What do you know about Finland? That it is the happiest nation on earth? Correct. That the school system is superb? Well, half right. Finland does indeed always rank at or near the top of the international league table for educational outcomes – but that’s because of the girls. Every three years, the OECD conducts a survey of reading, mathematics, and science skills among 15-year-olds. It is called the Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment) test, and it gets a lot of attention from policy makers.
Finland is a good place to look at gender gaps in education because it is such a high-performing nation (indeed, one could say that other countries suffer from a bout of Finn envy every time the Pisa results are published). But although Finnish students rank very high for overall performance on Pisa, there is a massive gender gap: 20 per cent of Finnish girls score at the highest reading levels in the test, compared to just 9 per cent of boys. Among those with the lowest reading scores, the gender gap is reversed: 20 per cent of boys versus 7 per cent of girls. On most measures, Finnish girls also outperform the boys in science and in mathematics.
The bottom line is that Finland’s internationally acclaimed educational performance is entirely explained by the stunning performance of Finnish girls. (In fact, American boys do just as well as Finnish boys do on the Pisa reading test.)
This may have some implications for the education reformers who flock to Finland to find ways to bottle the nation’s success, but it is just an especially vivid example of an international trend. In elementary and secondary schools across the world, girls are leaving boys behind. Girls are about a year ahead of boys in terms of reading ability in OECD nations, in contrast to a wafer-thin and shrinking advantage for boys in maths. Boys are 50 per cent more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: maths, reading, and science. Sweden is starting to wrestle with what has been dubbed a pojkkrisen (boy crisis) in its schools. Australia has devised a reading program called Boys, Blokes, Books and Bytes.
In the US, girls have been the stronger sex in school for decades. But they are now pulling even further ahead, especially in terms of literacy and verbal skills. The differences open up early. Girls are 14 percentage points more likely than boys to be ‘school ready’ at age five, for example, controlling for parental characteristics. This is a much bigger gap than the one between rich and poor children, or black and white children, or between those who attend pre-school and those who do not.
A six-percentage-point gender gap in reading proficiency in fourth grade widens to an 11-percentage-point gap by the end of eighth grade. In maths, a six-point gap favouring boys in fourth grade has shrunk to a one-point gap by eighth grade. In a study drawing on scores from the whole country, Stanford scholar Sean Reardon finds no overall gap in maths from grades three through eight, but a big one in English. ‘In virtually every school district in the United States, female students out-performed male students on ELA [English Language Arts] tests,’ he writes. ‘In the average district, the gap is… roughly two-thirds of a grade level and is larger than the effects of most large-scale educational interventions.’
By high school, the female lead has solidified. Girls have always had an edge over boys in terms of high school grade point average (GPA), even half a century ago, when they surely had less incentive than boys given the differences in rates of college attendance and career expectations. But the gap has widened in recent decades. The most common high school grade for girls is now an A; for boys, it is a B. As figure 1.1 shows, girls now account for two-thirds of high schoolers in the top ten per cent, ranked by GPA, while the proportions are reversed on the bottom rung.
Girls are also much more likely to be taking Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes. Of course, national trends disguise huge variations by geography, so it is useful to zoom in and look at specific places. Take Chicago, where students from the most affluent neighbourhoods are much more likely to have an A or B average in ninth grade (47 per cent), compared to those from the poorest (32 per cent). That is a big class gap, which, given that Chicago is the most segregated big city in the country, means a big race gap too. But strikingly, the difference in the proportion of girls versus boys getting high grades is the same: 47 per cent to 32 per cent. If you’re wondering whether grades in the first year of high school matter much, they do, strongly predicting later educational outcomes. As the Chicago researchers who analysed these data insist, ‘Grades reflect multiple factors valued by teachers, and it is this multidimensional quality that makes grades good predictors of important outcomes.’
It is true that boys still perform a little better than girls do on most standardised tests. But this gap has narrowed sharply, down to a 13-point difference in the SAT, and it has disappeared for the ACT. It is also probably worth noting here that SAT and ACT scores matter a lot less in any case, as colleges move away from their use in admissions, which, whatever other merits this has, seems likely to further widen the gender gap in postsecondary education. Here is a more anecdotal example of the gender gap: every year the New York Times runs an editorial contest among middle and high school students, and it publishes the opinions of the winners. The organisers tell me that among the applicants, there is a ‘2:1, probably closer to 3:1’ ratio of girls to boys.
By now it should not be a surprise to learn that boys are less likely than girls to graduate high school. In 2018, 88 per cent of girls graduated from high school on time (i.e. four years after enrolling), compared to 82 per cent of boys. The male graduation rate is only a little higher than the 80 per cent among poor students.
