I welcomed your editorial highlighting the complexities around gender gaps in education (25 March). While I agree that it is important to acknowledge these gaps, dividing results strictly by gender without exploring wider intersecting factors, such as socioeconomic status, only provides a partial picture.
If we frame girls outperforming boys as a crisis, we are sending a message that women being outperformed is OK, natural even. We need to have this discussion by observing education as a whole and using the differences to explore the root cause.
It’s essential that we consider how profoundly early stereotypes shape children’s brains and opportunities. Neuroscience tells us that children’s brains are remarkably plastic, adapting significantly to their environments and experiences. Yet, from an early age, children are constantly bombarded with gender stereotypes embedded in clothes, toys, language, books, media and classroom dynamics that tell them who they are supposed to be. These stereotypes create self‑fulfilling prophecies about skills, interests and aspirations.
If we genuinely aim for progress, we must address the root causes of disparities and biases. Because behind all the shocking and important statistics such as the motherhood penalty, sexual harassment, fewer young men going to university and more feeling lonely and isolated, we find a system that fails all of us by putting us in rigid outdated boxes based on our gender.
Every interaction matters – from classroom practices and role models to everyday conversations. These can either perpetuate harmful stereotypes or challenge and dismantle them. We all have a responsibility and opportunity to make things better, every day.
Virginia Mendez
Author, Childhood Unlimited: Parenting Beyond the Gender Bias
It is fantastic to see the Guardian joining those of us who have long been concerned about the serious educational underperformance of boys. But why did you feel it necessary to use a headline in your print edition that claimed “girls aren’t beating boys at learning”? The evidence is both overwhelming and unchallenged that, on average, men fall a long way behind women, from infant school to PhDs.
Is there any other group in our society where you would feel it necessary to warn against “overemphasising concerns” about their educational disadvantage? How is it even possible to “overemphasise” such a blatant and huge inequality as we see in boys’ educational underachievement?
We do not need to “balance” the labour market challenges faced by women against the educational challenges faced by men. A progressive newspaper and a progressive society can worry about – and seek to tackle – both problems at the same time
Nick Hillman
Co-author, Boys to Men (2016) and Boys will be Boys (2025)
As a mathematics teacher, I wholeheartedly agree that we should be concentrating on both boys and girls when narrowing the gap between them in mathematics and science. But don’t we also need to change the curriculum to include more technical subjects such as woodwork, metalwork, textiles and home economics, which I studied at my local comprehensive? This would inspire all students to see how mathematics and science is used. It is, in my view, the lack of technical subjects driving boys away from degree courses.
Kartar Uppal
Streetly, West Midlands
