Sexism is not why boys suck at school

White men reacted calmly and rationally when I recently tweeted that they’re the biggest beneficiaries of preferential college admissions policies.

Just kidding!

I got a lot of anger, cope, and anti-Semetism. I’m not a crypto Jew. I just have a last name that sounds Jewish and internet racists aren’t known for their fact-checking.

College admissions departments don’t have to reveal their policies and generally do not. But, we do have strong evidence that whites get the biggest leg up. I wrote the why in my quote tweet. For example, preference for athletes and legacy applicants disproportionately benefit white students.

Race-based admissions policies first advantaged whites over more qualified Jewish applicants. More recently, they primarily screwed over more impressive Asian applicants.

Historically, white women have benefited most from college enrollment DEI efforts.

Today, the opposite is true. And it’s been this way for decades.

Girls and women vastly outperform boys and men at every level of schooling. And the gap is widening.

Favoring boys is how most schools maintain an even somewhat balanced gender ratio. This is especially true for the Ivies. For example, Brown achieved its roughly equal gender split in the 2021-22 application cycle by accepting approximately 7% of applications from boys but only 4% from girls.

Some men in the replies were capable of accepting the reality that college admissions preferences must benefit men because their applications are weaker on average. However, they claimed, that’s only because K-12 is biased against boys.

This… does not appear to be true.

You can find studies that show that certain schools favor girls over boys in certain ways.

But the bulk of the evidence indicates that systemic bias against boys does not even come close to explaining the gender scholastic achievement gap.

To begin with, the gender achievement gap is global. Once girls start going to school, they eventually out-perform boys.

It’s true that around 90% of US teachers are female. And this matters for boys, who do worse without male teachers. Black boys from low-income families who had one Black teacher were 39% less likely to drop out of school.

But girls smoke boys regardless of the amount, form, or even direction of bias. It happens even when girls and boys go to school separately, like in Jordan. The main difference seems to be that Jordanian male teachers are more violent towards students and more tired from working multiple jobs than the female teachers at the girls’ schools.

If boys sucked beecause US schools have become “feminized,” then it would follow that simply “masculinizing” education would close the gap. Research from Stephanie Coontz and others indicates that it doesn’t. In fact, boys tend to perform better in schools with more girls and more music and art classes. So much for that theory.

The evidence indicates that what happens at home has a much bigger impact on the gender scholastic achievement gap than anything that happens at school.

The first problem boys face is that they’re simply more delicate than girls.

For all kids, having a good home life strongly predicts educational achievement.

Among kids whose homes are mostly safe, stable, and low-stress (must be nice), boys and girls perform about the same. The gender achievement gap is largest among kids with harder rows to hoe.

Girls seem much more resilient. Growing up in high-crime areas, experiencing poverty, lacking same-sex role models, being raised by a single parent, etc. has a much larger impact on boys’ success in school than girls’.

In addition, US public schools have largely stopped teaching kids how to read and a 2016 study by MIT economist David Autor and colleagues showed that poor school quality harms boys more than girls.

A second, even bigger issue is masculinity.

Gender bullshit starts the moment boys are born. Between the ages of zero and two, only 29% of boys are read to daily or nearly daily, compared to 44% of same-age girls. Fathers in particular are less likely to read to their sons than daughters. This gives boys a genuine disadvantage in terms of exposure to the written word and helps explain why boys start kindergarten behind girls behaviorally and academically.

In addition, by as young as six, boys and girls believe that boys are smarter and more talented than girls, having picked up the often unconscious bias of the adults around them. Thus, assume that they don’t have to work as hard as girls to succeed in school.

So, naturally, they don’t. In For the Love of Men,

Liz Plank

cites research finding that boys perform worse than girls in school because they’re less engaged and put in less effort. Girls, on average, care more about their grades and spend more time studying than boys.

Survey data indicates that worldwide, girls spend one more hour each week on homework than boys. Boys are also four times more likely than girls to say they play video games every day or almost every day.

Parents are less likely to encourage their sons to read. “As a result, boys tend to read less, choose simpler books, and struggle to finish them, all of which affects their reading comprehension, yes, but also their academic readiness, empathy, and prosocial behaviour,” wrote

Katie Jgln

.

It’s true that boys do worse with female teachers in the US. But that’s not because female teachers are biased against boys. Little evidence suggests that, and even less suggests it’s widespread or intense enough to explain outcomes. It’s because boys are socialized to perform masculinity, which means avoiding emulating women or seeing them as leaders.

When I talk about masculinity, I am referring to the cultural pressure for a person assigned male to never perform whatever his culture defines as femininity at that time.

Unfortunately for boys and schooling, our culture has defined trying hard and doing well in school as a feminine trait.

Scholastic success is feminine-coded,

Celeste Davis

,

Ruth Whippman

, and others have pointed out.

“Boys’ notions of masculinity do not overlap with the goals and values of their schools,” according to researcher Mohammed Eltahir Osman.

“Boys don’t feel that school can necessarily help them reach manhood,” said Michael Thompson, a psychologist and the co-author of Raising Cain. “Sometimes they experience school as an obstacle to becoming masculine; but girls rarely see school as a barrier to womanhood.”

Another way we know masculinity norms are screwing boys is the fact that the gender achievement gap is virtually non-existent among gay male students. In fact, gay boys do better than girls, on average. Which means, again, that the idea that schools discriminate against boys hard enough to explain the achievement gap strains credulity.

The canard that boys do worse in school because schools are biased against them is blatantly false. I’m not sure whether the people saying it actually hate boys and men. But they’re definitely screwing them over by blaming something that’s not happening and ignoring the actual sources of the disparity. Once again, sexism serves the status quo, so powerful people have an incentive to protect it. It’s sad how consistently conservatives love their self-serving definition of masculinity even, and especially, when it actively and measurably harms vulnerable men.

What does help vulnerable boys succeed in school?

Ashanti Branch received the 2023 U.S. Surgeon General’s Medallion for Health for his work with the Ever Forward Club, which helps boys succeed in school by providing “emotional tools to help boys feel safe, seen, and heard,” according to

Christopher Pepper

. Instead of teaching algebra, Branch teaches boys how to be vulnerable enough to learn.