One factor that gets too little attention in these debates is the developmental gap, with the male prefrontal cortex struggling to catch up with the female one well into the early twenties
You might think these were easy numbers to come by – a quick Google search away. I thought they would be when I started writing this. In fact it took a small Brookings research project to figure it out, and for reasons that are instructive. States are required by federal law to report high school graduation rates by race and ethnicity, proficiency in English, economic disadvantage, homelessness, and foster status. These kinds of data are invaluable for assessing trends for the groups at greatest risk of dropping out. But oddly, states do not have to report their results by sex. Getting the numbers cited above required scouring the data for each state.
An energetic non-profit alliance, Grad Nation, is seeking to raise the overall high school graduation rate in the US to 90 per cent (up from 85 per cent in 2017). This is a great goal. The alliance points out that this will require improvements among ‘students of colour, students with disabilities, and low-income students.’ It definitely will. But they missed a big one – boys. After all, girls are only two percentage points from the target, while boys are eight percentage points below it.
What is going on here? There are many potential explanations. Some scholars link the relative underperformance of boys in school to their lower expectations of post-secondary education, surely the very definition of a vicious circle. Others worry that the strong skew toward female teachers – three out of four and rising – could be putting boys at a disadvantage. This matters, for sure. But I think there is a bigger, simpler explanation staring us in the face. Boys’ brains develop more slowly, especially during the most critical years of secondary education. When almost one in four boys (23 per cent) is categorised as having a ‘developmental disability,’ it is fair to wonder if it is educational institutions, rather than the boys, that are not functioning properly.
In Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence, Laurence Steinberg writes that ‘high-school aged adolescents make better decisions when they’re calm, well rested, and aware that they’ll be rewarded for making good choices.’ To which most parents, or anybody recounting their own teen years, might respond: tell me something I don’t know.
But adolescents are wired in a way that makes it hard to ‘make good choices.’ When we are young, we sneak out of bed to go to parties; when we get old, we sneak out of parties to go to bed. Steinberg shows how adolescence is essentially a battle between the sensation-seeking part of our brain (Go to the party! Forget school!) and the impulse-controlling part (I really need to study tonight).
It helps to think of these as the psychological equivalent of the accelerator and brake pedals in a car. In the teenage years, our brains go for the accelerator. We seek novel, exciting experiences. Our impulse control – the braking mechanism – develops later. As Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford biologist and neurologist, writes in his book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, ‘The immature frontal cortex hasn’t a prayer to counteract a dopamine system like this.’ There are obvious implications here for parenting, and the importance of helping adolescents develop self-regulation strategies.
Adolescence, then, is a period when we find it harder to restrain ourselves. But the gap is much wider for boys than for girls, because they have both more acceleration and less braking power. The parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, future orientation, sometimes labelled the ‘CEO of the brain,’ are mostly in the prefrontal cortex, which matures about two years later in boys than in girls.
The cerebellum, for example, reaches full size at the age of 11 for girls, but not until age 15 for boys. Among other things, the cerebellum ‘has a modulating effect on emotional, cognitive, and regulatory capacities,’ according to neuroscientist Gokcen Akyurek. These findings are consistent with survey evidence on attention and self-regulation, where the biggest sex differences occur during middle adolescence, in part because of the effect of puberty on the hippocampus, a part of the brain linked to attention and social cognition. The correct answer to the question so many teenage boys hear, ‘Why can’t you be more like your sister?’ is something like, ‘Because, Mum, there are sexually dimorphic trajectories for cortical and subcortical gray matter!’
While parts of the brain need to grow, some brain fibres have to be pruned back to improve our neural functions. It is odd to think that parts of our brain need to get smaller to be more efficient, but it’s true. The brain basically tidies itself up; think of it like trimming a hedge to keep it looking good. This pruning process is especially important in adolescent development, and a study drawing on detailed brain imaging of 121 people aged between four and 40 shows that it occurs earlier in girls than in boys. The gap is largest at around the age of 16. Science journalist Krystnell Storr writes that these findings ‘add to the growing body of research that looks into gender differences when it comes to the brain… the science points to a difference in the way our brains develop. Who can argue with that?’ (It turns out, quite a few people. But I’ll get to that later.)
It is important to note, as always, that we are talking averages here. But I don’t think this evidence will shock many parents. ‘In adolescence, on average girls are more developed by about two to three years in terms of the peak of their synapses and in their connectivity processes,’ says Frances Jensen, chair of the department of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. ‘This fact is no surprise to most people if we think of 15-year-old boys and girls.’ I don’t have any daughters, but I can report that when my sons brought female friends home during the middle and high school years, the difference in maturity was often startling.
