And so are we going to see kind of a shift in society as a result of this? We're already seeing it. I mean, the other thing that we're doing is to young boys. Let's talk about what we're doing to young boys.
This starts very young. We basically educate young boys in a way that really favors girls. You know, from a very young age, we talk about being able to sit quietly and regulate your emotions and not be aggressive and not be impulsive. And these little boys are being diagnosed with ADHD, many of them just for being little boys. Little boys need to run around. They have a lot of physical energy. They have tons of testosterone. When you're like between three and six, you have a surge of testosterone, and all you want to do is run and jump and play and be outside.
And what we're doing, we're putting them in school, making them sit in circle time. So we marginalize them, we label them. We say they have a problem, we say that they have ADHD, they have behavioral problems. And in many of them, the stress that I talked about is the stress of making little boys be more like little girls. And that's where it starts.
And so then they go into childhood, and again, the educational system favors the way girls learn, not the way boys learn. How do boys learn? Boys have attention spans for very short periods of time, and then they need lots of physical activity. So ideally, if you go to look at the boys' schools, what do they do? They run the boys like running the dogs in the park. They sit for 45 minutes or half an hour, but then the boys get time off to run around. And then they'll sit another half an hour, and then they'll run around. I mean, they have like four recess periods a day, and so that's really better for boys.
And little girls have more of a capacity to sit quietly in circle time and sort of, you know, they don't have as much testosterone. They don't have that need to run and jump and play to the same degree that little boys do. They do need to play. We're not letting our kids play, boys and girls, because we're trying to force left-brain development on them too early. But we are forcing little boys into this box and they're not doing well in that box. And then they're labeled. They're labeled as having behavioral problems, ADHD, and that label then follows them through childhood, sometimes into middle school, into high school. Yeah.
What would you change? I make you prime minister of the world, president of the world, and you can fix this issue.
Oh, I would have little boys educated separately than little girls in the early years. In the early years, I would have boys' schools and girls' schools because little girls learn differently. Also, there's been a lot of evidence to show that in the early years, when you do single-gender education, little girls will try things, will take risks with things that they wouldn't in front of little boys. And little boys will try things that they wouldn't take risks in front of little girls.
Like little boys are more likely to try art, painting, and music. Little girls are more likely to try STEM and math and all these things that we talk about little girls should do. So the idea is that single-gender education in the early years is better for little kids because they learn differently.
Focusing on women and celebrating what makes them so unique, Evie Magazine helps women seek truth and find beauty...the kind that really mat
By: Lisa Britton
Published: Nov 19, 2025
From our beginning, we have sounded the alarm on the boy crisis: falling college enrollment, rising suicide rates, loneliness epidemics, workplace deaths, family court biases, and a culture that too often tells men their struggles don’t matter. We have published the stories mainstream women’s media won’t touch: the crisis in education and mental health, the young men drowning in gambling and porn addiction, the importance of fathers, the husbands told to “man up” while carrying impossible loads alone.
Today, on International Men’s Day, the founders, editors, and writers of Evie want to say something simple and long overdue: thank you.
Thank you to the men who get up before dawn to keep the lights on, the roads paved, the shelves stocked, and the country defended. Thank you to the boyfriends and husbands who work so hard, the brothers who drop everything when we call crying, the fathers who would do anything for their families. Thank you for the quiet sacrifices no one applauds: the dangers you face, the emotions you swallow, the dreams you postpone so someone else can chase theirs.
For too long, men have been told their lives are privileged and their losses are justice. We reject that lie.
We believe a harmonious world isn’t built by demanding men become “better for women” while ignoring what women could do better for men. Real partnership means both sides showing up, with honesty, humility, and fierce loyalty. It means women defending men the way we want men to defend us. It means calling out misandry with the same energy we bring to misogyny. It means admitting that tearing men down does not lift women up; it only leaves everyone broken.
Evie is proud, maybe even a little lonely, to be the only major women’s publication that consistently covers male mental health, educational, and economic challenges without apology or caveat. We will keep doing it, because our sons, brothers, fathers, husbands, and friends deserve advocates too. Because strong men and strong women are not enemies; our partnership is the bedrock of humanity.
So today we are not asking men to be anything more than they already are. We are simply saying: we see you. We love you. We need you, exactly as you are.
Happy International Men’s Day to every boy and man reading this. Your lives matter. Your pain is real. Your contributions are irreplaceable.
Focusing on women and celebrating what makes them so unique, Evie Magazine helps women seek truth and find beauty...the kind that really mat
By: Lisa Britton
Published: Jul 25, 2025
A frequent concern is the need for more male teachers in schools, where currently only 23% of educators are men—a figure that continues to decline. In her recent New York Times opinion piece, "The Boy Crisis is Overblown”, feminist writer Jessica Grose dismisses the concerns of a shortage of male teachers as exaggerated, arguing that focusing on this issue unfairly blames female educators and harms girls and women.
