Boys, it seems, are not doing well. No-one seems to care. In fact, some commentary seems to suggest that increasingly negative outcomes for boys and men should either be dismissed as “lazy stereotyping” – or viewed as a sort of payback deserved for years of ‘the patriarchy’.
That corrosive, divisive thinking serves almost no-one well – and only serves as a useful distraction from tackling the most harmful inequalities of all, which persist because it is not fashionable or useful to raise them, the divide between rich and poor.
But back to boys. I’m mother to four girls, so maybe I shouldn’t care, but it’s mystifying to me how rates of suicide, school dropout, drug abuse, criminal behaviour, and more, can continue to be so devastating for boys without consternation in every quarter.
The Financial Times summed up the situation in education for schoolboys in a recent piece which stated that:
“In developed countries, on average, boys underperform girls at school. They are much worse at reading, less likely to go to university, and their lead in maths is shrinking (to nothingness, in countries such as China and Singapore). In Britain, white working-class boys perform especially badly.”
In the U.S. just 40% of college places are now being taken up by young men, with all the obvious difficulties that then brings for future work, career and prospects. If the ratio was 60:40 in men’s favour, there would be outrage and anger, until endless affirmative action resolved the issue, and rightly so. But why does no-one care when it’s boys who are underperforming?
Clinical psychologist and author, Jordan Peterson, has described the lack of encouragement and emotional investment in young men as a “catastrophe”, and it’s certainly the case that studies have found that teachers can show gender bias to the detriment of boys.
Research by Ann Margareth Gustavsen at INN University in Norway, for example, showed that this unconscious bias towards boys caused teachers in lower secondary schools to “systematically” give boys grades that were too low and did not reflect their academic prowess. She noted that this was demonstrated by comparing the grades given by teachers for classwork with examination marks achieved by the same students. In general, boys fare better in exams than they do in classwork marked by their teacher – something that happened less to girls.
Gustavsen conjectured that this might arise because some boys have a poorer ability to listen to and follow the rules of the school, and that kick against the social norms of the classroom led teachers to develop an unconscious bias.
Now, it seems, this bias can and does also arise in Ireland. Yesterday, the State Examination Commission (SEC) revealed that it had undertaken an analysis of the estimated marks provided by schools for Leaving Cert students and found evidence of unconscious bias in favour of girls.
Covid-19 provided a strange ‘natural experiment’ for Ireland, in that students could both sit the Leaving Certificate written exams in the traditional manner – but they could also ask for an estimation of their grade from the school.
Female students have been doing better on average in these exams than males for some time now, but the official analysis showed that the ‘gender gap’ was wider in the estimates or ‘predicted grades’ provided by schools than in the traditional exams.
In other words, the bias of teachers caused boys to receive lower predicted or estimated grades than their exams subsequently showed they deserved.
Although girls are outperforming boys in most subjects, the SEC noted that higher-level maths is one of a handful of subjects where boys typically obtain more top grades than girls. But this year, using the results from estimated grades given by schools, the pattern was reversed – girls did better than boys.
Almost as startling as the confirmation of bias against boys was the SEC’s assertion that the result was “not unexpected”. They explained that international research suggests “unconscious estimation bias” generally favours female students.
The SEC report says the Department of Education made “strong efforts” to address possible bias by asking schools to remain objective and avoid preconceptions about each student’s performance. Clearly that didn’t work.
It’s obvious, then, that some of the reasons why boys are failing are biases which are systemic and which are largely being ignored. If I was a mother of boys I’d be furious. Equality shouldn’t mean leaving half of our children behind. If it were boys who were benefiting from “unconscious bias” there’d be uproar.