I’ve recently been thinking about literacy rates after coming across a TikTok on my fyp (I’m as hopelessly addicted as anyone else). It was a post 2024 election post investigating the gendered differences in the election polls. The creator pointed out that across the board boys in school are falling between somewhat and significantly behind the girls in school. This is now across the board, where a few decades ago boys dominated STEM, but now the ever widening gap is in the liberal arts. According to the Brookings Institute, “Girls outperform boys in reading by more than 40 percent of a grade level in every state”¹. This has been a generational issue, and is not limited to america, but is an issue that seems to be increasing as literacy rates continue to drop, with over 50% of americans not reading above a 6th grade level.

Widespread literacy is a historically new concept, it has become a necessity in modern life. With the decades of studies and experience we have on the subject, we know that higher literacy rates lead to overall better outcomes for societies, as well as overall better life standards for those with higher rates. The economic circumstances of educational outcomes cannot be ignored, however with the recent election that I find myself considering the gendered differences more. Men are both more illiterate than women, and voted significantly more for Donald Trump.

It’s not fair to draw a 1:1 comparison between literacy rates and voting for Donald Trump. I do think it is fair to point out that a large strategy for him and his campaign has always been to speak and communicate with low complexity language, generally falling under what would be considered a 3rd grade reading level². This makes his ideas more accessible, yes, but also allows him to prey on those most vulnerable more easily. Anyone who is unable to engage with more complex language because of a failing of their education are much more easily swayed with things explained to them in a way they can understand.

Gendered Education

Starting a few decades ago, under the push of 3rd wave feminism, a movement started to bring more young girls into STEM fields. This was a pushback on traditional thinking about which genders belonged in which fields. Women had been relegated to “softer” since being allowed into academia, and through many years of fighting, and an ongoing struggle for wider-spread recognition, young girls have now started to outpace their male counterparts in STEM as well.

There has been, at least in the american psyche, a longstanding gendered difference in school subjects. Where academia used to be a boys-club, women were able to find a place in the arts, and the gendering began in earnest. Since the patriarchy could no longer fully exclude women from academia, it was decided that easy, soft, “feminine” subjects could be the purview of women in academia, but the hard, “concrete” sciences were kept for the men. This was associated with a loss of status among those in these now “feminine” fields. When was the last time that you heard a man being lauded for his poetry? Much like the opposite of when computer programming was found to be useful, men handed a few things to women and then decided they no longer mattered anymore (programming was originally seen a grunt work for the typists, leaving the actual thinking to the computer scientists. As programming and design got closer and closer together, programming became a noble field, and the women who dominated the early industry were pushed out altogether, to the point most people assume it has always been a male dominated figure. Bless up hidden figures).

What I hope to impress is that the gendering of things is not something that tends to go both ways. Generally, all the “good” things in society are already reserved for men, and things that become good are taken completely. While there is finally some effort to reaching gender parity in a field like programming, it is still obvious to any women in it (and men who pay attention) just how hostile it is toward them, and how overall unwelcome they are³. This even happens in reverse, the way the “soft” arts have been wholly given to women, though most of the higher earners in art tend to be men.

Why reading though

There is a good reason I wanted to focus on the literacy gap between the genders. I think that while it is obvious enough that the gap exists because of the standard patriarchal gendering of things, it speaks to something deeper in the gendering of our society. I posit that not only is the class subject of English established as a feminine in society, but that the critical and creative thinking itself that is supposed to be taught. Through the loss of the masculine in the liberal arts, we have stopped allowing men to think in critical and creative ways, restricting male thought to logical thinking. This fits with the neo-con attitude of masculinity that is rooted in stoicism. No longer are men to think in ways that could cause emotions, they must control them and only think “logically”.

Not only is this “logical” thinking centered around the generally accepted thread of western thought since the 18th century, but it does not allow the consideration of any human elements. If we are to not think with any human element, why think in the first place. If all thoughts form in the way of a mathematical formula that has a one-to-one mapping of input and output would be to reduce the absolute breath and depth possible in human thought.

This limiting of thought can be seen throughout Donald Trump’s politics. Given that you can move to a post-truth world, no thinking has to be done past whatever you have decided is truth, and the obvious, logical outcome. If we take as truth that our country is going to hell because… there’s too many illegal immigrants? Then its simple, we just get rid of the illegal immigrants and the problem is fixed. This obviously doesn’t hold up to any critical thought, so its helpful if your supporters didn’t have those faculties as well-developed.

So boys don’t think good, so what

I think this current wave of ignorance is only an appetizer if we are to continue down the path we are on. Short of completely overthrowing the patriarchy, I think there are several things we can try as a society to pull ourselves back from the edge on this. For starters, I think there should be larger work to remove gendering from studies. Its obvious that it is failing us the same way all other genderings are. For smaller steps, there could be more educator awareness of the issue, and training on how to properly engage all students. As a larger society this falls under the same as any other issue of gendering, where mass shifts in thinking need to occur. No longer should English be a “girls” class any more than math or science should be a “boys” class.

To put more on the education system, I think more can be done to interest boys in things like reading. While it is already a struggle to interest any children to be away from screens for more than a few seconds, books can be brought in that reflect young male interests, while including intermediate works to bridge the gap between captian underpants and the odyssey.

My last piece on this is that I’m exhausted of the reaction to “boys are generally more illiterate than girls” being “well then that’s what they get”. While I understand that the patriarchy we live under is hell for women, and they struggle every day to try to reach the same baseline men start on, it is a disservice to us all to say “fuck the kids”. These boys who are being left behind across the country every day are not the scary men that are running and ruining our world. If anything, it is our best chance to sway any of them away from the violent, cold future laid out for them to one that is full of humanity and love.