Today's Article (27/11/2025)
The Real Way Schools are Failing Boys
It’s that boys are still socialized to compete only with boys and to read girls’ success as illegitimate or emasculating. The result is dissonance, resentment, and disengagement for boys—and hostile climates for girls.
Too often, competitiveness is culturally-coded as masculine, and for boys it becomes a pillar of identity. From childhood play to college sports, boys learn that “real” competition is male-against-male—the arena where status is earned and manhood confirmed.
But these rigid gender ideals don’t leave room for boys to compete with girls as equals in the classroom, or later, as adults, the workplace. As a result, boys often experience cross-gender competition as confusing, shameful, or as a test of masculinity rather than a test of skill.
When girls compete—and win, as they are bound to at least occasionally do—boys tend to respond in three ways. Some boys recalibrate, softening overt bravado. Others detach, underperforming or withdrawing to avoid the appearance of “losing to a girl.” And others escalate aggression—interrupting, dismissing ideas, excluding girls from groups or partnerships, and resorting to sexualized, relational hostility.
The problem isn’t girls’ gains—it’s a competitive culture that equates boys’ worth with dominance over other boys and offers no workable script for competing with girls as peers.
If we want healthier classrooms and better outcomes, we need to de-gender the competitive script: teach mixed-gender collaboration and rivalry as normal, interrupt status policing, and evaluate excellence beyond dominance. Boys shouldn’t need to win to be masculine; they need a way to compete that doesn’t make girls’ success feel like their failure or emasculation.
If men are assumed to be “naturally” more capable and rational, stronger, and better suited for leadership, and women are “naturally” nurturing, emotional, and designed for care and support roles, how can boys and men honorably compete with them?
For many boys trying to learn how to be men and still trying to conform to provide and protect ideals, competing with girls can feel like they are like punching down or that they have one hand tied behind their backs. Either way, it can feel wrong because they have been told that good men protect girls and women; they don’t compete with them.
In gaming, for instance, researchers have found that when boys lose to other boys, they are more likely to be gracious compared to when they lose to girls. The later is seen as shameful.