There’s much here I agree with her on. But I also think she’s framing the argument for representation in teaching far too narrowly, and in the process making it harder to address. I’ll address each of her points in turn, challenge some outlandish claims about Scandinavia, and finish with a plea not to falsely equate a positive movement for more men in our schools with a negative blame campaign against women teachers.
1. Girls have long been ahead of boys
Grose correctly writes that the gender gap in favor of girls in K-12 education is not a recent development, writing:
[T]he research that really surprised me was a meta analysis from 2014 by Daniel and Susan D. Voyer that showed that girls have been outperforming boys in school since 1914. This suggests that female academic achievement is hard to correlate with the post-1972 impact of Title IX or other downstream consequences of second-wave feminism. And going back further, I find it hard to believe that a teaching force trained before women had access to their own credit cards was somehow favoring girls, when the society around them wasn’t even sold on higher education for women.
But this is not breaking news to scholars in the field. If I may be permitted quote myself on this point, in Of Boys and Men I wrote: