Are the stereotypes that have kept girls from STEM preventing boys from pursuing HEALing professions?

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!
-Rudyard Kipling, “The Ballad of East and West”

For many years, writers, scholars, and researchers have expressed concern about the apparent misalignment between boys’ physical and intellectual development and the requirements of most K-12 schools (e.g., Froschl & Sprung, 2005; Gurian & Stephens, 2006). This situation has received increased public attention in the U.S. with the recent publication of Richard Reeves’ (2022) book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.

Although much of the current emphasis on boys’ disengagement from school is U.S.-focused, an international report by UNESCO (2022a) notes that, globally, 132 million boys of primary and secondary school age are out of school entirely, and those who do attend are at greater risk than girls of failure, grade repeating, and overall poor outcomes. Unsurprisingly, the situation for low-income and minoritized boys is even more dire, as a great deal of recent scholarship has found (Hines et al., 2020).

The point of this work is not to pit the needs of boys and girls against each other, but rather to note that boys and girls have different developmental patterns that likely require gender-specific interventions in schools and society. The research from UNESCO (2022b) tells us that “girls have more difficulty accessing education and are more likely than boys to be out of school, particularly at primary level. But as education progresses, it becomes a boys’ problem” (UNESCO, 2022b, p. 3). Engaging with the challenges boys face need not come at the expense of girls, as the authors of the UNESCO (2022a) report take great pains to point out:

addressing boys’ disengagement from and disadvantage in education is not a zero-sum game. Supporting boys does not mean that girls lose out and vice versa. Equal education opportunities benefit both girls and boys and the broader society. (p. 12)

Boys and the HEAL professions

The gender stereotyping that often discourages girls from pursuing certain fields is no less a factor for boys, who face different but still pervasive career stereotypes. Large, well-funded STEM programs for girls have helped counter the perception that these fields are primarily for men. In a 2018 commentary, Christine Henseler suggests that a similar effort might be needed in the humanities for boys:

Young girls are realizing they can have careers in STEM, and women today are succeeding in such male-dominated industries. While many hurdles persist, the attitudes that kept women out of STEM are changing and being discussed in public. But our society suffers when boys and men are actively discouraged from pursuing their interests in the arts and humanities. . . . So where, then, are the programs and mentoring networks that encourage boys and men to pursue professional careers in the arts and humanities? Such an intervention could ultimately strengthen society struggling under the pressures of great, sweeping technological change.

Reeves (2022) also notes the lack of men in health, education, administration, and literacy (HEAL) professions. In some HEAL fields, such as psychology, social work, and K-8 teaching, the percentage of men has dropped by at least half since 1980, to around 20% in 2020 (Reeves, 2022). Issues of race and socioeconomic status create additional layers of complication. At a time when research highlights the need for an increasingly diverse teacher workforce that mirrors our increasingly diverse student population (Goldhaber, Theobald, & Tien, 2019; Redding, 2019; Terrier, 2020), the decrease in Black and Hispanic male teachers complicates any efforts to diversify the education workforce (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019; Wong, 2019).

HEAL jobs may offer lower pay than many STEM jobs, but many tend to be fairly recession-proof. And attracting men into HEAL fields is not just good for men, given that many HEAL professions — especially health care and education — are currently experiencing labor shortages that are likely to worsen (Reeves, 2022). Encouraging boys and men to consider these professions can benefit our economy and culture as a whole.

A lack of engagement in reading

The most recently available National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report cards for American schools support the findings regarding disengagement and lower performance, in reading in particular, as boys progress through formal schooling. Data spanning 2019 to 2022 show that a 7-point reading score gender gap in 4th grade (on a 500-point scale) stretches to 9 points by 8th grade and 13 by 12th grade. Boys start behind, and stay behind, girls when it comes to reading achievement (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022). For comparison, in math, girls start with a smaller 3-point gap behind boys, which peaks during middle school at 6 points, and then drops back to 3 points by 12th grade. Schools still have work to do regarding girls’ STEM achievement, but whereas gender gaps stay roughly steady for girls in math, the gap for boys in reading starts nearly two and half times larger and roughly doubles throughout boys’ tenure in school. Similar patterns can be found in English language arts, writing, and social studies assessment results at both the national and state level.

