Misandry

Education

Education in general and “public” education in particular is rife with systemic, relentless and unaddressed misandry. It’s not a “western” problem. It’s a “everywhere” problem. There is not a single country on Earth that tried to test this and ended up not finding the exact same problem.

The problem is that women teachers, by and large, do grade boys lower for no objectively measurable reason other than misandry. The exact same paperwork is graded better by the exact same women teachers when they don’t know that the paper was written by a male pupil/student.

Here’s multiple sources for this reality:

 

The study, published in British Journal of Sociology of Education [in 2022], is the first to demonstrate that the problem is systemic – it is present across a variety of educational environments and irrespective of teachers’ characteristics.

Gender-related gaps in educational achievement are common worldwide. However, the nature of the gap differs with different ways of measuring achievement.

When the results of standardised tests, which have a standard scoring system, are used, girls typically outperform boys in humanities, languages and reading skills, while boys do better in maths.

In contrast, when grades are awarded by teachers, females do better than males in all subjects.

 

To quantify teacher bias, Terrier utilizes a French dataset tracking 4,490 pupils from grade 6 through grade 11 across 35 middle schools. The identification strategy exploits a combination of “blind” test scores—derived from standardized national evaluations graded externally without knowledge of student characteristics and “non-blind” scores provided by classroom teachers on internal exams. By employing a double-difference methodology, gender bias is defined as the average gap between non-blind and blind scores for girls minus the same gap for boys. To account for sampling noise caused by small class sizes, the study implements empirical Bayes estimates to adjust teacher bias metrics.

The empirical analysis reveals a significant teacher grading bias in favor of girls in mathematics. Conditional on their objective blind test performance, boys receive math grades that are, on average, 5.2% lower than those of their female peers. Interestingly, the baseline analysis does not show a systematic average gender bias in French, though individual teacher variation exists. When examining the roots of this grading behavior, Terrier finds that teacher experience plays a major role. Math teachers in their first year of teaching exhibit substantially higher levels of bias in favor of girls compared to colleagues with more than five years of experience. In contrast, experience has no significant effect on the grading practices of French teachers.

Critically, the study demonstrates that these short-term grading biases have long-lasting, causal impacts on human capital accumulation. Assigning a student to a math teacher who is one standard deviation more biased against boys reduces boys’ relative academic progress by 0.123 standard deviations in math and 0.106 standard deviations in French over the course of middle school. Ultimately, this grading favoritism accounts for roughly 6% of the total margin by which boys fall behind girls in math by the end of grade 9. Deeper analysis shows that this bias primarily functions by boosting the progress of girls rather than actively depressing the absolute progress of boys in math.

In other words, girls get a leg up, every step of the way starting from very young ages.

Furthermore, these biases steer high school academic trajectories. Girls who experience a math teacher biased in their favor are 3.6 percentage points more likely to select a competitive scientific track in grade 11—a critical precursor to careers in STEM fields. Terrier notes that without this teacher bias favoring girls, the gender gap in choosing a high school science track would be 12.5% larger in favor of boys. In other words, men’s excellence ends up being suppressed explicitly to help less qualified women solely because they’re women.

Conversely, the study rules out cumulative effects from multi-year exposure to the same teacher, as well as cross-subject spillovers. Robustness checks confirm that both blind and non-blind tests assess identical cognitive skills, reinforcing that the variance stems from grading bias rather than divergent evaluation criteria.

Published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, the article investigates whether teachers evaluate girls more generously than boys with identical subject-specific capabilities, and whether specific teacher, classroom, or institutional features mitigate this discrepancy.

To explore this, the authors utilize a dataset from the Italian National Institute for the Evaluation of the Education System (INVALSI-SNV) spanning the 2015–2016 and 2016–2017 academic years. The study pools a sample of approximately 39,000 10th-grade students matched directly with their language (literacy) and mathematics (numeracy) teachers. Methodologically, the authors use grade equation models embedded in a three-level hierarchical linear regression framework, where students are nested within classrooms/teachers, which are further nested within schools. Subject-specific competence is baselined using objective, “blind” standardized INVALSI test scores, which are compared against “non-blind” midterm report card grades scaled from 1 to 10.

The primary finding is the existence of a substantial and systematic female grading premium across both subjects. When comparing students with the exact same level of standardized competence, teachers award girls grades that are, on average, 0.4 points higher than those of boys. In language, this grading mismatch widens the existing female advantage. In mathematics—a subject where boys objectively outperform girls on the standardized test—the grading premium effectively erases the gap, ensuring that girls maintain higher classroom grades despite lower standardized scores.

Crucially, the study proves for the first time that this premium is systemic and deeply entrenched, as most teacher and classroom traits fail to moderate it.

This is the only major study that only confirms the systemic misandrist bias but does not confirm that female teachers are overwhelmingly guilty of it, but rather shows that all teachers are misandrist. The authors reject the “resemblance hypothesis,” finding that both male and female teachers over-grade girls to a similar degree. They also reject the “experience hypothesis,” demonstrating that a teacher’s age, within-school seniority, and permanent employment status have negligible impacts on narrowing the GGG.

Furthermore, classroom context variables, such as the proportion of female students or high-SES students, do not significantly alter the gap.
The only exceptions to this systemic stability occur in mathematics grading, which is moderated by class size and school tracking. Larger math classrooms significantly widen the GGG, further penalizing male students. Additionally, the math grading gap is wider in academic tracks (lyceums) and technical tracks than in vocational schools.

The authors propose several theoretical mechanisms for this mismatch, including teachers rewarding traditionally “female” classroom behaviors (such as quietness and order) that standardized tests do not capture, or executing positive discrimination to overcompensate and encourage girls in heavily stereotyped fields like mathematics. Lievore and Triventi conclude that because school grades are highly predictive of long-term life, tertiary education, and labor market outcomes, this grading bias against boys carries severe socio-educational consequences and warrants deliberate public policy intervention.