I find Grose’s argument, filled with gaslighting and cherry-picked data, to be very dangerous and misleading. Let’s be clear: Advocating for more male teachers isn’t about blaming female teachers. It’s about recognizing that boys will benefit from male role models who can guide them toward adulthood, especially in these concerning modern times. This issue should not be framed as anti-women.
There is increasing alarm over the influence of figures like Andrew Tate on boys and young men, contributing to a troubling rise in misogyny within our schools. Jessica Grose herself previously highlighted the dangers of this trend in another opinion piece. Increasing the presence of male educators could help counteract this growing issue. However, her latest article, which downplays the need for more men in schools, is perplexing and suggests an unwillingness to fully confront the problems, prioritizing a feminist perspective on issues of the day over comprehensive solutions.
The boy crisis in education is not solely attributed to the shortage of male teachers, as Jessica focuses on in her essay. This issue encompasses much more complexity.
Boys have experienced a significant academic decline over recent decades, falling far behind their female counterparts at every level of education. It’s not exactly trendy to say out loud that our boys are struggling, or that we need to take real action to fix it. It’s even less socially acceptable to suggest that their decline might be, at least in part, our collective fault. But if we’re being honest, that’s a conversation we need to have, whether feminists like Jessica want to hear it or not.
After years of acknowledging the issues on social media and meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, I earned the nickname “the chick that stands up for boys,” and my dedication to advocating for the education and well-being of boys and young men remains my top priority. Many others who share this commitment have also persisted, recognizing the significance of addressing what may be one of the most critical issues for the future of our nation and the world, our “boy crisis.” Now, we’re witnessing a public awakening to the challenges facing boys and young men and are beginning to see a willingness to address these issues, yet many in the establishment media believe the crisis is overblown.
Leaders from both sides of the aisle are now committing to addressing the challenges confronting boys and men. Whether it's a response to the recent election results or an acknowledgment that the crisis can no longer be overlooked, these issues have emerged as a trendy political topic. These pledges represent a crucial step toward creating the societal change we urgently need—as long as responsible, informed, and impartial voices are included in the conversation moving forward. Now is the time to address education and how we are failing our boys, not for feminist writers to use their influence to gaslight the public into believing the crisis is imaginary.
The Gender Gap in Education
The boy crisis, a term introduced by Dr. Warren Farrell in his insightful book, The Boy Crisis, is a pressing reality that extends far beyond the classroom. However, reforming our education system is a critical first step toward tackling these challenges.
From elementary school to higher education, the gender gap is there. Boys dominate the lower end of the academic spectrum. Two thirds of high schoolers with the lowest grades are boys.
Currently, women make up nearly 60% of college students and dominate the majority of Associate's, Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctorate degrees. Young men face higher dropout rates in college and are more prone to failure, suspension, and high school dropout.
In the past, when girls lagged behind boys in education, society recognized the problem and took meaningful steps to close the gap. We reformed systems, implemented support, and championed equal opportunity for girls to succeed.
But now that boys are the ones falling behind, the narrative has shifted. Instead of questioning the system, we point fingers at the boys themselves and expect them to adapt without help.
When girls were behind, we said, “There’s something wrong with the system.” Today, it’s, “There’s something wrong with boys.” That double standard isn’t just unfair, it’s unacceptable.
Gender gaps in education begin as early as kindergarten, with girls generally outperforming boys. Our education system values feminine traits, neglecting the unique learning styles of boys. The approach we’ve taken to address the challenges faced by boys in today's world seems to involve essentially shaming and blaming (and sometimes medicating) them in order to make them conform to the new preferred societal norms. The idea is that boys are simply broken girls, so if we take the boy out of boys, everything will improve. Now, obviously this is a terrible idea. Boys and girls are different. To adequately address the issue of boys falling behind, we must be emotionally mature and accept this biological fact.
Gender gaps in education are across racial groups as well, with the most pronounced disparity in GPA and on-time graduation observed among black students, while the smallest gap is found among Asian students. Only 36% of Bachelor's degrees awarded to black students go to black men. In order to uphold the principle that black lives do indeed matter, I believe it’s important that we recognize and address the educational challenges faced by boys and men and make their well-being a top priority.
Shouldn't we strive to adequately prepare all children for the future, regardless of gender? Instead of shaming and blaming the “boy” out of boys to force them into a system that favors feminine traits, we should focus on reshaping that system to better support how boys learn and thrive.
Just as our mental health system needs reform, so does our education system, so it becomes inclusive, supportive, and effective for everyone. Boys aren’t flawed girls. The real issue isn’t them, it’s the systems we’ve failed to adapt.
Most sex-specific scholarships are awarded to women—even though women already make up 60% of college students. One study found that a staggering 91.6% of sex-specific scholarships are reserved for women. That doesn’t exactly scream fairness or balance to me.