Troubling trends such as these are nothing new for boys and the humanities. The release of the 1998 NAEP results, along with their own observations, led former secondary teachers Michael Smith and Jeffery D. Wilhelm to write (2002) Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys: Literacy in the Lives of Young Men, in which they engaged in an intensive, longitudinal study of 49 diverse boys and their lives in and around literacy. The authors use Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) flow theory as a theoretical framework for their observations and conclusions.

Flow theory focuses on periods of deep task engagement that lead to optimal performance. Smith and Wilhelm condense Csikszentmihalyi’s original description of the flow state to four characteristics that facilitate this experience of flow:

• Competence and control.
• Appropriate level of challenge.
• Clear goals and feedback.
• A focus on the immediate.

To these, they add a fifth characteristic based on their engagement with the boys in their study:

• A social connection.

These qualities tend to be rare in school reading, Smith and Wilhelm explain. In fact, schools instead often offer up curriculum and teaching strategies that seem diametrically opposed to the attainment of flow states. In the words of one of the boys they interviewed, “reading don’t fix no Chevys.” School-based reading instruction isn’t engaging for students, especially boys. Instead, it is something done to them. And given the importance of agency for talent development, this fact presents a major developmental roadblock (Plucker, Williams, & Gao, 2021).

Smith and Wilhelm provide five expectations that boys have of their teachers, an “implicit social contract” required for them to trust that the work in school may be worth their engagement. In short, they want teachers to:

• Get to know them personally.
• Care about them as individuals.
• Pay attention to their interests in some manner.
• Help them learn and endeavor to make sure that they’ve actually done so.
• Be personally passionate, committed, hardworking, and knowledgeable.

As Kenny McKee (2022) explains, these expectations still have significant value for practitioners who want to make their instruction more engaging. Assessing curricula and instructional practices for these expectations, as well as the five characteristics (Smith & Wilhelm, 1990) that produce flow, provides leaders a robust, but not unwieldy, appraisal that can occur at the district, school, department, or even individual classroom level. And, when present, these qualities are likely to raise engagement and achievement for both boys and girls.

Targeted interventions for boys

The flow-based interventions described above are a good starting point for many educators and schools. But boys’ underachievement and lack of participation in the humanities and HEAL professions are so severe that we may need to take additional, bolder steps to address them. As both the UNESCO report and Reeves note, there are precious few interventions targeted specifically for increasing boys’ achievement and attracting them into HEAL careers, especially compared to the numerous, often well-funded programs for assisting girls in STEM education and careers. The success of many of these STEM programs provides evidence that investing in HEAL interventions for boys is a promising practice.

Big-picture changes

Reeves and others recommend some “big swings” at the problem. One of the most intriguing suggestions is starting boys a year later in school. Given boys’ physical and intellectual immaturity relative to girls of the same age — a difference with important implications for schools and learning — Reeves hypothesizes that a one-year delay could help foster boys’ learning in school and perhaps even improve the learning experience for girls.

We expected this suggestion to be an especially controversial idea, but in our conversations with parents, it has proved to be anything but controversial. It is already a common practice in upper-middle-class communities, with parents holding boys out of school for a year or having them be held back at some point in elementary school, a practice commonly referred to as redshirting. Of course, most students do not have upper-middle-class parents, and the costs to a caregiver of starting a boy a year later in school can be significant. For this reason, the idea of academic redshirting should be limited to those communities with easy access to high-quality and affordable early childhood programs.

Engaging with the challenges boys face need not come at the expense of girls.

Another potential strategy is to ramp up efforts to recruit men into HEAL professions, especially early childhood education and English teaching. The use of pipeline or pathways programs is common when encouraging girls to consider and thrive in STEM fields (Almukhambetova, Torrano, & Nam, 2023; Rincón & Rodriguez, 2021). Such programs are less common regarding boys and HEAL-related disciplines and careers, and Reeves (2022) provides evidence that they tend to be significantly underfunded, calling into question whether the few existing programs can have an appreciable impact. If they are to have an impact, these programs should be expanded and funded at much higher levels.

