Selling out our boys

- Feminist bureaucrats cover up the boys’ education crisis.

“We can no longer allow the partisans of girls to write the rules.”

This is Christina Hoff Sommers, writing in her book, The War against Boys, which showed how feminists were controlling American education and distorting research findings to suppress how badly boys were doing in school.

That was a quarter of a century ago and still the partisans of girls have a very firm grip on American education, with boys falling even further behind. Hoff Sommers’ efforts to wrestle back control from the ideologues sadly have had little impact.

The same dire state of affairs applies in Australia. In this country we have thousands of blinkered partisans of girls working as education bureaucrats, academics and policy makers. These femocrats are doing a remarkable job suppressing evidence of boys’ ongoing education crisis whilst continuing to promote measures to enhance girls’ performance.

Across Australia our education departments publish annual reports which list achievement gaps – by indigenous status, socio-economic status, disability, geolocation and language background – but never by gender.

Yet the data is there showing girls are streaking ahead of boys in almost every subject in final year exam results. There’s now hardly a subject where boys come out on top, apart from a couple of advanced maths and physics units.

Yet far more important than who is top of the pile is the deteriorating position of the boys at the bottom. The latest NAPLAN school tests show twice as many boys as girls seriously failing in writing and numeracy at every level – years 3,5,7 and 9. Almost half (47%) of all year 9 boys fail grammar vs 36% of girls.

Nearly half (44%) of boys in year 7 failed to reach minimum writing standards. In reading boys are around 13 months behind similar girls. And almost as many males as females are seriously failing the NAPLAN numeracy test at every grade level.

This should be a huge story, with almost half of this generation of children likely to end up barely literate, unable to perform the basic reading required for post school success. We constantly are exposed to media stories highlighting boys in trouble, the massive numbers now on Ritalin and other drugs for attention problems, the one in six boys receiving disability funding for autism or developmental delays. More boys being suspended or expelled, and failing to complete their schooling, dropping out early, fewer making it to university.

Yet our education bureaucracy just doesn’t want to know.

Back in the 1990s I wrote a great deal about boys’ education, reporting on the efforts of the public servants who run our education departments to deny there’s a problem.

“Boys’ disadvantage?” one gender equity officer said to me, “Well, it’s disadvantage complete with carpeting and air-conditioning.”

The bottom line is they aren’t interested in a fair go for boys and girls but, rather, in using education to provide a leg up to girls they perceive as being unfairly treated in our patriarchal society. Ironically, this was the position promoted by a former Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Susan Halliday, who, in a submission to a boys’ education inquiry, argued against boys as a group being given specialised attention. She exhorted the inquiry to look at the position of males and females in society generally and “not artificially limit their consideration to the few years at school in which girls enjoy comparative opportunities to boys”.

That’s the mentality driving the feminists running our education departments. Over the past forty years they have defeated every effort to get boys’ results onto the public agenda, derailed policy efforts put in place following various boys’ education inquiries and kept a firm lid on results that could be used to expose the plight of boys. Just look at these recent examples of government authorities doing the bidding of the feminists by ignoring the failure of boys:

• A Productivity Commission report on educational equity failed to include any gender-specific data on literacy gaps.

• The Australian Education Research Organisation’s (ACER) report on student writing deficits which failed to include the highly unequal outcomes for boys despite the NAPLAN data showing massive gaps in literary results.

• A Grattan Institute exploration of gender gaps which prioritized girls trailing in maths while ignoring literacy gaps disadvantaging boys.

• The Federal government STEM Equity Monitor aimed at boosting girls’ participation in maths and STEM. There are no equivalent datasets or incentives tracking boys’ aspirations or underperformance in humanities or literacy-heavy subjects.

Oh yes, the ideologues are firmly in control and every educational organisation toes the line. We are told by academics that it’s “a career ending move” for a PhD student to tackle why boys are dropping out from school or failing in record numbers. The data is there to start asking the right questions, but no one dares touch it.

The cowardly compliance of our entire education sector makes me despair. Surely some of these people are parents of sons. How can they sell out generation after generation of innocent boys? The education system’s cruel bias is on display for anyone who cares to look. What’s missing is the courage to act.

I’m just back from some time in Canberra, lobbying the few members of parliament prepared to speak up for men and boys. These are grim times with Labor firmly back in power, supported by the vile, anti-male Greens. Once again, femocrats are rubbing their hands in glee, finding fresh ways to promote girls’ education and ignoring the plight of boys.

That’s been the pattern for nearly the last forty years, ever since Bob Hawke’s government in 1986 launched the National Policy for the Education of Girls in Australian Schools setting the spotlight firmly on girls’ achievement. The government coffers poured out support, including millions for gender equity in curriculum reform- which had nothing to do with equity, of course, but rather trying to get girls to beat boys in everything, particularly maths and science subjects. Boys only featured when their behaviour interfered with girls’ progress, with a new emphasis on sexual harassment.

