Of Two Minds
ON A CRISP fall morning in 2017, veteran science teacher Mary Bozenmayer and her colleagues filed into the cafeteria of their New Jersey middle school for an all-day professional development session. The speaker took the podium, smiled brightly, and explained that he was there to tell them how boys and girls think differently.
Bozenmayer was skeptical. Given her scientific training, she knew that most theories about sex-related brain differences had been debunked long ago. Still, she tried to keep an open mind as the trainer, who worked for an organization called the Gurian Institute, told the teachers that girls learn best by sitting quietly and following directions while boys require competition and physical activity to master difficult concepts. “Males can store trivia (like sports statistics) better than females, and for a longer period of time,” read a card he handed out. Another stated, “Boys take longer to process emotions than girls, making them generally emotionally fragile.” Modern classrooms, the trainer said, cater to girls’ learning style—and as a result, he concluded, girls are succeeding in school while boys are falling dangerously behind.
This didn’t sit right with Bozenmayer, so she raised her hand and asked, “If boys are struggling so much, then why are we still seeing women underrepresented in Congress, in Fortune 500 companies?” The trainer responded by repeating his talking points. “I felt my blood pressure going up,” Bozenmayer recalls. “I was like, this just seems too skewed.” Yet when she looked around the room, she saw many of her male and female colleagues nodding in agreement, diligently sifting through the cards and taking notes.
The idea that boys and girls have innate characteristics that cause them to learn differently has picked up momentum over the past decade. The Gurian Institute says it has trained 60,000 educators in 2,000 school districts—to the tune of as much as $10,000 per session. Another prominent advocate of sex-differentiated education, the psychologist Leonard Sax, offers a popular two-day workshop for schools on “the emerging science of male-female differences.” At the Boy Brains & Engagement Conference, hundreds of teachers rack up continuing education credits while hearing about boys’ and girls’ learning styles. “Scientists have discovered about 100 typical gender differences in the brain,” states its brochure.
These ideas have gained traction among policymakers. The No Child Left Behind legislation signed by President George W. Bush in 2002 encouraged single-sex classrooms. Though the Obama administration pushed back against that idea, state legislators have taken up the cause: Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed a law allowing “gender-specific classrooms” in 2014; California passed a similar law in 2017. The number of single-sex public schools has exploded over the last two decades, up from a handful in the early 2000s to a few hundred today.
Beneath the move to make schools more “gender-friendly” lurks the fear that our educational system is failing boys in particular. A suite of bestselling books about boys’ academic struggles has pointed to their lagging grades, test scores, and graduation rates. “The evidence that boys are falling behind has mounted,” columnist David Brooks wrote in 2012. “The case is closed.” In a 2015 op-ed headlined “Why Schools Are Failing Our Boys,” one parent, a mother, article titled “The Feminization of Everything Fails Our Boys,” conservative pundit David French decried “the feminized school, complete with its zero tolerance, mortal fear of anything remotely martial, and its relentless emphasis on compassion and nurturing rather than exploration and adventure (unless the adventurer is a woman).”