In a society that prides itself on striving for equality, shouldn’t we be promoting education equally across both genders, especially where participation is lagging? As boys continue to fall behind, the solution isn’t to ignore the problem or place blame on them. Instead, we should be actively supporting and encouraging their academic success. Doubling down on "girl power" messaging while dismissing boys' struggles, as Jessica does in her piece, not only misses the point, it frames the crisis as a zero-sum attack on women, when it’s really a call for balance.
In 1972, Title IX was introduced to address gender inequality on campus. At that time, men had a 12% higher chance of obtaining an undergraduate degree compared to women. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the situation has changed dramatically today. Women now have a 15% higher likelihood of earning a degree compared to men. For every 100 Bachelor's degrees awarded to women, only 74 are awarded to men. This gender gap is even wider than it was in 1972 when Title IX was passed, but in the opposite direction.
The implementation of laws aimed at supporting women and girls has resulted in a reversal of the gender gap. But, despite it being the other way around now, there is currently no national campaign to bring the balance back to center.
Over the years, there has been an effort to encourage more young women to pursue careers in STEM. While we invest in programs to support young women breaking into male-dominated fields, it’s a must to also emphasize the equal importance of encouraging young men to enter what Richard Reeves from the Brookings Institution/American Institute for Boys and Men and author of his latest book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It” refers to as "HEAL” fields.
These growing fields include professions such as teaching and therapy, where we need more male representation. It’s puzzling why we don’t see a similar level of support and investment in promoting equal representation in these female dominated fields, where the presence of men is truly necessary to support and mentor other boys and men. It’s time to allocate equal resources and funding towards this idea.
There are real challenges associated with the underrepresentation of young men in higher education, resulting in a shortage of male professionals in other critical fields.
Clinical psychology doctoral programs have seen a significant increase in female representation, with women now comprising 79% of the student population. When the situation was reversed in medical and law schools, there was a big discussion about the systematic exclusion of women from those professions and the negative impact it had on clients and patients. Unsurprisingly, the current underrepresentation of men in clinical psychology programs hasn’t received the same level of attention. This is concerning, particularly because we need more male professionals in the mental health field to address the growing mental health crisis among boys and young men.
When I bring up the declining number of young men attending college, I often hear the response, "That's great! College is a pointless investment of time and money. Young men can earn more by pursuing other paths, like entrepreneurship!" While it would be fantastic if all young men were driven entrepreneurs, creating businesses and pioneering new ideas that will shape our future, the reality is quite different. Too many young men feel lost, a lack motivation, and are desperately in need of guidance and direction.
If you truly value representation, it’s important for both men and women to have equal opportunities to pursue higher education. Many careers today require higher education. Nearly 70% of jobs are expected to require a credential by 2040. By encouraging men to attend college and acquire the necessary credentials for many valuable careers, we can have a more balanced and diverse society. We should not be pushing men away from college, or the future will indeed be female.
Even at schools in Iceland, which is considered the most “gender equal country in the world” according to the World Economic Forum, 77% of undergraduates are women. When will we be equal? When 100% of undergraduates are women? This gender gap crisis in education is not confined to America; it’s a global issue.
In other parts of the world, gender inequality particularly affecting girls persists. During a humanitarian trip to Tanzania, I had the opportunity to witness this firsthand when I stayed at a secondary school that my brother helped build and run. My sister and I had organized fundraisers to support the girls in the village, where we stayed for several weeks. In Tanzania, some people continue to sell their daughters for a price equivalent to that of a goat. However, if your daughter is a student, it is much more difficult to sell her.
My experience in Tanzania opened my eyes to the cultural and gender disparities that exist. While I saw the obvious need to support girls, I also witnessed areas where boys required help. We must prioritize empowering all children and providing them with education, safety and opportunities in places like Tanzania, while still respecting their culture and way of life that may be different from ours.
The situation in America is not the same as Tanzania. Some people today may mistakenly draw a false equivalence by comparing the challenges faced by women in the West to those in more impoverished nations and argue that girls and women everywhere require the same attention and assistance. However, in America, as well as many other countries worldwide, it is our boys who face challenges and systemic sexism within the education system today.
Another effective solution I support and promote to address the education crisis among boys is to establish more vocational schools. I had the privilege of visiting a vocational school in New Jersey while working on a children’s book project, and I was impressed by the school's focus on providing tailored opportunities for boys.
Vocational schools could play a crucial role in the next era of education and development of boys and young men. These schools provide a specialized curriculum that focuses on practical skills and hands-on training, preparing students for specific careers and trades.
Boys often have a natural inclination towards hands-on activities and problem-solving, so vocational education is a perfect fit for many of them. By engaging in things like carpentry, auto repair, and electrical work, boys can develop valuable technical skills that are in high demand in the job market and are less likely to be taken over by artificial intelligence.