They threw over three million to schools to encourage them to get girls into top courses and poured money into the Girls in Maths and Science project; the STEM Equity Monitor; and program after program aimed at boosting the achievement of girls.

I was writing for our major newspapers at the time, reporting on growing disquiet in the community as parents noticed all the high achievers were suddenly girls. A mother from Cooma sent me newspaper cuttings from her children’s school speech days. “Twenty years ago, you would find a mix of boys and girls but now they are all girls. What’s happened to the boys?” she asked.

It took over a decade and a change of government for any attempt to answer that question. When the Howard government set up a parliamentary inquiry, it was flooded with submissions from concerned parents and teachers. The resulting report: Boys: Getting it Right - made it clear education departments were getting it very, very wrong.

“How could education have got so out of kilter? How could so many educational professionals fail to recognise the emergence of a serious problem of alienation and disengagement from education of so many boys?” asked the Deputy Chair of the parliamentary inquiry, Rod Sawford, when he presented the report to parliament.

The report came up with various initiatives to try to address boys’ educational needs - targeted literacy programs, teacher training and revisions to the Gender Equity Framework to prioritize boys. But dealing with eight Labor education ministers at the state level proved a major obstacle and, when Howard lost power, any interest in boys’ education returned to the back burner.

(The same happened in NSW in 1994 when backbencher Stephen O’Doherty led a similar inquiry. The resulting boys’ education action plan was shelved when the Labor gained power.)

When the Howard government inquiry was in the news, I interviewed a former head of education in Victoria, Melbourne University professor Peter Hill, who pointed out that they were observing “a gender gap in the opposite direction far bigger than anything we saw in the past.” He said the case for addressing low achieving boys was overwhelming.

Yet, here we are, over 20 years down the track and the problem has only got worse. And what does the Albanese government do? Earlier this month they announced major increases in funding for women in STEM (now a $47.5 million commitment), which includes $2 million for the Girls in STEM Toolkit and more money for the STEM Equity Monitor now worth $3.8 mill. And so it goes on…

Last year a national investigation by Catholic Schools NSW found Australia is facing “a growing crisis in boys’ education” with boys overrepresented amongst the most academically vulnerable school students. Their excellent paper – The Echoes of Disparity Report – highlighted “the social justice issue nobody is talking about.” Naturally the report sank without a trace.

A funny footnote to this worrying state of affairs was that late last year Australia was found to have ranked dead last in the field of 58 counties participating in a long-running international maths and science test and now has the world’s biggest gender gap in favour of boys.

Australia has been participating in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) every four years since 1995, and about 14,000 year 4 and 8 students took the exam in 2023. Last year, for the first time, Australian boys outperformed girls in both subject and year levels.

What a hoot. How’s that after 40 years of pouring resources into trying to help girls pull ahead in precisely these subjects?

“The chase towards gender equity in STEM and especially in Maths has been an expensive and counterproductive venture,” says Glenn Fahey, Director of Education at the Centre for Independent Studies. He points to an interesting paper by an expert in the field, psychology professor David C. Geary who makes the case that we are undermining our country’s STEM capabilities by pushing girls into STEM who lack the predictors of success in these fields.

So, what do we do to promote success for both boys and girls? Fahey says there is no better option than getting the fundamentals right for all students, starting with good teaching, a sensible curriculum, and ensuring classroom time is productively used.

The evidence is firmly in on what works in the classroom for students to succeed, according to Fahey: teaching that is explicit and actively led by the teacher. This is especially helpful for boys, who on average demonstrate lower levels of attention - therefore disproportionately struggling with the kind of fashionable teaching approaches that leave a lot more agency to children than adults.

So, what we are talking about is a good education for everyone, irrespective of gender.

But it is not going to happen unless ordinary people - parents, grandparents, everyone who cares about the future of all our children - start to speak out.

We have Senators lined up to speak on this in parliament and ask questions in Senate Estimates. I urge you all to do your bit by sending this draft letter to key politicians, both state and federal, and use school parents’ groups to voice your concerns.

Boys deserve a fair go.

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A sad postscript about Fiona Girkin, the brave lecturer at the University of Tasmania who was teaching police the truth about domestic violence - until I interviewed her for my YouTube channel.

As a result of the fuss created by local feminists who complained to the ABC, Fiona is no longer working at the university. She is now consulting and creating educational materials on toxic female behaviour at work and in relationships. Please support her new endeavours: Podcast: Leadership Shenanigans | YouTube: @DrFionaGirkin. Her website is www.drfionagirkin.com.