The UNESCO report (2022a) opens with a set of recommendations that include advancing equal access to education and preventing boys from dropping out; making learning transformative, safe, and inclusive for learners of all genders; investing in better data and generating evidence; building and financing equitable and inclusive education systems; and promoting and ensuring integrated, coordinated, and system-wide approaches. Any solutions likely will involve changes to the microsystem (students, parents, and peers); the mesosystem (communities and schools); and the macrosystem (governments and development partners). None of these ideas seem particularly radical or controversial in the context of the report, but its authors are constantly aware of the fraught landscape of gender and regularly remind readers that politicization and polarization won’t advance positive educational outcomes.

Gender-sensitive curricula and classrooms

Although there has been “mixed progress in tackling bias in textbooks,” the presence of gender stereotypes in curricular materials “has serious implications on how boys construct their own sense of masculinity and may limit their career choices, such as in the care and teaching sector” (UNESCO, 2022a, p. 107). Removing gender-discriminatory language and concepts and actively making texts more gender-sensitive has the potential to enable boys to see themselves in HEAL careers.

The UNESCO report also recommends child-friendly transformations, including learning environments in which student differences are acknowledged and appreciated. Building such environments may require, perhaps non-intuitively, more attention to gender, not less. Gender-responsive pedagogy, originally created to train teachers and schools to educate girls appropriately, may benefit all students when it reflects “an understanding of gender roles and biases, and in addressing these, encourages equitable participation and outcomes” (UNESCO, 2022a, p. 107). Gender-friendly learning strategies, such as paying attention to how teachers interact with students of all genders, adopting inclusive language, and eliminating gender bias in lesson content and materials, can help teachers provide the kind of individualized instruction that is often recommended but difficult to implement.

Removing gender-discriminatory language and concepts and actively making texts more gender-sensitive has the potential to enable boys to see themselves in HEAL careers.

Reporting results

We should not pretend that gender isn’t important in educational settings or decide that resources and attention should shift to boys at the expense of girls. Instead, we must acknowledge the complexity of gender, engage in thoughtful research, and create research-derived interventions that serve all school populations. These solutions are not one-size-fits-all, nor do they require us to bifurcate programs and resources according to gender. But we do need to address gender differences in educational settings.

In the category of lowest-hanging fruit, gender differences in student outcomes should be reported in press releases, publicly released data, and reports at every level of education. This transparency will help hold us accountable as we tackle gender issues, including the presence of boys and men in the humanities and HEAL fields and of girls and women in STEM education and careers. Currently, not all states report outcomes by gender. For example, a quick look at the Tennessee K-12 assessment results via the State Report Card shows test results broken out for students in a large range of subgroups, including race/ethnicity, economic disadvantage, disability, English learner, foster, homeless, migrant, and active-duty military parents. Reporting data within all these categories is laudable. But the absence of gender is glaring, especially because the inclusion of gender would almost certainly lead to interesting and important interactions in the data.

Differences, not destiny

The epigraph for and title of this paper are based on Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The Ballad of East and West.” The title comes from the famous first two lines, which are often interpreted as a statement that some things are simply incompatible and should be accepted as such. However, Kipling’s next two lines make it clear that he believes differences should be acknowledged but not allowed to rule our expectations and actions.

We believe this is a wise approach for educators, parents, and policy makers as we tackle the problem of male achievement in humanities education and HEAL professions: Acknowledge the problems yet refuse to accept them as destiny and instead work together to address them comprehensively.

References

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Henseler, C. (2018, October 2). We need more men in the humanities. Inside Higher Ed.

Hines, E.M., Moore, J.L., Mayes, R.D., Harris, P.C., Singleton, P., Hines, C.M., Harried, C.J., & Wathen, B.J. (2020). Black males in rural contexts: Challenges and opportunities. In C.R. Chambers & L. Crumb (Eds.), African American rural education (pp. 53-65). Emerald Publishing Limited.

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Wong, A. (2019, February 20). The U.S. teaching population is getting bigger, and more female. The Atlantic.

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This article appears in the April 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 7, pp. 12-17.