EDUCATION GAP
It has been said my entire life that schools strongly favour boys while making a sport out of either passively neglecting or actively crushing girls. And these aren't mere rumours, hushed murmurings coming from the dark corners of libraries and supply rooms; instead, countless academics and associations have published studies, op-eds, and whole books on this theme, and done so continually over the last forty years. And certainly my nineteen years in the education system, including in teacher education and as a practicing classroom teacher, was full of expressions that boys are unduly privileged and that they, their privilege, and this fundamental bias all form a tremendous collective obstacle to any kind of opportunity for girls. But, of course, nobody needs all this writing and talk as evidence because we have all seen and experienced it ourselves and know it to be true. And, if any other evidence were needed, today we fully acknowledge this situation with a whole variety of policies and laws aimed at rectifying the gender imbalance in schools.
Looking at this you may then wonder how the pogrom against girls perpetuates in a space so uncommonly dominated by women who've gone through the system themselves and know first-hand how terrible it is. And then if you care about your own children or your students and really want to help, you won't just hope and trust that things are being taken care of by the legislators or administrators positioned to make meaningful, systemic change. No, instead you seek out primary sources and study the findings and recommendations therein to see where you may be failing and what you might do to make the world a better place.
If you're ambitious and have a lot of time on your hands you might cast your net into the sea of academic journals. Or, if you're lazy like me and don't have the time or energy, you might flip through a few press releases and media reports, hoping that some will cite or link to relevant research, interviews, or survey data. And if you do this you may find that the most commonly cited research on the one-sided gender privilege found in classrooms is, at best, infested by unjustifiable errors and plagued with curious omissions. And if you look you'll notice that little of the cited research has been published for peer-review and then wonder why that would be, given the importance of these findings. (You're also likely to feel that many reports seem like promotional material and public relations for individuals and organizations trying to justify their perspective and existence.)
Then when frustrated with this you may uncover, through reading peer-reviewed research (that uses normative methods of science and can't be immediately suspected of obvious bias), sufficient evidence that boys are on the losing end of whatever gender bias exists in education – and have been for quite some time. And then you may realize that, actually, you know this to be true, thinking back to your time in school.
The findings you discover are likely to show that boys tend to be far behind girls academically, and so on a number of fronts. In the classroom, girls show little sign of being shy, overshadowed, or demoralized. Girls read more and better than their male counterparts, achieve better grades, and win more awards while also having higher academic aspirations. Once in post-secondary, the data reveals, girls tend to enroll in more-rigorous academic programs and are placed in more advanced classes at higher rates. And girls not only receive more scholarships but there are more scholarships for them out there. (While more women than men have university degrees and males are a minority at schools across Canada – as low as 25% at some institutions – there are about 1,000 female-only scholarships and only around 200 for men. Even in fields dominated by women, such as nursing or education, the scholarships for women outnumber those for males ten to one.) Even outside of the classroom, girls are more likely to be found dominating the membership of any school's newspapers, debating teams, student government, and honour societies.
Amongst all this flourishing though we see and hear almost weekly now how there's a real problem in higher education, that runs straight back to elementary school, with a lack of women entering STEM fields. Yes, their numbers are lower in math, engineering, and computer science, but is that because of bias or other problems needing correction? I don't know. It seems to be mostly because, while they are as good or better in math and science than boys, they are even better still in other areas where language and people skills dominate – and so choose to study what they're best at. What is clear, and what these regular op-eds ignore is (from the numbers I could find – mostly from ten years ago) that in biology, agricultural sciences, earth sciences, chemistry, medicine, and others (these “male dominated fields”) women match or at times even greatly exceed the number of males achieving degrees or graduate degrees. Of course this means that thirty years ago we were doing something right for these girls, now women, who've become physicians, earned PhDs in marine biology, and are conducting leading research in vulcanology – all of whom seem to have nailed their math and science requisites. (If you want numbers: As far as I can tell, women made up only 10% of medical degrees in Canada back in the 1970s, while today they approach 60%, and 80% of all degrees in the health sciences.) And, interestingly, when women are asked about their experience in science and areas where their attendance numbers are lower they don't report sexism; instead, studies show them avoiding doing PhDs or choosing to walk away from top research positions citing a desire to balance career with life and with family. But even post-PhD the numbers seem to be positive: for example, in science and engineering, we find that if a woman with a PhD is married with young children she is only 30% less likely to be employed than a single man with a PhD. (Some seem to think the full flowering of feminism will create a world in which all males and females are clones, with the same skills, interests, and aims – and weirdly interpret this stat as evidence of gender bias. I think it's much more reasonably seen as women freely making decisions that are their best interest and make them happy.)