By investing more in vocational education, I believe we can bridge the skills gap and ensure that boys are equipped with the knowledge and abilities required for the jobs of the future. Their education can be tailored to our rapidly evolving economy.
Recognizing the challenges facing our boys, and taking meaningful action, is essential not just for their sake, but for the well-being of families, communities, and our society as a whole. When we fail our boys and men, we fail our girls and women too. We fail our communities. We fail our nation. If we want a truly inclusive future where everyone thrives, we can’t afford to ignore half the population.
As a society, we must wake up to the very real boy crisis unfolding around us and take proactive, thoughtful steps to address it. Reforming our education system and increasing the presence of male teachers are pivotal parts of that solution, no matter how loudly establishment media feminists try to downplay the problem. Because if we allow our boys to keep falling behind, it’s not just their future at stake, it’s all of ours.
Why the UK risks sentencing its next generation of men to life’s scrapheap
By: Szu Ping Chan
Published: Mar 31, 2024
Britain has a boy problem. If you are born male today, you are increasingly likely to struggle in school, in the workplace and at home.
The gender attainment gap is not new – girls have been outperforming boys at GCSE level for over three decades now, while the number of women completing degrees has exceeded the number of men since the 1990s.
But solving the problem of underachievement among boys has never been more crucial. Economic growth is stalling, productivity is flatlining and public finances are creaking under the strain of growing benefits bills.
At a time when businesses are struggling to hire, more and more men are dropping out of the workforce. Everyone in society must achieve their fullest potential if we are to fix our economic problems.
There is a political dimension too – William Hague earlier this month raised the alarm about the growing numbers of disaffected young men who, with little offered or promised to them in life, were turning to far-Right politics.
There is nothing innate about boys’ underachievement. There is no fundamental reason why outcomes should be getting worse.
Yet without a concerted effort to close the attainment gap, it seems destined to widen. Ever more men and boys will find themselves unwittingly consigned to life’s scrapheap.
The problem is clear – where are the solutions?
Deepening development gap
Before children even step a foot inside the classroom, boys are already behind.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) notes that “a significant gender gap in both cognitive and socio-emotional development” emerges by the age of three.
By the time children start primary school, two-thirds of girls have reached a “good level of development”, suggesting they are able to write a simple sentence or count beyond 20.
Just under two-thirds of boys have hit that same milestone. For children eligible for free school meals, the disparity is even larger.
This gap that opens up at three never completely closes, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ (IFS) analysis of Department for Education data.
“There’s a silent crisis brewing among boys and men in our classrooms, workplaces and communities,” says Richard Reeves, academic and author of Of Boys and Men, which explores the male malaise from cradle to career.
“Boys now lag behind girls and men lag behind women at almost every level of education. That’s true in nearly every rich economy.”
Reeves, a former adviser to Nick Clegg, the former deputy prime minister, says biology is behind some of this gap.
All the academic evidence suggests that the prefrontal cortex – or in Reeves’s words “the part of the brain that helps you get your act together” – develops around a year or two faster in girls than boys.
Girls are not smarter, they just mature faster, Reeves says. “Anyone who spends any time with teenagers knows exactly what I’m talking about.”
His conclusion is that there are simply some “natural advantages of women and girls in the education system”.
Rather than recognise and compensate for this, the system has in fact evolved in ways that favour girls. A switch to more coursework at GCSE level benefitted girls more than boys, according to the IFS, which noted that the gap in performance first emerged in the 1980s when exam-based O levels were replaced by GCSEs in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
“The shake-up brought a move towards more continuous assessment, which seems to have benefitted girls,” the IFS said in a recent paper.
This idea is “quite hard to get this across because many people say: well if girls and women always had this natural advantage, why didn’t we see it 40 years ago?” Reeves says. “The answer is sexism.
“There is no doubt my mum would have gone to university if she was born 50 years later, but it wasn’t considered to be a thing. But now having taken the lid off, that potential for women in education just keeps going. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just that along the way a lot more men have fallen behind.”
Woes of the white working class
Of course, it would be wrong to suggest women were doing better than men in the working world. A median gender pay gap of 7.7pc still shows women are being shortchanged.
After graduation, men are more likely to get a “highly skilled” job than women and average earnings for a male graduate are around 9pc higher than a female a year after they leave university, according to the IFS.
That gap rises to 31pc a decade later.
However, what is worrying academics, politicians and teachers is that attainment among men and boys seems to be declining while for women it improves.
Average pay adjusted for inflation has fallen by 6.9pc for men since 2008, according to ONS data. Among women, it has climbed 2.2pc. In fact, men’s wages are no higher in real terms today than they were in 2002.
Men have been behind the fall in average hours worked since the pandemic, while women are working more.
