Where the Boys Aren't
Culture wars over gender obscure the deepening educational struggles of young males.
Kay S. Hymowitz
Autumn 2022 Education The Social Order
According to the Tao of blue-state T-shirts—the sort that every nine-year-old soccer-playing girl in my Brooklyn neighborhood wears—“The Future Is Female.” On college campuses, that future has arrived. Women are now 60 percent of college graduates, men a mere 40 percent. This gender gap is not new—among college grads, the ratio has moved in women’s favor since the early 1980s—but it has reached a record extent, and people are paying attention. That attention is a good thing. With its ripple effects on male underemployment, falling marriage rates, and family instability, the fading male presence in higher education should set off alarm bells for anyone concerned about the country’s social and economic future. Dig deeper into the issue, however, and you’ll discover that focusing on college, as so many media stories do, misses a big part of the problem. In fact, the education gender gap favoring girls goes all the way back through the education pipeline, showing up in high school, middle school, and even in the proverbial little red schoolhouse. No one suggests that the gap results from any male cognitive deficiency; average IQ scores for the sexes don’t vary that much.
I’m not the first to notice the pipeline problem. Christina Hoff Sommers and Richard Whitmire wrote landmark books on it more than a decade ago. Yet the discussion has stalled. Trying to analyze this particular gender gap lands one in the middle of one of the culture’s hottest war zones: the conflict over sex and gender identity. As a powerful minority of activists, educators, and academics seek to dismantle—or at least, blur—the sex binary, gender gaps are an uncomfortable reminder of the reality of what the French call—or at least, used to call—la différence. But there’s no way to help boys, or to alleviate the societal woes that follow from their struggling school performance, without directly confronting the fact that, for some only partly understood neurological-hormonal-genetic reasons, they develop differently from girls. And let’s face it, the boy problem isn’t going away, whatever pronouns kids want to use.
Consider some specifics. Boys have lower grades than girls throughout their primary and secondary school years. They have more behavior problems. Boys are more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit disorder; to wind up in special-education classes; and to be held back, be suspended, or drop out. Hence, they’re less likely to graduate from high school. In fact, the high school graduation gap between girls and boys is within a hair of the gap between poor and middle-class kids. Along with their subpar overall college graduation numbers, boys now constitute a minority of M.A.s and Ph.D.s and of medical and law students. This trend isn’t an example of some peculiar American dysfunction. Boys’ lagging school outcomes show up everywhere, from the enlightened Nordics to the hidebound Gulf States. An OECD survey, based on a Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) measure of 64 countries, summarized the situation this way: boys “are less likely than girls to attain basic proficiency in core subjects, report investing less time and effort on schoolwork, and express more negative attitudes to school.” Boys get lower grades and attend university less often than girls across the developed world—and increasingly in developing countries, too: one 2019 survey cited studies confirming a gap in Zimbabwe, Kenya, Malaysia, Turkey, Iran, Qatar, and Oman, among other places. True, in parts of the Third World, girls often don’t complete elementary school, so it’s rare to see them eclipsing their brothers. But in every place where girls do have the opportunity, they’re doing exactly that.
The usual cultural and economic characteristics that once illuminated so many academic inequalities are of only limited help here. Yes, the size of the education gap varies by race and class. It is more than three times larger in the most disadvantaged families than it is among well-off girls and boys—in part, perhaps, because boys in higher-income communities see more highly educated successful men than boys in blue-collar and poor neighborhoods do. Low-income children, particularly blacks, more often grow up with a single mother. Studies repeatedly associate this arrangement with boys’ disruptive behavior, lower grades, and grade retention. Whether because of a missing role model, the emotional loss, money woes, the instability in the home that follows a breakup, or all of the above, fatherlessness takes a toll on boys’ school achievement, with lifelong repercussions. Fatherlessness doesn’t seem to have the same impact on girls; the puzzling difference may help explain why the biggest gender gap of any demographic group is seen among black kids. Black boys’ school performance has lagged behind that of black girls for decades now; 66 percent of black college-degree recipients are women; they earn 70 percent of black master’s degrees and more than 60 percent of doctorates. So socioeconomic advantage improves boys’ performance relative to girls, just as disadvantage, whether racial or economic, does the opposite. But the puzzle remains: rich boys remain in the shadows of their female siblings the same way poor boys trail behind their poor sisters.
https://www.city-journal.org/where-the-boys-arent
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