A New York Times guest writer argued that the narrative of boys falling behind in education is overblown.

Author Jessica Grose wrote that she has heard that boys around the world have been underperforming academically compared to girls for the past few years and that there have been assumptions that young boys are at a disadvantage in schools and require attention that girls and young women do not.

“Reactionary conservative commentators, including Jordan Peterson, say boys are underperforming in school because the ‘vast majority of teachers are not only female but infantilizing female and radically left,’ boys are made to sit for hours at a time, which is against their ‘nature,’ and they are told that their “ambition is pathological,” Peterson said in a conversation with my Times Opinion colleague David French,” Grose wrote.

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Grose said that she had “long accepted the basic premise” that the lack of male role models in the classroom drove the crisis of learning in boys. But then when she started asking people about their experiences, it led her to research.

“There’s not much solid evidence that boys do better with male teachers. And girls have been getting better grades than boys since before women had the right to vote,” she added.

“The ‘crisis’ doesn’t seem to be that boys are doing particularly poorly of late. It seems to be that girls are finally being rewarded in the form of college attainment and more equal pay for their efforts,” she continued. 

Grose’s article notes that the teaching force in the U.S. has been majority female for over 100 years and that public schools are not “bereft of male leadership,” considering “men dominate middle school and high school administrations.”

“Only a quarter of superintendents, who are in charge of multiple public schools or districts, are women,” she noted.

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The author added that the evidence of students doing better with same-gender teachers is mixed at best, citing a “2021 study using seven years of data” that reviewed students in Indiana in grades three to eight, finding that “female teachers are better at increasing both male and female students’ achievement than their male counterparts in elementary and middle schools.” 

The study she cited concluded that “contrary to popular speculation, boys do not exhibit higher academic achievement when they are assigned to male teachers.”

Furthermore, Grose cited Judith Warner’s essay called “What Boy Crisis?” explaining that the notion that modern teaching styles favored girls and neglected boys was “little more than a myth.”

“The myth persists because there’s always a market for anti-feminist backlash… a mostly female teaching force is sadly an easy target,” she argued.

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Grose took issue with the narrative of blaming female teachers for the downfall of boys in academia.

“These are all important questions to consider. But if we are identifying the root of boys’ problems based on vibes rather than real evidence, we are not going to find helpful solutions.”

She went on to say, “By incorrectly blaming female teachers, society may also end up downplaying some of the gendered harassment that girls and their female teachers experience — another problem that doesn’t seem to be abating.”