 

Published in The Journal of Development Studies, the article specifically tackles why schoolboys in rural areas of the Philippines lag behind their female counterparts in human capital accumulation. Rather than attributing this gap solely to innate academic deficits, Okabe shifts the academic focus to teacher evaluation behaviors and structural labor market realities.

To systematically analyze this issue, the study utilizes unique primary field data collected from a tailored survey encompassing 275 students across 9 villages in the Marinduque Province. This localized data is paired with official administrative data from the country’s National Achievement Tests (NATs). By embedding these datasets within a natural experimental design, the researcher isolates the casual impact of evaluation methodologies on student outcomes.

Even after applying strict regression models controlling for a comprehensive array of individual, household, and school characteristics, the results confirm that boys are systematically penalized under non-blind conditions. Male students display significant underperformance on their teacher-assigned report cards, yet this negative effect entirely disappears or is heavily mitigated in anonymous, blind external assessments.

Okabe identifies two underlying mechanisms that drive this severe gender grading mismatch. The first channel is rooted in implicit gender stereotypes held by local educators, which create generalized, anti-male biases regarding cognitive capability or compliance. Which is a very nice way of saying generalized misandry. Due to these entrenched representations, even diligent schoolboys fail to receive the same relative grading rewards as identically performing female students.

The second channel stems from the criteria embedded in classroom grades. Unlike external standardized tests that strictly evaluate curriculum knowledge, teacher-rated report cards frequently capture a broader spectrum of diligence-related behaviors, such as classroom obedience and school attendance. Because rural schoolboys statistically demonstrate lower engagement metrics in these specific non-cognitive areas, their subjective classroom grades suffer disproportionately. Which is a very nice way of saying that teachers systemically and deliberately treat boys as defective girls.

Furthermore, the study links this grading bias to macro-economic constraints within the region. The negative scoring impact on boys is actively amplified by a highly gender-skewed teacher labor market. Female “professionals” overwhelmingly dominate the local education workforce. This structural imbalance maximizes the statistical likelihood of a student-teacher gender mismatch, which correlates with an intensification of the grading penalties imposed on boys. Which is a nice way of saying that women teachers hate boys even more.

In conclusion, Okabe demonstrates that evaluation bias is not merely a pedagogical flaw but is deeply structural. Consequently, the paper stresses that gender-equalizing education policies must look beyond basic classroom interventions.

Among the studies that examined discrimination based on gender (21 studies in total), 52% found it, 24% did not find it, and 24% produced mixed results, meaning that discrimination was observed only under certain conditions.

The gender discrimination that was found was mostly directed against boys. On average, teachers’ assessment is higher for female students compared to what is measured by blind test scores and boys tend to receive lower grades than girls in school, even controlling for their performance in standard tests.

The proportion of studies that found discrimination based on sex (52%) was higher than the proportion of studies that found discrimination based on race (40%) (see Table 4 and the two paragraphs following it).

Links to studies included in the review are available in Table A1 of the Appendix.

The study “Gender Bias in teachers’ grading: What is in the grade” by Tomáš Protivínský and Daniel Münich (2018) explores the presence and impact of gender disparities in academic evaluations within the Czech Republic. Published in Studies in Educational Evaluation, the research investigates the “gender grading gap”—the extent to which boys and girls with identical academic competencies receive systematically different grades from their teachers. The authors evaluate how these discrepancies distort feedback, shape student aspirations, and potentially cause long-term labor market inefficiencies.

To isolate teacher bias, the researchers construct an empirical framework using a sample of 4,880 9th-grade pupils across 293 Czech lower-secondary schools. The study pairs primary questionnaire data with a natural experimental setting by contrasting two evaluation mechanisms: “non-blind” transcript report card grades issued subjectively by classroom teachers, and “blind” standardized test scores from high-stakes upper-secondary school admission exams administered externally by the SCIO agency. To rigorously control for varying school-level grading stringencies, the authors implement a school-specific fixed-effects model where both evaluation types are standardized to a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one.

The objective test results confirm traditional international patterns: boys outperform girls in mathematics by 0.29 standard deviations, while girls lead in the Czech native language by 0.25 standard deviations. However, the core analysis reveals a substantial, systematic grading bias in favor of girls across both subjects. When comparing a boy and a girl with the exact same objective test performance, teachers award girls significantly higher grades. This gender grading bias is uniform across the entire capability distribution for the native language, but it becomes even more pronounced among high-performing students in mathematics. In terms of academic magnitude, this grading advantage is sizeable, corresponding to an artificial skills premium of roughly 60% of a standard deviation in each subject.

A primary contribution of this paper is its deep exploration of the potential causal mechanisms driving this variance. Utilizing the detailed student questionnaires, the authors test whether the grading gap could be explained by different levels of exam-related stress or varying personal attitudes toward the subjects. Subsample regressions demonstrate that the female grading advantage persists undiminished even among students who report low stress or an explicit dislike of the subject. Consequently, the authors rule out exam anxiety and subject appreciation as driving factors.

Instead, Protivínský and Münich conclude that the grading gap is primarily driven by gender differences in non-cognitive and behavioral skills. This behavioral influence is institutionalized by Czech ministerial guidelines, which explicitly permit teachers to adjust term grades based on a pupil’s diligence and study attitudes. Traits such as classroom compliance, orderliness, and reliable homework completion confound subjective teacher grading while remaining entirely invisible on anonymous standardized tests. Because school grades serve as the primary institutional signal governing selection into prestigious, academic-track high schools (Gymnasia), this systemic bias against boys fosters sub-optimal educational choices and early occupational matching inefficiencies.