Louise Murphy at the Resolution Foundation says the worsening prospects for boys and men reflect structural factors.
“The industrial structure of the UK has changed. Some of these manufacturing jobs that existed don’t exist in the same way now.”
Reeves says: “It used to be true that men with relatively modest levels of education do OK in the labour market. And that is not always the case anymore.”
The experience of boys in schools has led them to “underperform in the labour market” more broadly, he adds.
Achievement has become a particular issue among one subset of boys in particular: the white working class.
“Too many people in society just see these boys as the people on mopeds with a balaclava on their head,” says Andy Eadie, assistant headteacher at Cardinal Langley school in Rochdale. “Actually, that’s only a tiny minority.”
Eadie has taught at the mixed comprehensive school of 1,200 pupils since 2016. A fifth of his pupils are eligible for free school meals.
Many have already been “written off” by teachers as soon as they enter the classroom, Eadie says, particularly if they are white working class boys.
“There is a perception that some boys are already signed off and have no hope,” he says.
“The danger is that people aren’t bothered about these gaps. They’re just bothered about keeping them quiet so they can get on with other things.”
Just 14.6pc of white working class boys went into higher education in 2021. This was the lowest figure of any ethnic or socio-economic group and a third of the overall average, according to research published by the House of Commons Library.
Eadie says: “A lot of young people in the white working class background actually have really low self-esteem.
“And so you’ve got a lot of young people who potentially all underachieve and not feel very good about themselves.”
There are signs that this malaise is adding to Britain’s worklessness crisis. One in three 18 to 24-year-old boys were classed as economically inactive – meaning they’re not in work or looking for a job – in the three months to January, a record high.
The figure is up by more than five percentage points since the end of 2019, before the pandemic. Inactivity among 50 to 64-year-old men has climbed five times slower over the same period.
The inactivity rate among young men has roughly doubled since the early 90s, with almost two million now out of the labour force.
Some are choosing to stay on in education but the share of men not in employment, education or training (NEET) is climbing back towards financial crisis rates at 15.3pc. For women, it has remained on a bumpy but downward path.
“I think it goes back to the idea that we just don’t expect our boys to do well. So they don’t do well,” says Conservative MP Nick Fletcher, who leads the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for men and boys.
Caroline Barlow, headteacher at Heathfield Community College, has submitted evidence to the APPG suggesting there was a culture of low expectations for male students.
“In the early days, there was a tendency to almost just be grateful if boys were there and they were doing some work,” she said.
By shifting teachers’ expectations of their pupils, results improved and Heathfield was also able to close the gender gap.
Fletcher says: “We expect our boys to behave badly, so they behave badly. We are letting our boys down and unless we actually recognise we have a problem, then we won’t really start searching for the solution.”
Where does the problem start? Some think it is in the home.
Family circumstances have changed dramatically over the past few decades, with a sharp rise in lone parent households as divorce becomes more common or people don’t even get married in the first place. The vast majority of children in these circumstances grow up with their mothers.
In part, this reflects the economic empowerment of women: they can afford to be a single parent.
However, it raises the question of where male role models are coming from. Research conducted jointly by the Fatherhood Institute found that fathers who read to their children every day are contributing to their development and can help to address early attainment gaps.
The Conservative peer Lord Willetts writes in his book, The Pinch: “A welfare system that was originally designed to compensate men for loss of earnings is slowly and messily redesigned to compensate women for the loss of men.”
This too can leave men rudderless in mid-life.
As Reeves puts it in his book: “Economically independent women can now flourish whether they are wives or not. Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess. Compared to married men, their health is worse, their employment rates are lower, and their social networks are weaker.”
‘Crisis in masculinity’
The underachievement of men and boys was once seen as almost taboo.
“There have been people who have sniggered when I stood up and asked for a minister for men and a men’s health strategy,” says Fletcher.
“I genuinely believe some of the problems we face are down to the lack of interest in young boys and men, who we’ve always assumed are going to be fine.”
However, politicians have now started to notice.
Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, has announced that Labour is looking at introducing a men’s health strategy to address what he describes as a “crisis in masculinity” that is costing lives.
It is understood that Labour’s forthcoming review into mental health by Luciana Berger will include a chapter that focuses on male suicide. It remains the biggest killer of British men aged under 35.
William Hague, the former Tory leader, believes the issue is reshaping politics. He recently highlighted that a majority of men now believe they are being discriminated against, which is fuelling support among young men for extreme parties.
Fletcher is calling for a dedicated minister for men to match the minister for women, Kemi Badenoch, who is also part of the Cabinet as Business Secretary.
Despite overwhelming evidence that boys are falling behind, some colleagues still treat the idea of a dedicated minister with ridicule.
Fletcher says: “I think one of the problems that we’ve had as a society is there’s a lot of reluctance to speak up for men. We’ve noticed it in parliament over the years.”
