Are boys disadvantaged at school?
History repeats itself, but is it true?
For years, the media has been reporting on boys as «educational losers». The accusation is that boys can no longer be boys, and that schools are hostile and unfair to boys. «Clever girls, stupid boys», was the headline in Der Spiegel back in 2004. «Boys are the stupid ones», was the headline in Beobachter in 2009. In 2019, Swiss television asked: «Do we need all-boy classes?» «Das Magazin» also looked into this in an interview with Remo Largo in 2008. The paediatrician said: «The good pupil of today is a girl. But that's not because of their competence, but because of their behaviour.»
«From discrimination against girls to discrimination against boys» was the title of an interpellation in the municipal council of the Bernese suburb of Zollikofen in 2010. In 2018, a member of the cantonal parliament of Basel-Stadt submitted a question entitled «Discrimination against boys/men in the school system» to the cantonal government. In 2020, the Grand Council of the Canton of Thurgau discussed the interpellation «Knaben an der Volksschule Thurgau im Abseits?».
In fact, statistics can easily be found to back up such statements. In Switzerland, 25.9 per cent of all female pupils complete the baccalaureate, but only 17.9 per cent of all male pupils. Only 3.3 per cent of female pupils require special educational measures, but 6.1 per cent of male pupils. Pupils skip school more often, have to repeat a class more frequently and drop out of school more often.
Much of what is reported on the subject is falsified or even complete nonsense.
Beat A. Schwendimann, educational scientist
But is this due to systematic discrimination?
Yes, says Allan Guggenbühl, one of the country's best-known youth psychologists. I'm talking to him first because the media quote him particularly frequently on this topic.
Guggenbühl researches conflict management and violence prevention. He believes that the discrimination of boys is a fact that is not talked about enough. «I don't question the fact that it took too long to fight for equal treatment for girls. But now we have an imbalance to the detriment of boys, and that needs to be discussed, even if it doesn't fit in with the zeitgeist.»
According to Guggenbühl, many boys would like to achieve something at school, but today's pedagogy demotivates them. They have to sit still and are given gentleness instead of resistance. «The restlessness of many boys is perceived as a problem, their provocation as social incompetence. But this only shows their need to connect.»
Poor school performance is only one symptom of the boys' difficulties. «Their self-assessments are just as important. Boys often experience school as boring and have the feeling that they are not catered for. This also affects those who are successful at school.»
Girls have always had better grades at school
A call to educational scientist Beat A. Schwendimann, who heads the Pedagogical Centre of the Swiss Teachers' Association. Schwendimann begins by criticising the media: «Much of what is reported on the subject is distorted or even complete nonsense.»
Then he says what I will hear from everyone I talk to about this from now on, from the head of a school psychology service who has to deal with children who are left behind on a daily basis, to the education lecturer who wonders why everything revolves around the male gender again: «It's important that we differentiate.»
Sounds boring. But the sentence is possibly the key. School, gender, children: this debate brings together topics that are complex and emotional in themselves. Schwendimann: «There is no doubt that there are boys who struggle in our school system. But the reasons are manifold. And the generalised statement that boys are educational losers is simply not tenable.»
He advises me to contact Margrit Stamm, the grande dame of Swiss educational science. I reach her while she is on holiday and she suggests an appointment a few days later.
In the meantime, I talk to employees of the Coordination Centre for Educational Research, which publishes the Swiss Education Report every four years. If there's anywhere you can get an overview of all the research that has been done on gender equality in schools, it's there.
Here are three findings from studies that have been brought to my attention:
1) Many believe that boys are disadvantaged because male teachers are massively underrepresented at primary level. However, the fact that female teachers favour girls has been refuted many times over: Female teachers do not grade differently to male teachers, nor does the gender of the teacher have any influence on academic performance for either boys or girls.
2 The question of whether the child's gender plays a role in the grading is more difficult. The studies contradict each other. Girls are most likely to be favoured in stereotypically female subjects (languages), boys in stereotypically male subjects (maths).
3 The Berlin Social Science Research Centre analysed 42 studies with data on 2.4 million pupils from 41 countries - and found no evidence that boys' school performance had deteriorated over time. «Girls have always received better grades than boys,» writes study author Marcel Helbig, adding that there was no change in the differences in grades between the sexes between 1914 and 2011. This would mean that girls have always found their way around the school system better, they just weren't able (or allowed) to translate their abilities into corresponding qualifications for a long time. But when did people actually start labelling boys as educational losers?
I cannot recognise any systematic discrimination.
Stefan Wolter, Professor of Economics of Education at the University of Bern
Stefan Wolter is Director of the Coordination Centre for Educational Research and Professor of Economics of Education at the University of Bern. He says the question can be answered fairly precisely: perceptions changed in the mid-1990s when the gender ratio at Swiss grammar schools began to tilt. Wolter talks about educated middle-class parents with very specific educational expectations. «They are not concerned with gender equality, they just want their child to pursue an academic career. Now that girls are overtaking boys, these parents are worried about their sons. They suddenly believe that they recognise a disadvantage for boys in the A-level quota and look for reasons. Why didn't they worry about their girls when boys were still in the majority at grammar schools? Because girls were not intended to be the breadwinners.»