The gender gap in the development of skills and traits most important for academic success is widest at precisely the time when students need to be worrying about their GPA, getting ready for tests, and staying out of trouble. A 2019 report on the importance of the new science of adolescence from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine suggests that ‘sex differences in associations between brain development and puberty are relevant for understanding… prominent gender disparities during adolescence.’ But this emerging science on sex differences in brain development, especially during adolescence, has so far had no impact on policy. The chapter on education in the National Academies report, for example, contains no specific proposals relating to the sex differences it identified.
The debate over the importance of neurological sex differences, which can be quite fierce, is wrongly framed as far as education is concerned. There are certainly some biologically based differences in male and female psychology that last beyond adolescence. But by far the biggest difference is not in how female and male brains develop, but when. The key point is that the relationship between chronological age and developmental age is very different for girls and boys. From a neuro-scientific perspective, the education system is tilted in favour of girls. It hardly needs saying that this was not the intention. After all, it was mostly men who created the education system; there is no century-old feminist conspiracy to disadvantage the boys. The gender bias in the education system was harder to see when girls were discouraged from pursuing higher education or careers and steered toward domestic roles instead. Now that the women’s movement has opened up these opportunities to girls and women, their natural advantages have become more apparent with every passing year.
The gender gap widens further in higher education. In the US, 57 per cent of bachelor’s degrees are now awarded to women, and not just in stereotypically ‘female’ subjects: women now account for almost half (47 per cent) of undergraduate business degrees, for example, compared to fewer than one in ten in 1970. Women also receive the majority of law degrees, up from about one in twenty in 1970.
Women are earning three out of five master’s degrees and associate’s degrees, and the rise has been even more dramatic for professional degrees. The share of doctoral degrees in dentistry (DDS or DMD), medicine (MD), or law (JD or LLB) being awarded to women has jumped from 7 per cent in 1972 to 50 per cent in 2019. The dominance of women on campus shows up in nonacademic areas too. In 2020, the law review at every one of the top sixteen law schools had a woman as editor-in-chief.
As Rosin noted, this is a global trend. In 1970, the year after I was born, just 31 per cent of undergraduate degrees went to British women. When I left college two decades later, it was 44 per cent. Now it is 58 per cent. Today, 40 per cent of young British women head off to college at the age of 18, compared to 29 says of their male peers. ‘The world is waking up to… this problem,’ says Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, rector of the University of Akureyri in Iceland, where 77 per cent of the undergraduates are women. Iceland is an interesting case study, since it is the most gender egalitarian country in the world, according to the World Economic Forum. But Icelandic universities are struggling to reverse a massive gender inequality in education. ‘It’s not being discussed in the media,’ says Steinunn Gestsdottir, vice rector at the University of Iceland. ‘But policymakers are worried about this trend.’ In Scotland, policymakers are past the worried stage and into the doing-something-about-it stage, setting a clear goal to increase male representation in all Scottish universities. Their approach is one that other countries should follow.
It is true that some subjects, such as engineering, computer sciences and maths, still skew male. Considerable efforts and investments are being made by colleges, non-profit organisations, and policymakers to close these gaps in Stem (science, technology, engineering, and math). Women now account for 36 per cent of the undergraduate degrees awarded in Stem subjects, including 41 per cent of those in the physical sciences and 42 per cent in mathematics and statistics.
But there have been no equivalent gains for men in traditionally female subjects, such as teaching or nursing, and these are occupational fields likely to see significant job growth.
In every country in the OECD, there are now more young women than young men with a bachelor’s degree. Figure 1.3 below shows the gap in some selected nations. As far as I can tell, nobody predicted that women would overtake men so rapidly, so comprehensively, or so consistently around the world.
Almost every college in the US now has mostly female students. The last bastions of male dominance to fall were the Ivy League colleges, but every one has now swung majority female. The steady feminisation of college campuses may not trouble too many people, but there is at least one group whose members really worry about it: admissions officers. ‘Once you become decidedly female in enrolment,’ writes Jennifer Delahunty, Kenyon College’s former dean of admissions, ‘fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.’ In a provocative New York Times opinion piece, plaintively headlined ‘To All The Girls I’ve Rejected,’ she said publicly what everyone knows privately: ‘Standards for admission to today’s most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men.’
The evidence for this stealthy affirmative action program in favour of men seems quite clear. At private colleges the acceptance rates for men are considerably higher than for women. At Vassar, for example, where 67 per cent of matriculating students are female, the acceptance rate for male applicants in fall 2020 was 28 per cent, compared to 23 per cent for women. You might be wondering if this is because Vassar was a women’s college until 1969. But Kenyon, which was all-male until the same year, has a similar challenge.