Reeves wants to challenge the longstanding assumption that gender gaps only run one way.
He takes particular issue with the World Economic Forum (WEF), which looks at progress on gender equality across the world.
Countries are scored on a scale from zero to one, with the former representing no equality and the latter signalling full equality. The problem, says Reeves, is that the index itself assumes that only women have any catching up to do.
For example, it “assigns the same score to a country that has reached parity between women and men and one where women have surpassed men”.
This is a deliberate choice. However, as a result the UK’s educational attainment score stands at 0.999 despite the fact that girls have clearly outperformed boys for decades.
Reeves believes continuing to publish the index in this way is damaging and leads “to a lack of policy attention to the problems of boys and men”. In short, he says: “It makes no sense to treat gender inequality as a one-way street.”
The Government insists it is making progress, with a Department for Education spokesman saying the gender gap “across most headline measures is narrowing across all key phases.
“Education standards have risen sharply across the country, with 90pc of schools now rated good or outstanding by Ofsted, up from just 68pc in 2010.”
Reeves offers some radical solutions to closing the attainment gap in his book, including starting boys a year later in school. Many teachers and academics believe this is not practical and Reeves himself says the idea was designed to spark a debate.
Reeves says the evidence also suggests children should take more frequent breaks at school because boys find it harder than girls to sit still. He himself was put in a special class for English because his teachers felt he lacked focus.
At Balcarras secondary school in Cheltenham, headteacher Dominic Burke felt the only way to tackle what used to be a 15pc gender gap in the GCSE results was to level with his students.
“We got the boys together en masse and said to them: ‘You’re going to underachieve. The girls are going to beat you hands down’. And then we showed them the evidence. Their ability profiles were the same. But we said the reality is girls are going to get better results than you and we challenge you to be the first year group to stop that. We called it the ‘effort challenge’.”
It worked. Competition and the offer of cold, hard cash was enough to encourage many to put the effort in. Boys who were judged to have done so received £20 at the end of term. The school managed to close the gender gap and a few years ago, the boys beat the girls for the first time.
“Competition does work I think, and it’s a good tactic for teaching because it becomes a rewarding experience to meet the challenge,” says Burke. “If you make something more engaging and enjoyable, people are more likely to do it.”
Healing
No survey of the state of boys and men in Britain today can ignore the changing ideas of masculinity.
Whereas men were once seen as breadwinners, American sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas point out that many women in poor US neighbourhoods have come to see them “as just another mouth to feed”. This is disorientating.
Yet perhaps the way to survive as a man in the job market of the future is to junk ideas of traditional masculinity altogether. Many of the jobs of the future will be in things like caring and education.
Reeves wants governments to spearhead a drive to get more men into health, education, administration, and literacy jobs – which he brands HEAL – just as they have ploughed efforts into getting more women into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – or STEM roles.
Increasing the number of male teachers would also raise the number of role models for boys in class. Three-quarters of state school teachers are women, according to data published by the Department for Education.
The share of men working in state-funded nurseries is even lower, at just 14pc. Around 30pc of primary schools have no male teachers at all.
“I did actually get some funny looks when I first started,” says one male nursery worker who does not wish to be identified.
“Even now I tend to leave the cuddles to my female colleagues as I think there’s still a stereotype that any man who wants to work with young kids has to be some kind of pervert.”
Encouraging more men into these types of jobs would be no small undertaking. Perceptions that men are not suited to caring or creative professions are deep-seated.
Florence Nightingale, who in the 19th century established the principles of modern nursing, insisted that men’s “hard and horny” hands were “not fitted to touch, bathe and dress wounded limbs, however gentle their hearts may be”. The Royal College of Nursing did not even admit men as members until 1960.
Edward Davies, policy director at the Centre for Social Justice think tank, cautions: “It’s absolutely right to remove cultural, perceived and real barriers that keep men from certain careers, especially caring and teaching professions. But we also need to be careful not to pretend men and women are exactly the same.
“At a blunt population level women seem more interested in people and men in things. You would expect to see that reality play out in the jobs they do too. Imposing quotas or expectations that all professions should be evenly split between men and women will probably drive some people into careers they are not suited to.”
Fixing Britain’s boy problem may be harder than even experts think.
[ Via: https://archive.today/AFaiR ]
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The people who talk endlessly about "equality" and "equal rights" are strangely silent when it comes to areas where boys and men fall behind: education, health and lifespan, and life satisfaction.
[ The Basic Index of Gender Inequality (BIGI, x-axis) as a function of the Human Development Index (HDI, y-axis).
BIGI is the average of 3 components: Ratio in healthy life span, ratio in overall life satisfaction, and ratio in educational opportunities during childhood (see Materials and Methods for details). Deviation from zero implies the extent of gender inequality. The plot shows the largest contributor to the overall score for each nation: Purple dots indicate healthy life span is the most important component, green dots indicate educational opportunities, and red dots indicate overall life satisfaction. The Ns indicate for each level of HDI how many nations have a BIGI score greater than 0, and how many less than 0. ]
All-male middle schools show what boys need to develop skills—and these lessons would work in coed schools, too.
