I’ve read about the ways in which the K-12 education system in the United States has failed boys. The harms induced by their poor primary and secondary school experiences last through university and postgraduate studies and eventually plague men in the workforce. There’s an emerging narrative that the U.S. has overcompensated somehow in its goal for educational equality, that it has designed an environment suited to the interests of girls to the detriment of boys. It’s true that female students today have surpassed their male counterparts in a few key metrics — women are more likely to have bachelor’s degrees, for example. And I agree that our current educational system fails many students in numerous ways as early as elementary school: There is too much sitting; discipline is performed incorrectly; work is becoming more digitized to the detriment of all involved. Perhaps there exists a system that benefits all students more, and maybe a number of our issues, which are harmful to all students, are ultimately more harmful for boys.
But I think that something is missed when higher rates of college education are interpreted as evidence of complete female domination. Have you ever noticed, for example, the way guys participate in class? I’m not going to claim that girls don’t participate, because they do. When a professor poses a question that is unexpected in some way, though, where answering feels like a risk, it’s often a guy who raises his hand. Or, if a class is assigned to a spur-of-the-moment debate, it’s usually a guy who takes charge and volunteers to speak, regardless of his knowledge on the subject.
One of my classes this term is a small seminar. Each class period is spent discussing the latest text we’ve read. Our gender ratio is pretty equal — there are actually more girls, by one student — but you wouldn’t know it from listening to a class session. The first person to volunteer to speak almost every day is a guy who loves to make points that are regularly fascinating yet entirely unrelated to the topic of our discussion. He recently revealed to my friend that he usually doesn’t do the assigned reading at all. This is obviously entirely anecdotal, but I can’t imagine a girl ever doing something similar. I’ve often observed that our intellectual culture pushes girls to be more careful in their intellectual engagement.
I don’t just mean that girls are more cautious, but in the classrooms I’ve been in, girls are less secure in the idea that their intellectual capabilities are inherent. In the context of scientific analysis, the gender disparity between male and female students’ confidence in their intellectual competence is often described with the term “self-efficacy,” defined as the belief in one’s ability to accomplish a task.
The influence of gender stereotypes on female students’ self-efficacy is most visible in STEM environments. A 2012 study conducted in the physics department at the University of Colorado found that negative gender stereotypes influenced both female students’ sense of belonging and their grades. And it’s not just internal — it’s easy to dismiss claims about prejudice as problems of the past, but decades of institutional misogyny have left behind lasting implicit biases. In a 2016 study performed in a mixed gender undergraduate biology class at the University of Washington, for example, researchers found that male students disproportionately chose other male students as their most knowledgeable peers — even after controlling for course performance — despite the fact that female students had equal confidence in both male and female peers. While both of these studies focus specifically on STEM, their findings have significance in all classrooms so long as stereotypes surrounding male leadership and competence remain prevalent.
When we analyze the gender disparities in education, we’re failing girls by interpreting certain attainments as a surefire sign that the education system works perfectly in their favor. Women may benefit from structures that reward diligence and studiousness; we cannot claim those structures give them an “unfair” advantage so long as women are trained to be careful in a culture that rewards boldness.
I don’t know what sweeping structural changes might fix academia. I want to recognize that a number of the behaviors I highlighted — such as when someone raises their hand to contribute a perspective that we don’t find meaningful, or when someone is confident in a way that feels unmerited — are annoying in a way that may be objective. I believe women should feel free to adopt traits independent of those traits’ perceived impact on their likeability. Part of existing in a place like Dartmouth is learning to take up the intellectual space to announce you have an idea, even when you can’t be certain it’s the greatest one.
I hope that as educators across the U.S. engage with the issues surrounding our education system, they weigh potential changes not against a past in which men dominated but a future in which success is equitable.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