If you find all this interesting and dig a little deeper, daring as you might to risk showing up on some database somewhere as a misogynist, and go looking for data on boys you won't just find lower numbers and lower achievement but instead a very stark contrast. Starting in kindergarten, boys are far more likely to receive a disorder diagnosis and also to be held back. They are more likely to visit the principal, get disciplined, be suspended, and also to drop out of school altogether. Boys in high school are far less committed to their current education and as a result are less likely to move on to post-secondary than their female peers. It's also reported that more school-aged boys are involved in crime and use drugs and alcohol than their classmates. But, of course, none of this should come as a surprise as you can recall it yourself from your days in school. While all of this is sad, there's one statistic that outshines them all: there's one area in which school-aged girls fail while boys overwhelmingly succeed: suicide. Though girls attempt suicide more often than boys, boys are about five times more likely to achieve their goal. Even with all of this the “crisis in education” remains – not in the research, because the data seems actually pretty unequivocal, but in the popular imagination – as one of unreasonable bias against girls.
Please notice I haven't cited or directed you to any studies or reports. I hope that in so doing I elicit enough skepticism that you will go and look for yourself. What you will find is likely to be so contrary to the common narrative (that has been published widely from the 80s through to today, and which largely ignores the facts) as to disrupt other assumptions that you, and all of us, have. You'll simply have to ask yourself how we arrived at this apples-are-actually-oranges, up-is-really-down, black-is-in-fact-white worldview; and, therefore, why the belief has not just persisted but gone on to be encoded in institutional policy and law, despite legitimate and overwhelming evidence continuously demonstrating the opposite. Like me, you will inescapably wonder why and how it is that the demonstrably more mature, articulate, engaged, and far better balanced girl is said to be the one being shortchanged by the system? And, then, consider the impact (even just within classrooms and schools) of this oft-expressed worldview on the members of the said-to-be-favoured gender.
Rather than scholarly research, I'd like to share three of my own recent classroom experiences. In 2012, as a 34-year-old would-be teacher-in-training, I volunteered in a Vancouver kindergarten weekly for almost six months. The classroom had a small minority, only a handful, of boys in it. On day one the teacher, alone and with no psychology background of any kind, diagnosed the boys, all of them, as having big problems. Some, she said surely had attention and hyperactivity issues, others might be autistic, and some were just way behind developmentally. (Most bizarrely, the teacher was certain of the attention deficit label even while telling me how these boys seemed transfixed on things – typically “inappropriate” activities like drawing dinosaurs or playing aggressively with wood blocks or toy cars, and even after witnessing me sitting talking to them about subjects they were interested in for stints as long as twenty minutes...) And then on a daily basis following their collective pseudo-diagnosis they were, almost mockingly, excluded and punished for their non-conformity to the standard of appropriate behaviour set out by their female peers. But it wasn't just this one-sided punishment that happened: praise and affection was also doled out almost exclusively to the always-well-behaved little ladies of the class. Things were so bizarre and unprofessional that these girls regularly received motherly attention from their teacher, who happily combed and braided their hair for them, at her desk at the front of the whole class, seemingly whenever they asked. And, of course, this wasn't just a bad classroom or year these kids endured: all of this was a formative experience, with their identity and labels (“off-task”, “disruptive”, “deficient”, “trouble”, “bad”...) not just following them in official written reports for the next teacher in the next class but also taught to and picked up by their classmates. Needless to say, I was grateful for the experience in this master class in bias and inappropriate behaviour. Though, lest you feel otherwise, this was nothing like a one-off experience. I also volunteered later that year in a 3/4 class in Burnaby in which the teacher would yell at her two “trouble kids”, both boys, through a microphone and speaker system she set up for just this purpose – an activity normalized in that classroom, and somehow permitted by the school but which I would consider a form of child abuse. In 2014, in my practicum class, grade three, I had an autistic child, two diagnosed with and medicated for ADHD, and another on anti-anxiety meds – all of whom were, of course, boys. There were no girls in this class labelled disabled or dysfunctional or being medicated for anything, but there were two referred to as gifted.
So what exactly is going on? What am I ignoring? Is my deep gender bias clouding my perspective and deranging Google searches?
