Boys Are Falling Behind Girls Because Girls Aren't Being Held Back

Is lack of male teachers to blame for boys underperforming and otherwise falling behind? Probably not, at least according to the data Jessica Grose marshals in a New York Times column. (Gift Link) She raises what’s typically a good critique to point out whenever someone says, “Here’s something bad that has recently, and it must be caused by this feature of the world.” Namely, she asks, “Is that feature new?” If it isn’t, if it’s been around for a while, then chances are it isn’t the cause of the new bad thing.

In this case, she correctly points out that, well, young boys have been taught overwhelmingly by female teachers for much longer than we’ve been fretting about the “boy crisis.”

Boys and girls were made to sit for long periods of time in the 1950s, and their punishment for disobeying was likely harsher than it is in many schools today. (I have heard so many tales of nuns hitting kids with rulers.) I don’t think there was a widespread embrace of boys acting out in the classroom in previous generations, and yet no one is arguing that American education of the Eisenhower era made boys less ambitious. This revelation made me want to see if there was actually empirical support for the boy-crisis argument.

This sounds right. So what has changed? I think the correct answer is: opportunities. It used to be that a boy could underperform a girl in school, but still be confident in achieving higher status once he graduated, because high status positions were closed to women, and so less qualified boys could still get them. Or, if they weren’t closed, their environments were so hostile to women that few women pursued them, and fewer still stuck around.

In other words, in the high-status professions, there used to be a good deal less competition, which meant that relatively more mediocre men were able to find positions and success than can today when those relatively more mediocre men have to compete with a greater number of less mediocre women. (And, in the case of white men, fewer qualified minorities, as well.)

In a knowledge economy such as ours, status very much latches onto educational attainment. Yes, you can achieve high status while not achieving high educational attainment (you can drop out of college and launch a successful tech firm). But if you want a surefire bet, getting a graduate degree helps a ton. Which means going to undergrad and doing well, and that means doing well enough in high school to be accepted into a good undergraduate program. Girls perform better in K-12, and that’s not terribly new, which is Grose’s point. What is new is that those better-performing girls have far more opportunity to get into top schools, and then go to grad school, than they did in the middle of the last century.

That, in turn, means that the guys who aren’t as successful aren’t just finding themselves competing against a field of higher-qualified peers than before, but they’re competing against more of them, as well. And, the ones who do make it into higher-status professions aren’t getting the cushy boys' clubs of yesteryear, where they could coast comfortably in a comparatively less demanding environment. (I suspect this is the root cause of men in traditionally male intellectual professions getting rather incensed by finding themselves now among female peers who are showing them up. And then spinning up rather silly arguments about how those women aren’t really showing them up.)

Put another way, there’s no longer (as much of) a default status that comes with being a guy, nor does being a guy give you exclusive access to the high-status professions. The K-12 educational success gap isn’t new, but those status and access changes are exposing it, where before it was more hidden. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look for ways to bring up the educational achievement of boys, including acknowledging that boys, particularly younger boys, might need different methods to pay for their different behaviors. But it also doesn’t mean we should see the fact that the relative success of boys and girls, and then men and women, is shifting in itself a problem. If women were kept down, and now they aren’t, then it will appear that boys are losing ground. If that’s at least part of what’s going on, then the solution isn’t to drag women back down again, but to encourage our boys to recognize that it’s actually okay if the girls around them, or some of them, or many of them, are as good, if not better, at school or work or careers than they are.