Education, many argue, has become ‘feminized.’ Most teachers, especially in primary schools, are women. This is said to have reshaped teaching, curriculum, and assessment in ways that favor girls.
Teaching has long been seen as ‘female work,’ a pattern traced to 19th-century elementary education (Skelton, 2002). The mechanism is often described as the hidden curriculum. These are the informal norms a school transmits alongside its taught lessons, which are said to shape expectations and assessment in girls’ favor.
The predominance of female teachers is well documented. Women comprise 84% of primary teachers in North America and Western Europe, 60% in East Asia and the Pacific, and 77% in Latin America and the Caribbean (Drudy, 2008).
In England, only around 14% of primary teachers are men (House of Commons Library, 2022).
The gap this pattern is meant to explain starts early. Atkinson and Wilson (2003) found a gender gap favoring girls already visible by around age seven, well before subject choice could explain it.
It is also uneven by subject: in England’s 2024 GCSE results, girls led boys overall, but boys continued to out-perform girls in mathematics, physics, economics, and statistics.
Key Takeaways
- Feminisation: the claim that mostly-female teaching staff have reshaped curriculum, expectations, and assessment in ways said to favour girls.
- Contested Claim: direct tests, including a randomized US study, mostly find no causal penalty for boys from being taught by women.
- Coursework: girls are said to gain from coursework-heavy assessment; England’s 2010s exam reforms cut coursework partly to close this gap.
- Laddish Subcultures: some boys build status by rejecting academic effort, a peer-culture explanation distinct from teacher gender.
- Class Matters More: social class and ethnicity predict attainment more strongly than gender does on its own.
- Gender-Bias Critique: radical feminists argue the framing treats girls’ gains as a problem, unlike boys’ historical dominance.
Why do girls have more of an advantage in education?
The feminization argument points to several mechanisms working together, not one.
Role Models, Teacher Expectations, and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The teaching workforce is described as ‘female-biased’ (Skelton, 2002). With far more female teachers, especially in the earliest years of school, girls have more same-sex adults to model themselves on.
Girls may also be more likely to seek advice and approval from a female teacher than boys are.
A lack of male role models is thought to leave boys without an alternative model of masculinity compatible with academic engagement. The effect is said to be indirect.
It is argued to contribute to problems with motivation, discipline, and classroom social interaction.
Women teachers are also argued to generally hold higher expectations of girls’ abilities than of boys’ (Skelton, 2002).
If pupils internalize this pattern, it could work as a self-fulfilling prophecy: an expectation that becomes true partly because holding it changes how people act.
This is not unlike the Pygmalion effect. Rosenthal and Jacobson first demonstrated it experimentally in a real classroom.
A teacher who expects less of a boy may, without meaning to, give him less challenge or encouragement.
A boy who senses this may disengage further, seeming to confirm the original lower expectation.
Curriculum Delivery and Assessment Design
Curriculum delivery is also argued to favour girls (Delamont, 1999). Classrooms have moved away from individualised, competitive practice toward collaborative group work.
Girls are said to gain from this because they generally have stronger verbal and collaborative skills.
Boys, by contrast, are more often socialised toward active, physical, and competitive interaction.
Textbooks and reading schemes have also dropped overt gender stereotyping. In the 1970s and 1980s, girls were often shown as future wives and mothers.
That image discouraged interest in science and maths. This removed one barrier to girls’ achievement.
By the same logic, though, it should have helped boys too, not disadvantaged them. This is a tension the feminisation account does not fully resolve.
Assessment design matters too. Improvements in girls’ relative achievement are said to coincide with the expansion of coursework in GCSE-style qualifications.
Coursework is read as favouring girls. Unseen, time-pressured terminal exams are read as favouring boys instead (Mitsos & Browne, 1998).
Girls are thought to hold an advantage in coursework partly because they are, on average, more organised and conscientious.
They are also more likely to seek help from teachers while planning and drafting their work (Mitsos & Browne, 1998).
What are the consequences for boys?
A feminized system is said to make some boys switch off from school altogether.
Disengagement and Underachievement
Boys are more likely to be excluded from school and to drop out before finishing secondary or tertiary study.
Enrolment of men in US colleges and universities has also declined in recent decades (Mulvey, 2010).
Boys can be reluctant to do homework.
As a result, they more often receive negative feedback, poorer grades, and lower performance than girls (Belaid & Sarnou, 2018).
Doing well at school is sometimes coded as feminine. School itself can feel ‘too feminized’ for some boys to identify with.
A lack of male role models is also thought to leave boys without an alternative model of masculinity (Skelton, 2002).
See Role Models, Teacher Expectations, and the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, above, for more on this mechanism.
None of this is universal. Many boys thrive under female teachers; the mechanisms above are proposed tendencies, not fixed rules.
Laddish Subcultures and Peer Culture
A related but distinct explanation points to anti-school ‘laddish’ subcultures rather than teacher gender.
Willis’s (1977) classic study of working-class boys, ‘the lads,’ found that some build a masculine identity around rejecting academic effort.
They treat conscientious pupils, or ‘swots,’ with contempt. They mock rule-following as effeminate.
This is a way of claiming status among peers when academic success feels out of reach.
Mac an Ghaill (1994) extended the idea. He found several competing versions of school-based masculinity, including explicitly anti-academic ‘macho lads,’ rather than one uniform group.
- Willis (1977) and Mac an Ghaill (1994): boys build status by rejecting academic effort and mocking conformity as unmasculine.
- Francis and Skelton (2005): disengagement instead reflects boys’ own disruptive choices, better met with firmer discipline than more male teachers.
Francis and Skelton (2005) offer a sharply different reading of the same behaviour.
They argue boys choose to disengage. This is better addressed through discipline, they say, than a drive to hire more male teachers.
Either way, this explanation locates the cause of boys’ disengagement in peer culture and masculine identity, not in the gender of whoever is teaching the class.
Evaluation
The feminization account faces several serious criticisms.
- Whose Interests Does This Serve? the framing may redirect attention to boys’ needs just as girls close a much older gap, rather than fixing structural inequalities.
- Correlation, Not Causation: the trend lines fit, but studies designed to test the mechanism directly mostly do not find it.
- The Social Class Confound: white, middle-class girls are more likely to succeed academically than working-class or minority-ethnic girls (Abbott et al., 2006); more broadly, gender differences are smaller than class and ethnicity differences, and largest where overall attainment is already lowest (Connolly, 2006) – see Alternative Explanations for the Gender Gap, above.
- Definitional Slipperiness: ‘feminisation’ is used to mean at least three different things, making the claim hard to pin down and test.
Whose Interests Does This Framing Serve?
This criticism comes most sharply from a radical feminist position.
It argues that ‘feminisation of education’ takes a genuine finding, girls’ improved relative attainment, and frames it as a problem needing correction.
Boys never faced this. Their historical dominance of educational and economic power was never treated as a problem needing ‘re-masculinisation.’
Radical feminists accept that girls are achieving more.
They argue this happens despite the patriarchal structure of education, not because it has been transformed (Skelton, 2002).
Women remain hugely under-represented in the curriculum itself. Wiener (1995) calls history teaching a ‘Women Free Zone.’
Men also dominate senior roles.
Around one in four male primary teachers becomes a headteacher, compared with about one in thirteen female teachers (Skelton, 2002).
This is not just a claim about school itself.
Subject choice differs by gender too. Girls are less likely to pursue and stay in science, engineering, and technology.
Those who do often feel marginalised in a male-dominated field (Abbott et al., 2006).
Careers matter here too. Later on, women more often face slower promotion, career sacrifices for family, and a gender pay gap.
So while school may be structured to favour girls, that advantage does not carry through to higher education or employment.
Read this way, alarm about a ‘feminized’ system can redirect attention toward boys just as girls begin closing a much older gap.
Correlation, Not Causation
Much of the case for feminisation rests on a correlation.
Female teachers are common, and so is the attainment gap.
Two widespread trends occurring together, though, is weak evidence for a specific cause.
Both trends could share other explanations entirely, from labour-market change to assessment reform to shifting norms about masculinity.
The mechanism has actually been tested, though, with designs built to isolate a cause.
The finding does not hold up.
Studies of what pupils and teachers themselves believe, large-scale UK attainment data, and a randomized US experiment have all pointed the same way.
None found it. See Evidence: Does Teacher Gender Affect Attainment?, above, for the direct test.
This matters. Designs higher up the evidence hierarchy, like random assignment, are pointing away from a causal claim that weaker correlational evidence makes look self-evident.
The Social Class Confound
Connolly (2006) makes an important point here.
Treating ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ as internally uniform groups obscures something real.
Social class and ethnicity predict attainment far more strongly than gender does on its own (see Social Class and Material Deprivation, above).
A feminisation account here risks a mistake.
It attributes to teacher gender a pattern that, for the pupils most affected, is better explained by material deprivation itself.
This matters for policy too.
Treating ‘boys’ underachievement’ as one national problem with one national fix, more male teachers, is risky.
It may misdirect resources away from the working-class and minority-ethnic pupils for whom the gap is actually concentrated. National-level talk of ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ hides exactly the pupils who need help most.
Definitional Slipperiness
‘Feminisation’ is also used loosely, to mean at least three different things that do not necessarily travel together.
It can mean the sex ratio of the teaching workforce, a demographic fact.
It can also mean a shift in pedagogy toward styles thought to suit girls, a contested claim about classroom practice.
Or it can mean something else again.
It can mean a cultural coding of school itself as feminine, which some boys are said to resist.
This third sense sits closer to the laddish-subculture account (see Laddish Subcultures and Peer Culture, above) than to teacher demographics.
Studies often slide between these senses within the same argument.
That makes the underlying claim hard to test cleanly.
It is also easy to defend against any single piece of contrary evidence.
If the workforce-composition version is falsified, the argument can simply retreat to the pedagogy or culture version instead.
Contemporary Research
More recent research tests this directly, using random or near-random assignment of pupils to teachers.
This goes beyond just asking what people believe.
Does Teacher Gender Cause the Attainment Gap? The Randomized Evidence
- Aim: To identify the causal effect of being assigned a female rather than a male primary-school teacher on pupils’ maths and reading achievement. It also tested whether any effect differs by pupil sex.
- Method: Antecol et al. (2015) used nearly 2,000 pupil-level observations from random assignment of teachers in disadvantaged US elementary schools. They compared outcomes for boys and girls taught by female versus male teachers.
- Results: Assignment to a female teacher lowered girls’ maths scores, but only when she had a weaker maths background herself. There was no effect on girls’ reading, and no significant effect of teacher gender on boys’ achievement in either subject.
- Conclusion: Random assignment rules out the possibility that pupils who end up with female or male teachers already differ in ways that affect attainment. It found no causal penalty for boys from being taught by a woman.
Where an effect did appear, it ran the opposite way from the feminisation story: a conditional cost to some girls, not a cost to boys.
It was also tied to teacher subject expertise rather than gender itself.
This null result for boys is not a one-off.
Using large administrative and survey data from 413 English primary classes, Carrington et al. (2008) likewise found teacher gender was unrelated to pupils’ attainment.
There was no support for the idea that male teachers help boys more than female teachers do.
The picture is not simply ‘gender doesn’t matter’ everywhere, though.
One Chinese study points the other way.
Using random assignment of pupils to teachers in Chinese middle schools, it found that female teachers actually raised girls’ test scores and wellbeing there. That effect was concentrated among pupils from less-educated or migrant families (Gong et al., 2018).
Taken together, the causal evidence since 2015 points to something heterogeneous and context-dependent, not a stable disadvantage for boys.
Why Are There So Few Male Teachers?
A separate question is why the profession stays so heavily female in the first place.
A self-reinforcing supply problem would need a different response than a ‘boys need role models’ policy.
Analysing international test data from 49 countries, Han et al. (2020) found boys were consistently less likely than girls to expect to become teachers themselves.
This gap narrowed where more men already taught.
It also narrowed where teacher pay was higher. The low share of male teachers, in other words, may partly feed on itself.
Evidence: Does Teacher Gender Affect Attainment?
The mechanism doing the most work in the feminisation argument is that having mostly female teachers itself changes outcomes. This has been tested directly, not just inferred from national statistics.
The most detailed English study of this question is Skelton et al.’s (2009) investigation of gender-matching in primary schools.
- Aim: To test whether primary-age pupils and teachers actually perceive teacher gender as affecting pupils’ experience, engagement, or behaviour. It also tested whether gender-matched teachers behave differently in the classroom.
- Method: Skelton et al. (2009) studied 51 Year 3 classes across two English regions, with 307 pupils aged seven to eight and 51 teachers. Each school was studied over two days using pupil and teacher interviews plus structured classroom observation.
- Results: Sixty-five per cent of children rejected the idea that teacher gender mattered, with no real difference between boys’ and girls’ answers. Most teachers agreed, though female teachers were more likely to disagree (64%) than male teachers were (40%).
- Conclusion: Neither the pupils most affected nor most teachers endorsed the idea that a teacher’s gender changes how they teach a pupil. Gendered assumptions still shaped everyday practice, though, which complicates any simple claim that gender is irrelevant.
Comparing two demographically similar but distant regions, and finding no real difference, gives the findings a fair claim to generalise across English primary schools of this type.
Each school was studied for only two days, though. That may have produced socially desirable answers rather than typical classroom behaviour.
Alternative Explanations for the Gender Gap
Feminisation of the teaching workforce is one candidate explanation among several. The evidence increasingly treats it as one contributing factor rather than the main cause.
Social Class and Material Deprivation
Connolly (2006) analysed Youth Cohort Study data covering English pupils from 1997 to 2001.
He found that both social class and ethnicity have a substantially larger influence on GCSE attainment than gender does on its own.
Gender differences interact with class and ethnicity.
The lower a group’s overall attainment, the larger the gender gap within it tends to be.
A middle-class boy and a working-class boy do not share one ‘boy’ experience of a feminized curriculum.
Material disadvantage does much of the explaining. Any credible account of the gender gap has to be read alongside class and ethnicity, not treated as a clean, isolable variable.
This has a direct implication for policy. A blanket national response aimed at ‘boys’ or ‘girls’ as uniform groups will miss the real target.
The pupils, from either sex, who need help most are the ones where class and ethnicity are doing most of the work.
Changing Aspirations and the Labour Market
A different explanation looks at girls’ own changing goals rather than boys’ disengagement.
Sharpe (1994) compared interviews with British schoolgirls from the early 1970s and the late 1980s.
Earlier cohorts prioritised ‘love, marriage, husbands, and children.’ The later cohort prioritised careers, qualifications, and independence instead.
On this reading, expanding job opportunities for women, and the wider women’s movement, drove up girls’ effort and engagement at school.
The curriculum and teaching workforce may have stayed fairly constant while girls’ own reasons for trying changed.
See also Laddish Subcultures and Peer Culture, above, for a parallel explanation centred on boys rather than girls.
None of these explanations fully replaces the others.
Class, changing aspirations, and peer culture likely each explain part of the pattern. The causal evidence reviewed below gives feminisation of the teaching workforce the least direct support of the group.
References
Abbott, P., Tyler, M., & Wallace, C. (2006). An introduction to sociology: Feminist perspectives. Routledge.
Antecol, H., Eren, O., & Ozbeklik, S. (2015). The effect of teacher gender on student achievement in primary school. Journal of Labor Economics, 33(1), 63-89.
Atkinson, A., & Wilson, D. (2003). Measuring pupil attainment in English secondary schools: A preliminary analysis (CMPO Working Paper No. 03/063). Centre for Market and Public Organisation, University of Bristol.
Belaid, L., & Sarnou, H. (2018). Feminisation of Schooling: Understanding the Detraditionalized Gender. Brolly, 1(1).
Carrington, B., Tymms, P., & Merrell, C. (2008). Role models, school improvement and the ‘gender gap’—do men bring out the best in boys and women the best in girls? British Educational Research Journal, 34(3), 315-327.
Connolly, P. (2006). The effects of social class and ethnicity on gender differences in GCSE attainment: A secondary analysis of the Youth Cohort Study of England and Wales 1997-2001. British Educational Research Journal, 32(1), 3-21.
Delamont, S. (1999). Gender and the discourse of derision. Research papers in Education, 14(1), 3-21.
Drudy, S. (2008). Gender balance/gender bias: The teaching profession and the impact of feminisation. Gender and education, 20(4), 309-323.
Francis, B., & Skelton, C. (2005). Reassessing gender and achievement: Questioning contemporary key debates. Routledge.
Gong, J., Lu, Y., & Song, H. (2018). The effect of teacher gender on students’ academic and noncognitive outcomes. Journal of Labor Economics, 36(3), 743-778.
Han, S. W., Borgonovi, F., & Guerriero, S. (2020). Why don’t more boys want to become teachers? The effect of a gendered profession on students’ career expectations. International Journal of Educational Research, 103, Article 101645.
House of Commons Library. (2022). Increasing the number of male primary school teachers (Research briefing CDP-2022-0197). UK Parliament.
Mac an Ghaill, M. (1994). The making of men: Masculinities, sexualities and schooling. Open University Press.
Mitsos, E., & Browne, K. (1998). Gender differences in education: the underachievement of boys. Sociology Review, 8, 27-29.
Mulvey, J. (2010). The feminization of schools. The Education Digest, 75(8), 35.
Sharpe, S. (1994). Just like a girl: How girls learn to be women (Rev. ed.). Penguin.
Skelton, C. (2002). The “feminisation of schooling” or “re-masculinising” primary education? International Studies in Sociology of Education, 12(1), 77-96.
Skelton, C., Carrington, B., Francis, B., Hutchings, M., Read, B., & Hall, I. (2009). Gender ‘matters’ in the primary classroom: Pupils’ and teachers’ perspectives. British Educational Research Journal, 35(2), 187-204.
Wiener, J. (1995). History lesson. New Republic, 212(1), 9-11.
Willis, P. (1977). Learning to labour: How working class kids get working class jobs. Saxon House.