He is of the opinion that there are, of course, school settings that are more suitable for girls. But there are also some that are more suitable for boys. «I can't recognise any systematic discrimination.» That sounds like a concluding remark, but the conversation is not over yet. Stefan Wolter asks: «Who says that boys are at a disadvantage if they don't go to grammar school?»
If an academic degree was the goal, the girls would make the right decision. But when it comes to finding a profession in which you can make a career and earn a lot of money, the boys' path is more promising. «Every statistic in the world shows this: men have better salaries, hold more management positions and are more highly regarded in their jobs.»
Girls became the majority at grammar schools just as Switzerland was massively strengthening the tertiary education sector: the vocational baccalaureate, which was introduced in 1994, and the expansion of universities of applied sciences from 1995 opened up completely new avenues.
There are not the boys
According to Wolter, we know from studies that girls who are bad at maths take private tuition in order to make it to grammar school. Boys who are bad at languages are much less likely to do so. «They'd rather do an apprenticeship with a vocational baccalaureate, go to a university of applied sciences, have a bachelor's degree at the age of twenty-one and earn their own money in all those years. Depending on how you look at it, a supposed disadvantage quickly becomes an advantage.»
Wolter therefore also believes it is wrong to only ever look at the baccalaureate rate when discussing disadvantaged boys. In fact, the gender discrepancy becomes a little less pronounced when apprenticeship and vocational baccalaureate qualifications are taken into account. 92 per cent of all female students achieve such a qualification. And 89 per cent of all pupils.
«Social background influences school success much more than gender.»
Margrit Stamm, educational scientist
Apprenticeship, vocational baccalaureate, grammar school: 95 per cent of all 25-year-olds should have at least one of these qualifications - this is the educational goal formulated by the Confederation and the cantons. Margrit Stamm explains to me what it says about the real injustice of the Swiss education system and that this goal is far from being achieved.
But first, the Professor Emeritus of Educational Psychology and Educational Sciences at the University of Fribourg wants to emphasise something fundamental: «There are no boys and there are no girls. The differences within the sexes are greater than between the sexes.»
She considers the debate about gender inequality in the education system to be a diversionary tactic: an elitist discussion that ignores the real problem. «A considerable part of what we perceive as gender inequality is actually a disadvantage caused by social background. Social background influences school success much more than gender. It's frustrating that this is always forgotten.»
A brief explanation of the term: Social background refers to the socio-cultural heritage, i.e. the family's financial situation, its network or learned behaviour patterns. It is largely determined by the class into which one is born.
I take a closer look at the statistics. It's true: The Swiss born in Switzerland come closest to the 95 per cent target - 93 per cent of them have successfully completed at least one such course by the age of 25. This is followed by foreign nationals born in Switzerland (87 per cent) and Swiss nationals born abroad (85 per cent). At 77 per cent, the completion rate is lowest among foreign-born foreigners: they fall almost 20 percentage points short of the educational goal.
I come across an evaluation of the 2012 Pisa study for the canton of Bern: 49 per cent of all young people from the canton's highest social class attend grammar school, 35 per cent secondary school and 16 per cent intermediate school. Of all young people from the socially weakest class, 6 per cent attend grammar school, 32 per cent secondary school and 62 per cent intermediate school. In other words, every second child from the upper class goes to grammar school. From the lower class, one in sixteen.
The social inheritance of education is particularly pronounced in Switzerland.
Margrit Stamm, educational scientist
In principle, it is of course possible that there are so few young people from the lower classes at grammar school because they perform less well. But if you take a closer look, you realise that young people from the upper classes are more than three times more likely to go to grammar school than young people from the lower classes who perform comparably well. The situation is similar at lower performance levels: Young people from the upper class, whose performance corresponds to the Realschule average, have more than twice the chance of reaching secondary school level or even the Gymnasium than young people from the lower class with comparable performance.
«Children from educationally disadvantaged and/or poor backgrounds have a hard time in all German-speaking countries,» says Margrit Stamm. «But in Switzerland, the social inheritance of education is particularly pronounced. This applies to boys as well as girls.»
Biology does not explain everything
But why is that? And does it mean that there is no gender inequality at Swiss schools?
In my search for answers, I experience something astonishing: The educational scientist Christa Kappler, who heads a research centre at the PH Zurich, the sociologists Simone Marti and Simone Suter, who work as lecturers at the PH Bern, the child and adolescent psychologist Georges Steffen, child and youth psychologist Georges Steffen, who heads the school psychology service of the canton of Graubünden and is also a member of the board of Schulpsychologie Schweiz, developmental psychologist Christine Neresheimer Mori, who heads the primary school department at the PH Zurich, and Moritz Daum, Professor of Developmental Psychology at the University of Zurich - they are all struggling for words.
«We need to talk about school, but above all we need to talk about education.»
And I wonder how it can be that the public repeatedly engages in this one-sided and generalised debate about disadvantaged boys, while large parts of the scientific community make such an effort to differentiate.
