The case for helping boys and men in education

When feminist scholars cite a “gendered injustice,” it was once a safe bet that they would be referring to inequities disfavoring girls or women. No longer. The feminist philosopher Cordelia Fine, for example, now uses the term to describe the wide gaps in U.S. education where, as a group, boys and men are lagging behind their female peers (Fine, 2023).

There are wide gender gaps favoring girls and women at every stage in the education system. But the ones getting the most attention are in higher education. On college campuses, the educational underperformance of men becomes suddenly obvious: they aren't there. There is a bigger gender gap in higher education today than in 1972, when Title IX was passed. Back then, 57% of bachelor's degrees went to men. Within a decade the gap had closed. In 2021, 58% of degrees went to women.1 We have Title IX–level gender gaps, just the other way around.

This gap is the result of both lower rates of college enrollment and lower rates of completion. In 2021, 51% of women graduating high school enrolled in a 4-year college, compared to 36% of men. Immediate enrollment rates into a 2-year college had no gender gap, at 18% for women and 19% for men. Having enrolled, women are more likely to complete their degree, and especially to do so quickly. Among women matriculating at a 4-year public college, 47% will have graduated 4 years later; for men the equivalent graduation rate is 37%.

These gaps reflect disparities that have emerged much earlier in the education system. There is a small and shrinking gender gap on the SAT and no gender gap on the ACT.2 (This is one reason why colleges and universities which go test-optional in admissions see an increase of 4 percentage points in the female share of students.) But there are wide gender gaps on most other measures, most importantly on GPA. The most common high school grade for girls is now an A; for boys, it is a B (Fortin et al., 2013). Girls now account for two-thirds of high schoolers in the top decile of students ranked by GPA, while the proportions are reversed on the bottom rung. Girls are also much more likely to be taking Advanced Placement, Honors, and International Baccalaureate classes (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012).

“There is now wide consensus that gender inequalities are unfair, and lead to wasted human potential,” says Francisco Ferreira (2018), Amartya Sen Chair in Inequality Studies at the London School of economics, commenting on education gaps. He adds, echoing Fine: “That remains true when the disadvantaged are boys, as well as girls.”

Narrowing gender gaps in educational outcomes is an important goal for policy; and today, that means concentrating on boys and men.

There are three broad policy approaches to tackling these challenges: gender-neutral, gender-sensitive, and gender-based.

Gender-neutral policies aim at improving overall educational outcomes, without any explicit consideration of gender in their design or implementation. Of course, gender differences might be considered in any evaluation, along with factors such as race or ethnicity, or socio-economic background. But they might not, especially if there is no specific intention to narrow gender gaps. At the extreme, gender-neutrality veers into gender-blind approach: some school districts, for example, do not even routinely track differences in outcomes by gender. But improving schools overall would of course benefit boys (and in the lower-performing schools may help them the most, as an unintended byproduct of the policy).

Gender-sensitive policies are not restricted to males or females, but are implemented with the explicit goal of offering greater help to one or the other. Policymakers identify programs or initiatives that, on average, disproportionately benefit females or males.

Gender-based policies are restricted to one gender or another, with the stated goal of helping either women or men, typically in the spirit of attempting to level the playing field where it is tilted one way or the other, or in domains where equality of outcomes is seen as intrinsically important for social welfare reasons (such as political representation).

These categories are similar to those used by Klein (1987). She distinguished between “intentional” educational policies with regard to gender gaps and “general” ones, which have “no specific intentions related to gender, but with unintended effects on females.” The key difference is that I add a middle category: in my framework, gender-sensitive policies are “general” in the sense that they are not restricted to only one gender, but are “intentional” in the sense that they will have a bigger effect on one or the other.

This typology could be applied across policy areas. In politics, quotas for women or women-only candidate shortlists are examples of gender-based reforms, which I have argued for elsewhere (see Reeves, 2021). In employment, increasing access to flexible working or to paid leave are gender-sensitive policies, with the explicit goal of improving outcomes for women, especially those with caring responsibilities, without restricting access for men.

In health policy there are a number of provisions made exclusively for girls and women, especially in terms of prevention. These include obvious examples, such as screening for breast cancer. But they extend to some less obvious cases, too, such as screening for adolescent anxiety, which is covered without cost under the Affordable Care Act for girls and women, but not for boys and men. But I'll focus here on education policy, providing examples of existing policies or programs under each heading.

Many of the gaps in educational outcomes described above justify policies with the explicit intent of improving outcomes for male students, both in absolute terms and relative to female students. Gender neutrality won't cut it when gender gaps are this wide, in either direction.

Here I'll argue for some policies that range from gender sensitive (such as more vocational educational opportunities) to gender-based (such as starting boys in school later) to those that are arguable a mix (such as incentives for men to enter the teaching profession).

Such policies are only justified when the evidence for both the scale of the problem and the efficacy of the solution are strong. This is not only a matter of good policy but of good jurisprudence. In United States v. Virginia (1996), Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that, among other requirements, the state must provide justifications showing the need for policies separating students by sex that are “genuine, not hypothesized or invented post-hoc in response to litigation. And [they] must not rely on overly broad generalizations about the talents, capacities, or preferences of males and females.” This suggests, as Lettie Rose et al. (2023) wrote in the Georgetown Law Review, that “claims must have concrete empirical evidence behind them to succeed” (p. 807). This was in reference specifically to single-sex schooling in higher education, but the same legal test may apply more broadly.