For most of history, young women have faced obstacles in achieving post-secondary education, including legal restrictions, quotas and administrative regulations, as well as social pressures to stay at home or pursue more “feminine” jobs. Women saw equal representation in higher education only beginning in 2015. Despite these barriers to higher education, girls have always tended to score higher on standardized and in-class tests and receive better grades at the elementary and secondary school levels.
Since 1870, girls’ literacy levels in U.S. public schools have consistently surpassed boys’. As early as fourth grade, girls read around 100,000 more words a year than boys. Concerningly, boys are half as likely to meet international standards in reading, science and math as girls. Despite these data points, it often goes unnoticed that girls consistently outperform their male counterparts in school.
The consequences of these discrepancies impact boys throughout their lives. Reading at an early age enhances vocabulary and cognitive development, strengthening memory. Inversely, poor reading skills are associated with anxiety, low self-esteem and high dropout rates for high school students.
Men account for only 20% of the market for fiction novels essentially because society has historically told young boys, since childhood, that reading fiction for pleasure is a feminine endeavor. Societal norms direct young boys to reject anything considered feminine at an early age, making them less likely to embrace emotions like sensitivity and vulnerability, which aid in early education processes. Vulnerability initiates complex thinking and facilitates a better understanding of a broad range of social-emotional and academic topics.
Additionally, the social pressures for boys to be aggressive and competitive contrast with the behavioral expectations to be calm and attentive in the classroom. An Irish study found that many boys aged four to ten didn’t believe their teachers and parents had equal confidence in their academic success compared to their female counterparts, a self-fulfilling prophecy leading them to perform worse in school. Repeated negative performance leads to teachers disciplining boys more often, further discouraging them from engaging in learning.
The disparities between sexes manifest further as students progress through their learning careers. In public schools, boys are 2.5 times more likely than girls to face expulsion due to behavioral issues. Additionally, boys are less likely than girls to graduate from high school or pursue higher education.
If boys today are going to catch up academically, teaching strategies need to change. Boys dominate participation in athletic extracurricular activities, but not academic ones. Girls benefit from the positive academic development that comes from continued extracurricular learning. While girls continue to thrive, boys continue to fall behind.
Elizabeth George, a Title I Reading Specialist at Barcroft Elementary School described that a primary reason for these discrepancies is the difference in neural development and maturity between the sexes.
“Boys seem to be more distractible, acting out and being silly,” George said. “If they can be goofy, then they won’t have to attend to the text they now realize is a struggle. Girls, while they also don’t like it when they’re not doing well, they have more grit and stick with it.”
The primary reason for this disparity is that boys don’t catch up to girls in prefrontal cortex development until late high school, making them less cognitively capable in primary education.
Jennifer Fink, author of “Building Boys,” wrote about boys’ early childhood and the disparities between the sexes. Her book highlights the importance of understanding these biological differences and how they affect learning and academic success.
“A boy’s ability to sit and focus isn’t as advanced as girls because their brains develop more slowly,” Fink said. “There’s a mismatch between where boys are developmentally and what we’re asking of them.”
Boys are also diagnosed with learning disabilities at higher rates than girls — 18% of boys are diagnosed with a learning disability compared to 10% of girls. Today, the CDC estimates that over 10% of children live with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but boys and girls don’t always express the same symptoms. Boys are more likely to display external ADHD symptoms, such as hyperactivity and impulsivity, which often leads to them receiving negative attention from teachers and lower standardized test scores and grades than neurotypical students.
Girls with ADHD, meanwhile, express symptoms differently. Girls’ ADHD is more likely to manifest itself through inattentive behavior, while boys’ symptoms revolve around hyperactivity. Societal standards make girls more independent, making them significantly better than boys at self-regulating their studying, which helps them succeed with less hands-on assistance. Still, girls end up getting more hands-on attention than boys both at home and at school.
Teachers and administrators must understand both the biological and social disparities between girls and boys and actively work to combat them. Teachers can adjust their lessons to be more hands-on and include physical activities and breaks. Kinesthetic learning — in which students associate lessons with physical activities — has shown promising results. When kids can interact with a topic differently, they are more likely to retain the information and apply it to other subjects.
Finally, teachers and parents can guide children away from harmful gender norms and reinforce positive academic behaviors like reading for pleasure and writing creatively, emphasizing that these activities are for everyone, not just girls. If an adult can encourage learning, it will lead to higher self-esteem in the classroom, ultimately leading to increased academic success.
