The case for helping boys and men in education
本文论证了美国教育系统中男孩和男性在学业表现上落后于女性的现状，并提出了性别中立、性别敏感和性别基础三类政策来缩小性别差距。
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. The list of gender-neutral education policies is of course a very long one. The vast majority of programs and initiatives are aimed at improving outcomes for all students, regardless of gender. As a general proposition, this is just as it should be. The case for focusing resources to help one gender more than the other, or even to the exclusion of the other, requires strong evidence that a) there is a significant gender gap to be addressed; and b) that there are programs that will help to address that gap, by helping whichever group is at a disadvantage. So investments in Head Start, School Improvement Grants, or the Teacher Incentive Program (TIP), or broader policy fronts such as raising teacher pay, expanding charter schools, or widening school choice are not aimed at helping female students or male students, but all students, and should be judged against that goal. To take a more specific example, the well-known ASAP program, for example, was not aimed at helping men or women, but students in general. And it does, pretty much equally well for women and men. There are some complexities here, however. Like all classifications, my three-fold typology does not capture some of these nuances. In particular, policymakers have to be, or should be, alert to unintended gender differences in the impact of gender-neutral policies. There are a surprising number of policy reforms that generate positive results for girls or women, but not boys and men. Perhaps the most striking is the Kalamazoo Promise, a full-dollar free college program in the Michigan town. According to the evaluation team, “women experience very large gains,” in terms of college completion (increasing by almost 50%), “while men seem to experience zero benefit” (as cited in Reeves, 2022a). There are many other similar cases (for a fuller account, see Reeves, 2022a, 2022c). There are also some evaluation studies where the opposite proved true, with boys benefiting more than girls. This includes Boston's expanded pre-K program. But at least in mainstream education (vocational training is a very different story, as we'll see), these are the exceptions to the pro-female rule. Josh Angrist and co-authors (2009) wrote, “These gender differences in the response to incentives and services constitute an important area for further study” (p. 17). They do indeed. But as far as I can see, nobody has heeded this call. At the very least, these results suggest that policymakers and scholars need to be much more sensitive to differential effects by gender and their potential implications for program design. Most scholars are puzzled by the gender difference in impact of some of these programs, which were unexpected, and definitely not intended. These programs were gender-neutral in theory, but turned out to be gender-sensitive in practice. Whether that is a feature or a bug depends on how far you think male or female educational outcomes are most in need of a boost—and there are good arguments for each. It is easy to imagine the opposite result from a gender-neutral policy reform happening, too. For example, there is good evidence that boys fare even worse in poor-performing schools than girls do: this is one reason why gender gaps in education are almost always widest in poorer families and communities. Let's assume that Policy X, which is gender-neutral in intent, significantly lifts up the weakest schools. This would likely have an even more positive impact on boys, than on girls. Again, while not the goal of Policy X, this gender difference in impact might reasonably be seen as a feature, rather than a bug. These are policies that aim to help one gender or the other, without restricting the benefits of the policy to that gender. Current investments in increasing the share of school-based mental health professionals, for example, are being explicitly linked to the alarming evidence of growing mental health problems among adolescent girls in particular. But of course boys will have access to these extra resources too. (Especially if some of the counselors and psychologists are male, but that's an issue for another day.) Likewise initiatives to improve campus safety will benefit all students, but particularly women, and women's safety is, correctly, the main goal of such initiatives. Changes to assessment mechanisms, aimed at improving relative outcomes for women or girls, as well as for other demographic groups, are another example of a gender-sensitive policy. A high-profile example is Thomas Jefferson High School, a highly-ranked, STEM-focused school in Virginia. In 2020 the school dropped its admission test, switching to a lottery system among 8th graders with high enough grades. In the first year alone, the female share of entering students rose from 42% to 46% (Fairfax County Public Schools, 2021). (At the time of writing, the new policy has been struck down by a federal judge because of its disproportionately negative impact on Asian American students, one example of a battle playing out at educational institutions around the nation.) Similarly, changes to college admissions policies downgrading the role of standardized tests, are aimed at increasing diversity in general on college campuses, but are also supported for being of particular benefit to women. That's because, as noted above, there is a big gender gap in GPA, and a small gap on the SAT and ACT. Indeed, the main effect of colleges going “test optional” in their admissions policy is to significantly increase the female share of students—by about 4 percentage points—according to Bennett (2021). Of course, there are also boys who do not perform as well on tests as on other measures, and who will benefit from these changes in policy. But overall the impact will be to favor girls and women. Certain policies are aimed solely at one gender. The scholarships available to women studying STEM subjects are an obvious example in the education field. Likewise, the Women's Resource Centers available on most college campuses. The provisions of the Women's Educational Equity Act (WEEA) of 1974, which was effectively defunded in the 1980s but reauthorized in 2001, are explicitly channeled towards programs and initiatives to support girls and women in the education system. Perhaps the most obvious example of gender-based policy in education is the creation of single-sex schools and colleges. Single-sex colleges were once the norm, but now are relatively few in numbers, especially for men. There are only 26 women-only colleges remaining, and three all-male colleges (excluding institutions for religious training). But the trend has been strongly in the other direction. Since 2006, public schools have been exempted from the sex discrimination laws that prevented the creation of single-sex schools. This was one result of the 2002 No Child Left Behind legislation, with Senator Hillary Clinton being a crucial vote for this provision, citing her own educational experience at Wellesley, an elite women's college. By 2014, there were 850 single sex public schools (including charter schools), up from 34 in 2008 (Rich, 2014). The evidence on their effectiveness, for either boys or girls, is mixed. 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. Expansion of technical high schools (gender-sensitive) A recruitment drive of male teachers (mixed) Starting boys in school a year later (gender-based) There are currently around 1,350 vocational secondary and high schools in the U.S., accounting for about 6% of all public high schools (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022). Of the 98% of school districts that offer CTE programs, only 12% have a full-time, CTE-focused high school (Gray & Lewis, 2018). We should aim to add at least 1,000 new CTE secondary schools across the nation by 2030. Assuming an additional cost of $5,000 per student for these schools (the Connecticut level of extra funding), this goal could be achieved for around $4 billion a year.3 Given the results of the evaluation studies, only showing benefits for boys overall, should these be single-sex schools? No. Even if, in general, girls derive less benefit from attending these schools, some girls will, and they should not be denied access to this opportunity, just as young men in Kalamazoo should not be denied the Promise Program. As Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote, requiring the Virginia Military Institute to become coed, differences on average between male and female learners do not as a rule justify separation. VMI might be a better learning environment for the average boy compared to the average girl, Justice Ginsberg conceded, but this did not provide a justification for excluding girls “whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description” (United States v. Virginia, 1996). (Today, around 12% of students at VMI are women.4) But the expansion of technical high school I propose does have the explicit intention of helping boys and young men. Success would be judged primarily against that metric. If the schools skew heavily male, that should be considered good news, not bad news. At the margin, it would make sense to market these schools primarily to male students. It would, in other words, be a gender-sensitive policy. The male share of K–12 teachers is now 23%, down from 33% at the beginning of the 1980s (Ingersoll et al., 2018). Male teachers are especially scarce in elementary and middle schools. There is some limited evidence that male teachers can help boys learn more effectively. Thomas Dee (2006) estimated that if half the English teachers from sixth to eighth grade were male, “the achievement gap in reading [between girls and boys] would fall by approximately a third by the end of middle school.”5 On the other hand, work by Michael Hansen and Diana no strong evidence that male teachers are with better outcomes for either girls or boys, points to that male teachers of might be. And a no positive from male teachers in the year of school female teachers seem to generate better outcomes for both boys and & 2023). 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