Boys are falling behind girls in school. What is driving the gap?

A new study says boys consistently report less positive attitudes toward academic effort than girls, regardless of socioeconomic status, family structure or grade repetition. The gap appears in nearly every country studied and is larger in more developed societies. Researchers say it could be connected to a troubling “boys’ crisis” in education.

Published Tuesday in PNAS Nexus, the study analysed survey responses from roughly 750,000 15-year-old students across 61 countries, including more than 34,000 teens in Canada. It found an overall link between attitudes toward academic effort, school achievement and participation in higher education. One notable exception was boys’ continued high representation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Study author Clotilde Napp is an economist and research director at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL.

Napp said Canada had one of the larger gender gaps in reported attitudes toward trying hard at school, ranking 11th among the 61 countries analysed. The largest reported gaps in academic effort were in Norway, Jordan and Lithuania; the smallest were in South Korea, Vietnam and Thailand. In an email from Paris to CTVNews.ca, she said Canada sits around the middle of the distribution for gender gaps in academic performance and for boys’ representation in higher education. Canada therefore fits the broader pattern in developed countries, where attitude gaps tend to be larger.

‘This gap appears in almost every country’

Napp said she expected girls to value academic effort more than boys, but two findings surprised her. The gap appeared in almost every country in the study and was larger in more developed and more gender-equal countries, running counter to the common intuition that gender gaps shrink as societies become more equal. The gap was also associated with gender differences in performance and educational choices in verbal and arts-related fields, but not at all in STEM fields.

The study describes the larger gap in developed countries as part of a “Gender Equality Paradox,” in which more economically developed and more gender-equal societies tend to show greater gender differentiation in preferences or behaviours.

The study does not focus on ways to narrow the gap. Napp suggested challenging the cultural idea that effort is “feminine” and boys succeed through innate talent; encouraging more positive attitudes toward effort among boys, particularly in fields where they are underrepresented, such as the humanities; and promoting the idea that success for both girls and boys comes through learning and effort rather than fixed ability.

The study says gender norms are most often associated with disadvantages for women and girls, but can also harm boys’ education outcomes. Napp added that this disadvantage is partial: it does not extend to the most rewarding fields, since boys’ relative representation in STEM shows no such association with the attitude gap.

‘Raising our expectations’

Brendan K. Hartman, a Vancouver-based sociologist and educational consultant, specializes in the social-emotional development and well-being of boys and men. He was not involved in the study and said its findings did not surprise him, as they largely align with his own research and classroom experience.

Hartman told CTVNews.ca that several boys in his PhD research had said it was not cool to try too hard, depending on the culture of their school and friend group. He said one of the best ways to narrow the gender gap and encourage greater academic effort among boys is to raise expectations.

Hartman suspects the larger gap in developed countries may relate to the opportunities available, with many boys seeing formal education as unnecessary for the lifestyle or future they imagine for themselves. He said there may be more freedom in developed countries to choose who you want to be and whether education is part of that. In less developed countries, education may be seen as a higher priority because it is one of fewer pathways forward.