Here are the eight findings from the interviews:
1. just because girls do slightly better in reading, you can't say that boys shouldn't even try to become writers. Nor can you say that girls shouldn't even try to become engineers just because boys do better in maths. On the contrary: many girls are much better at maths than the average boy, and many boys are much better at reading than the average girl. You can imagine two Gaussian bells that are very close to each other: The area of overlap is huge, it's the edges that make the difference. There is a group of girls who really struggle with maths. And a group of boys who experience the same with reading.
2. a number of characteristics that have been shown to impair school success are more common in boys than in girls. Boys are more likely to have a critical attitude towards school, are less intrinsically motivated for school and tend to overestimate themselves more often.
3. a child's leisure activities have a particularly direct influence on their success at school, and this depends heavily on parental resources. The large World Vision children's study from Germany in 2010 showed that, whether girl or boy, lower class or upper class, every second child between the ages of six and eleven (52 per cent) has «normal leisure behaviour». However, the study counted significantly more girls (37 per cent) than boys (11 per cent) among the so-called «versatile kids»: Their leisure time is characterised by cultural, artistic and communicative content, plus they meet friends and play sport. And significantly more boys (37 per cent) than girls (11 per cent) are «media consumers»: they watch TV, play computer games, but also meet friends and play sport. However, the situation becomes even more unequal when looking at social class: almost every second upper class child (43 per cent) is a «versatile kid», but only one in twenty lower class children (5 per cent). Almost every second lower-class child (45 per cent) is a «media consumer», but only just over one in eight upper-class children (14 per cent).
4 Girls and boys are biologically different. This can be explained by the different levels of certain hormones and the different behaviour this causes. For example, boys actually have certain advantages in spatial thinking from birth and girls have better verbal skills. Girls also have a head start in terms of maturity until after puberty because their growth spurt starts earlier. As it is during this time that it is decided whether a child will make the leap to grammar school - if they want to! -It cannot be ruled out that boys are biologically disadvantaged here under certain circumstances.
5 However, it is important to note that different preferences, strengths and behaviours can still only be partially explained by biology. Above all, biological differences are not so great that they necessarily lead to differences in school performance. The decisive factor is the environment. The idea that boys are better at maths and girls are better at languages is so deeply ingrained in our minds that a biologically different starting position can be reinforced on a social level. For example, it has been proven many times over that parents talk to a three-month-old baby more often if it is a girl. If it is a boy, they hold out the rattle.
6 Years later, the Pygmalion effect then looms at school: this is the name given to the psychological phenomenon in which an anticipated assessment by teachers has such an impact on the behaviour and performance of pupils that they are confirmed. According to the study «Lazy boys, ambitious girls?», the largest study on gender inequality in Swiss schools, this could be an explanation for pupils' perceptions of discrimination that has long received too little attention. Teachers (women and men) may have a kind of general - albeit unconscious - fear that pupils (but not female pupils) will disrupt the planned, well-organised progress of their lessons. As a result, female students feel the expectation to behave in a way that conforms to the lesson and male students feel the expectation to behave in a way that disrupts the lesson. This can lead to them being sanctioned more quickly, reinforcing their behaviour and ultimately restricting their learning opportunities.
«Teachers are forced to discipline children instead of being allowed to create educational opportunities.»
Simone Suter, sociologist
7 The sociologists Simone Marti and Simone Suter, whose work focuses on inequality of opportunity and educational equity, point out that the pygmalion effect not only plays out between genders, but also between social classes - especially as boys from socially disadvantaged backgrounds often encounter teachers from the middle class and many teachers meet the possible masculinity practices of these boys with a lack of understanding. Simone Marti says: «If such behaviour is sanctioned with poor grades, this is not conducive to a professional working relationship between teacher and pupil.»
8 It is not enough to simply hold the schools responsible. Christine Neresheimer Mori says that teachers are intensively sensitised to the problem of gender stereotypes during their training, «the topic has been omnipresent here for twenty, thirty, forty years». This could be reinforced, teachers could work on their reflexive attitude, become aware of their own stereotypes and think even more intensively about the prejudices they reproduce. Nevertheless: «Society - it carries on as before. We need to talk about school, but above all we need to talk about education. Too little consideration is given to the influence of parents and the extracurricular environment on a child's gender identity.»
The conclusion? There is no doubt that slightly more boys than girls fail to realise their potential at school. At the same time, this very statement is misleading. The disadvantaged-boys debate is counterproductive because it oversimplifies a complex situation. It is not gender that is the decisive factor for disadvantage at school, but social background. Social background is at the origin, gender - in this case masculinity - at best reinforces an already existing educational inequality.
Simone Suter says: «Our education system is highly selective and characterised by a narrow understanding of education. School lessons are very limited in terms of time and space, making it difficult to cater to children's interests and abilities. Teachers are forced to discipline children instead of being allowed to create educational opportunities. Boys suffer from this just as much as girls. But children are disadvantaged in the current system primarily because of their social background.»
What is needed in schools is not a battle between the sexes, but a battle for a better social mix of classes.
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