If you were following the news last week it seems that those of us with a Y-chromosome (the males) aren’t doing so well. As a former school teacher with 30 years’ experience in secondary school teaching this does not come as a surprise, but it is sad that it still needs addressed.
A detailed report published in March 2025 by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) entitled Lost Boys highlighted the fact that boys start falling behind girls even before they start school and for many boys this gap widens during school. In employment we used to be concerned that young women were not paid as much as men, but now young women (16-24) on average appear to earn 10% more than males.
For much of my life the struggle has been to encourage women into all jobs and to fight the injustice that prevented them from getting equal pay. We might be tempted to see this decline in male success and pay as restitution for the past, but when any group underperforms in education and in work, this tends to create problems for all us.
Y-Chromosome as detrimental as coming from a deprived background
When primary teachers assess children at the age of 5, they find that 75% of girls achieve a good level of development compared to only 60.7% of boys and it appears this gap is widening. The gap between male and female pupils is almost as great as the difference between those on Free School Meals (FSM) and those not. FSM is traditionally regarded as an indicator of coming from a disadvantaged background, so having a Y-Chromosome is almost as detrimental as coming from a deprived background. By the end of primary school, in the very important skills of reading and writing, 64 per cent of girls met the expected standard compared to only 57 per cent of boys. This difference in achievement continues in secondary school.
What is going wrong?
Roughly 20 years ago when I became head of ICT in my secondary school, I introduced an exercise where Y8 pupils had to word process a book review, describing their favourite book from those they read in the past year. To my great surprise several of the pupils said they couldn’t do this because they didn’t read books. When we checked across all Y8 classes it became clear that many boys did not read books for pleasure, while most girls did. We did try to address this by getting all male staff in the school to set an example by producing a book review of their favourite books and organising a display of male staff book-reviews to go alongside the pupil work. However, it was clear that reading for pleasure remained much lower among boys.
Because being able to read is so significant in studying all subjects, it seems obvious that boys who do not enjoy reading are much less likely to enjoy education.
In more recent years there has been some research conducted in Harvard showing that boys who are read bedtime stories by their fathers are more likely to enjoy reading, but even where fathers are willing there is still a problem. So many boys do not have a male in the parent role living with them. The Lost Boys report states that ‘children these days are more likely to have a smartphone than a father’.
Even in school, boys do not encounter as many positive male role models as we would wish, the gender imbalance in school teachers can be significant. Almost 70% of the teachers were female in the co-ed school where I was employed at one point, although the balance was significantly restored by employing more male teachers in the years before I retired. In a conversation about this issue, my son reminded me that his primary school had only one male teacher, but that as was not in that teacher’s class, he had no male teachers while at primary school.
Toxic Masculinity
At the end of last week, a pathetic and cruel man was convicted of a triple murder and rape committed as revenge for being dropped by his girlfriend. During his trial prosecutors claimed “violent misogyny” promoted by well know social media influencer “fuelled” his attacks. The problem of toxic social influencers encouraging anti-women hatred was developing in my last years at school and appears to be getting worse.
Anyone who talks to young males will be aware that their inability to express or discuss their emotions makes them more isolated and more likely to fall under the influence of those who would tell them that it is women’s fault that they are ‘involuntarily celibate’ (Incel).
Steven Pinker in his 2012 book ‘The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity’ assembled a broad range of statistics showing that human violence has declined across the centuries and provides a convincing argument that reading novels is part of this, because when you read a novel, you have to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Reading novels helps you to develop empathy, and yet reluctant male readers opt for factual books rather than for novels, again missing out on an opportunity to develop empathy.
One statistic that surprised me was that 96% of the prison population in the UK is male and according to Lost Boys, from that population:
- 57% had the reading age of an 11-year-old;
- 42% had been excluded from school;
- an estimated 75% had an absent father.
All suicide is tragic, but a worrying statistic is that for every one female suicide there are over 3 male suicides. How are we failing our boys so badly?
What are the solutions?
The data from this report comes from England and Wales, statistics in N. Ireland will be slightly different, but we would do well to take action to rescue our boys.
We need to acknowledge that boys and girls are not identical, they have biological differences that encourage different behaviours. Just as girls sometimes need encouraged to take more risks and to be less scared of making mistakes, boys need to be encouraged to develop empathy, especially with women.
1) Encouraging boys to read more novels and getting fathers (or other significant adult males) to read bedtime stories to their children, will be part of that.
2) I do not have research to back this up, but in my experience, boys who perceive themselves to have ‘failed’ the Transfer Test are more likely than girls to react by deciding that they are not clever, or not academic and stop trying. Their logic tells then that ‘if an official test tells you that you are not cut out for academic life, then it makes sense to stop embarrassing yourself by pretending otherwise’. Most non-selective schools already make significant efforts to persuade pupils that selection at 11 is unreliable and their future is not fixed at that age.
3) Males and females really do have different outlooks on sex/intimacy, partly because of the biological difference in our bodies. As well as the enormous differences in physical strength and our ability to defend ourselves, in straight sex our male bodies are not penetrated, an action that most men tend to look upon with anxiety and fear. Having part of another person inside your own body is a breach of intimacy on a different level and this difference in perspective is behind some of the misunderstandings between the sexes. I remember one boy protesting that it seemed that ‘boys were expected to go about apologising for being boys and interested in girls’. We need to avoid giving this impression or we will lose communication with the boys. (Should we avoid using the phrase ‘Toxic Masculinity?) In a previous Slugger article, I suggested that a fresh look at how PSE teaches boys about sex and relationships, might help educate boys on how to understand girls better.
Conclusion
Boys are much more sensitive than is sometimes realised and many young men suffer from loneliness, resorting instead to relying on internet-based communities where they can become prey to toxic influencers. We can make our society a better place for everyone by teaching boys how to be sociable, how to talk about their feelings, teaching them how to be kind to girls and how to talk to girls; we also need to teach boys how to care for themselves and how to prepare for fatherhood.
Note/Links
- Lost Boys report in full here: https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/library/lost-boys
- https://sluggerotoole.com/2023/10/05/relationships-and-sex-education-rse-what-straight-boys-need-to-learn/
- Be warned – the Steven Pinker book is not an easy read.
- For families dealing with the death of a grandparent, ‘How Kirsty Jenkins Stole the Elephant’ by Elen Caldecott is a great book for opening up conversations.
Arnold is a retired teacher from Lisburn, now living in Belfast.
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