By: Julie Jargon
Published: Dec 16, 2023
Boys are struggling in middle school, stuck in an academic setting that they say rewards them for sitting still and taking notes—in other words, behaving more like girls.
“It’s really hard sitting still for eight hours a day,” says Tyler Brausa, now 16. When he jumped from elementary school to middle school, the lack of recess and daily gym was a jolt. Tyler often got in trouble for talking out of turn and fidgeting at his desk. After school, he and his friends escaped into videogames—a realm where they have purpose and work together toward a shared goal.
School could compete with gaming if it felt more rewarding to boys, he says.
Some of them are. A number of all-boys middle schools—public, charter and private—have begun opening in recent years to meet boys’ needs. Inside the walls of these schools, boys get lots of hands-on learning, frequent breaks and plenty of movement. Some coed schools are also addressing the problem, dividing up boys and girls for certain classes. And they’re having success.
“Instead of making guys change the way we behave,” Tyler says, “maybe schools should change the way they’re structured.”
‘Bumping into things’
At the private, boys-only Field Middle School in the San Francisco Bay Area, which opened two years ago, students start some days sitting in a circle. The school’s 46 students, in grades six through eight, talk about what they’re grateful for and acknowledge mistakes they’ve made.
On other days, they begin by reviewing assignments, cleaning out backpacks and checking they have supplies such as sharpened pencils. Organization and time management don’t come easily to all adolescent boys, as I covered last week.
“Boys tend to learn by bumping into things,” says Jason Baeten, Field’s head of school. Dance classes held in the courtyard aren’t judged for grace and form. “That’s not always a metaphor—sometimes they’re too big for their bodies.”
At Field, 80% of the teachers are male. Overall numbers of male teachers in K-12 education have been falling nationwide, according to Richard Reeves, president of the nonpartisan nonprofit American Institute for Boys and Men.
The administrators know how distracting technology can be to kids. Every morning the students turn in their phones and smartwatches to the front office for the day. They use iPads for some assignments in class but they aren’t in constant use.
Giving boys a chance to move around and work with their hands is a big focus at Field and other all-boys schools. The students get a 20-minute morning snack break, a 45-minute lunch period and PE three to five days a week. One classroom has standing desks.
The school has a class in which kids design products to solve problems or help people. One boy developed sugar-free recipes so his diabetic brother could enjoy dessert. The school also offers a build class; last year the boys built go-karts. On Mondays, the students cook lunch for each other and the staff. They regularly vacuum and sweep the classrooms.
‘Motivated by competition’
Field is too new to have high-school graduation success rates. But the Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy, a public all-boys school for grades six through 12, has proven results. The Dallas school, open since 2011, has a 91% graduation rate; the same percentage of students score proficient on reading, compared with the district average of 52%, according to U.S. News & World Report.
“The biggest reason our students do well is we have a committed staff. The brothers, as we call our students, know we care about them,” says Rashad Jackson, principal of the school, which has 541 boys. “It’s not just about A’s and B’s, we’re invested in their social-emotional well-being.”
The boys at the Obama Academy, as well as the students at Dallas’s two other public all-boys schools, have opportunities to get out their wiggles throughout the day. (The district also has three all-girls’ schools.)
At Dallas’s pre-K through-eighth-grade Solar Preparatory School for Boys, students rotate through a different learning station every 15 minutes because brain science shows boys need frequent movement, says principal Derek Thomas.
Timers buzz to indicate when students need to switch to the next task.
“When you put a timer on something, it becomes a competition, and boys are motivated by competition,” he says. “If I tell them to work on organizing their binder and I give them two minutes, they’ll do it in one minute 30 seconds.”
‘The boys have voices’
These educators say middle-school boys feel freer to make and learn from mistakes when girls aren’t around.
That’s something administrators at Treasure Valley Classical Academy, a coed charter school in Fruitland, Idaho, also noticed. When middle-school boys and girls are together in PE class, the boys try to impress the girls, and the girls don’t participate as much, says school founder Stephen Lambert
The 580-student school, which serves kindergarten through 10th grade, began separating girls and boys in some PE classes two years ago. The girls became more engaged and competitive and the boys more focused, teachers said.
The school did the same for some music and art classes. When together, girls tend to out-sing the boys, Lambert says. “The boys’ voices are cracking and they’re embarrassed and self-conscious and they won’t sing,” he adds. “When you split them up, you realize the boys have voices and they want to make them heard.”
All students get plenty of time to move, with recess for all kids in kindergarten through eighth grade, and an extended hangout time after lunch for the high-school students.
