College gender gap widens: 57% are women

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That study "really ... got people to focus on girls ... (but) there is no big network that protects the needs of boys," says family therapist Michael Gurian, author of the just-published The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life, which argues that elementary and secondary schools aren't meeting the developmental needs of boys.

The minefields ahead:

And the needs of boys and girls are different, says Kimberly Tsaousis, a college-prep adviser who works mostly with low-income minorities at Cleveland High School in Seattle. "Girls are way more likely to just pay attention" during advising sessions, she says. "It's almost less cool" for boys to show interest in college.

Talk of gender is fraught with social, legal and political minefields. Witness the outcry after Harvard President Lawrence Summers remarked in January that women might be underrepresented in sciences because of innate differences in abilities. For one thing, female inequities persist.

There's still a pay gap. According to the Census Bureau, women on average earned 77 cents to each dollar paid to male counterparts in 2004.

So it's perhaps no surprise that most educators exploring the issue have an eye toward equilibrium.