free them, to liberate them from this toxic masculinity. Well, the boys don't see it that way.

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