By contrast, public colleges and universities, which educate the vast majority of students, are barred from discrimination on the basis of sex. This is one reason they skew even more female than private institutions.
As Kenyon’s Delahunty put it candidly in a September 2021 interview with the Wall Street Journal, ‘Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely. The question is, is that right or wrong?’ My answer is that it is wrong. Even though I am deeply worried about the way boys and men are falling behind in education, affirmative action cannot be the solution.
To a large extent, the gaps at the college level reflect the ones in high school. Differences in early attainment at college can be explained by differences in high school GPA, for example. Reading and verbal skills strongly predict college-going rates, and these are areas where boys lag furthest behind girls. Equalising verbal skills at age 16 would close the gender gap in college enrolment in England, according to a study by Esteban Aucejo and Jonathan James. The most urgent task, then, is to improve outcomes for boys in the K–12 school system.
Getting more men to college is just the first step. They also need help getting through college. With most students now going to some kind of college at some point, the big challenge is completion. Here, too, there is a gender gap. Male students are more likely to ‘stop out,’ that is, to take a detour away from their studies, and they are also more likely to ‘drop out’ and fail to graduate at all. The differences are not trivial: 46 per cent of female students enrolling in a public 4-year college have graduated 4 years later; for male students, the proportion is 35 per cent. (The gap shrinks somewhat for six-year graduation rates.)
In 2019, Matthew Chingos, director of the Centre on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute, in collaboration with the New York Times, created a league table of colleges based on their dropout rates. To judge the performance of institutions fairly, Chingos took into account the kind of students they enrolled, since ‘on average, colleges have lower graduation rates when they enrol more lower-income students, more black and Latino students, more men, more older students and more students with low SAT or ACT scores.’ In other words, colleges should not be penalised for having higher dropout rates because they enrol more disadvantaged students. When I read that article, the addition of ‘more men’ in that category jumped out. It shows that the educational underperformance of half the population is now a routine fact to social scientists, one to be added to the standard battery of statistical controls.
The numbers from Chingos suggest that all else equal, an all-female four-year school would have a graduation rate 14 percentage points higher than an all-male school. This is not a small difference. In fact, taking into account other factors, such as test scores, family income, and high school grades, male students are at a higher risk of dropping out of college than any other group, including poor students, black students, or foreign-born students.
But the underperformance of males in college is shrouded in a good deal of mystery. World-class scholars have pored over the low rates of male college enrolment and completion, piling up data and running regressions. I have read these studies and spoken to many of the scholars. The short summary of their conclusions is: ‘We don’t know.’ economic incentives do not provide an answer. The value of a college education is at least as high for men as for women. even a scholar like MIT’s David Autor, who has dug deeply into the data, ends up describing male education trends as ‘puzzling.’ Mary Curnock Cook, the former head of the UK’s university and college admissions service, says she is ’baffled.’ When I asked one of my sons for his thoughts, he looked up from his phone, shrugged, and said, ‘I dunno.’ Which may in fact have been the perfect answer.
One factor that gets too little attention in these debates is the developmental gap, with the male prefrontal cortex struggling to catch up with the female one well into the early twenties. To me, it seems clear that girls and women were always better equipped to succeed at college, just as in high school, and that this has become apparent as gendered assumptions about college education have fallen away.
I think there is an aspiration gap here too. Most young women today have it drummed into them how much education matters, and most want to be financially independent. Compared to their male classmates, they see their future in sharper focus. In 1980, male high school seniors were much more likely than their female classmates to say they expected to get a four-year degree, but within just two decades, the gap had swung the other way.
This may also be why many educational interventions, including free college, benefit women more than men; their appetite for success is just higher. Girls and women have had to fight misogyny without. Boys and men are now struggling for motivation within.
Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book had a gloomy title: The End of Men. But she remained hopeful, back then, that men would rise to the challenge, especially in education. ‘There’s nothing like being trounced year after year to make you reconsider your options,’ she wrote. So far, however, there is little sign of any reconsideration. The trends she identified have worsened. There has also been no rethinking of educational policy or practice. Curnock Cook correctly describes this as a ‘massive policy blind spot.’ With honourable exceptions – go Scotland! – policymakers have been painfully slow to adjust. Perhaps this is not surprising. The gender reversal in education has been astonishingly swift. It is like the needles on a magnetic compass reversing their polarity. Suddenly, north is south. Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls. Disorienting, to say the least. Small wonder our laws, institutions, even our attitudes, have not yet caught up. But catch up they must.
This is an edited extract from Richard V. Reeves’s new book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What To Do About It, which is published by Swift Press.
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