Leonard Sax is a family doctor who has studied more than 500 schools over the past 20 years, and wrote several books on gender differences. He says that any school could replicate these approaches without being disruptive—or discriminatory.
“Schools can be friendly to boys without being unfriendly to girls,” he says.
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Apparently, bludgeoning the maleness out of boys doesn't make them better students. Males and females are inherently different. Imagine that.
A program like this would never fly at many co-ed schools where activists masquerade as teachers. For reference, one of the Grievance Studies papers is called "The Progressive Stack: An Intersectional Feminist Approach to Pedagogy" and described thusly:
This is our most appalling paper, and it’s deeply concerning that how it is being treated at the highly respected journal Hypatia. It forwards that educators should discriminate by identity and calculate their students’ status in terms of privilege, favor the least privileged with more time, attention and positive feedback and penalize the most privileged by declining to hear their contributions, deriding their input, intentionally speaking over them, and making them sit on the floor in chains—framed as educational opportunities we termed “experiential reparations.”
[..]
The reviewers’ only concerns with these points so far have been that (1) we approach the topic with too much compassion for the students who are being subjected to this, and (2) we risk exploiting underprivileged students by burdening them with an expectation to teach about privilege. To correct for this, the reviewers urged us to make sure we avoid “recentering the needs of the privileged.” They asked us to incorporate Megan Boler’s approach called “pedagogy of discomfort” and Barbara Applebaum’s insistence that the privileged learn from this discomfort rather than being coddled or having their own experiences (suffering) “recentered.”
When scholarship around pedagogy - how things are taught - is organized around and motivated by cruelty, malevolence and spite, it seems unlikely that activist scolds will be in favor of sparing boys - even black boys - from an intersectional haranguing. If boys are allowed to be boys, what hateful, sexist harridan will get to shame and berate them into understanding that they'll never, ever have to experience being discriminated against based on their sex?
This week’s graphs show sex-segregated data on university enrollments and degrees earned in Australia, Canada, and the United States (U.S.).
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Australia
The first graph shows the number of men and women enrolled at universities annually in Australia from 1949 to 2023. Up until the COVID-19 pandemic, numbers of men and women enrolled increased most years. However, the pandemic caused enrollments to drop. As of 2023, they have not fully recovered. The first year that female enrollment exceeded male enrollment was 1987 (50.1% female enrollment). Female enrollment has exceeded male enrollment in all subsequent years; it peaked in 2022 (57.4%); and it currently stands at 56.9% (2023).
The second graph shows the number of university degrees (all types) completed by male and female students in Australia annually between 1995 and 2023. Every year, more women than men completed university degrees. In 2023, women earned 58.8% of all university degrees in Australia.
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Canada
This graph shows the number of bachelor’s degrees earned annually by men and women at universities in Canada between 1992 and 2022. A significantly higher proportion of women than men completed bachelor’s degrees each year over this 31-year period. In 1992, 57.3% of bachelor’s degrees in Canada were earned by women. This number peaked in 2007 (62.2%) and was 60.1% in 2022 (the last year data were available).
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United States
This graph shows the number of bachelor’s degrees earned annually by men and women in the U.S. from the 1959-60 to 2022-22 academic school years. The first academic year that women earned more bachelor’s degrees than men was 1981-82 (50.3% women). In all subsequent years, the number of women earning bachelor’s degrees outnumbered the number of men earning bachelor’s degrees. This difference peaked in 2021-22, with women making up 58.5% of bachelor’s degree earners.
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Bonus Commentary
More women than men have been earning university degrees in Australia, Canada, and the U.S. for many years. The shift to more female than male degree earners occurred in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Today, women make up 58%-60% of bachelor’s degree earners in these three countries.
Numerous factors contribute to fewer males than female enrolling in universities and completing bachelor’s degrees. Some examples include: more males than females are in prison, males have lower high school grade point averages than females, males have higher high school dropout rates than females, males have poorer reading and writing skills than females, males have less access to financial aid and scholarships than females, and fewer initiatives exist for increasing male enrollments. Regarding this last factor, attempts at increasing female, but not male, enrollment are still occurring. Curtin University and the University of Western Australia both recently advertised Project Officer roles in which the main responsibility of the Officer is to increase the number of female STEM students via high school recruitment strategies. No similar jobs were posted for increasing the number of male students in any field. Thus, to the extent that such Project Officers are successful at increasing the number of female STEM students, universities will exacerbate the current sex difference in university enrollments.
University of Pittsburgh study: High social support associated with less violence among male teens in urban neighborhoods
University of Pittsburgh study: High social support associated with less violence among male teens in urban neighborhoods
Denise Williams had a hit with a catchy little tune, “let’s hear it for the boy.” The question for many parents and schools is how are boys doing? Boy Crisis is an organization which examines challenges faced by boys. According to Boy Crisis:
