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HEPI has an interesting report out today.
Boys will be boys examines a persistent and widening gender gap in education, and shows that boys fall behind girls at every stage - from early years to higher education.
Boys perform worse in literacy and language skills from a young age, lag in secondary school qualifications, and are significantly less likely to enter university than their female peers. It explores potential causes for this gap - developmental differences in brain maturity, a lack of male role models in schools, societal expectations around masculinity, and biases in teaching methods.
It also suggests that boys often lower aspirations, struggle with engagement in traditional learning environments, and face greater stigma when seeking academic support.
If we view higher education as a straightforward category - symbolic of a higher status, level of achievement and granter of better outcomes - it all makes sense. But as such, there’s much the report doesn’t get into that it probably should if we’re to take scarce access and participation resources and plough them into men.
If we look at graduate outcomes, for example, on the classic continuation metric England’s access and participation dashboard tells us that in 2021/22, men were on 73 per cent while women lagged behind on 71.4 per cent. I could just as easily argue that closing that gap should be a major focus for the sector.
Part of what’s going on is about subject - which of course OfS’ data on access and participation is never split by. Men outnumber women in engineering and technology, computing, mathematical sciences, architecture, building and planning, physical sciences, business and management and biological and sport sciences - and guess how those subjects do in LEO data on salary differentials.
Degree apprenticeship access is roughly equal - but watch out for those subject splits. Below HE at Level 3, there’s a 38 per cent long term salary differential for men doing engineering apprenticeships rather than a college course, compared to a 5 per cent differential for women in child development and wellbeing, and so on and so on and so on.
The report does point out that young men and young women who do make it to higher education veer disproportionately towards certain academic disciplines:
For example, UCAS data show over six times as many women as men study Education / Teaching and Veterinary Science and over four times as many take Psychology and Subjects allied to Medicine. In Nursing alone, women outnumber men by around 9:1.35 Over three times as many women as men opt for Languages and more than twice as many take Law and Agriculture / Land, while men are significantly more likely than women to opt for Engineering and Technology, Computing and Mathematics.
The suggestion in the report is that just as women have successfully been encouraged to enter some scientific roles, we should actively engage men in entering Health, Education, Administrative and Literacy (HEAL) occupations.
We could. Or we could ask ourselves why it is that related occupations are paid significantly less than others. If you’re thinking “well if more men were in them the salaries would go up”, maybe you’d be right - but on that chicken and egg problem, given the preponderance of women in public servant roles driving down those differentials, it feels like something government should fix by driving up those salaries.
There’s a way of looking at HE which is that it’s something to aspire to - but for many, it’s what you do instead of or to prepare for getting into the labour market. The split on employment rates between women and men aged 16-24 is negligible - it’s been at around 60 per cent each for years. The key differential is in the inactivity rate - men are out earning in the labour market while women are racking up debt in HE. As I noted a while ago, fantasies about the way in which more male participation might close a social mobility gap are, over the next few decades, likely to be just that.
I am though struck by the material in the report on achievement, attainment, and what I might call readiness. (Joint with Belgium) we have the youngest Bachelor’s graduates in the OECD - driven partly by age-on-entry and the pace at which we ram students through the system.
Men are almost 5 percentage points more likely to “drop out” (England, non-continuation, full-time first degree UG) than women. If the material in the report is telling us that for all sorts of reasons, men at 18 are less “ready” for HE, taking steps to encourage later entry and longer, less intense completion expectations (which are driven partly by our dated student finance rules) would appear to be a good bet.