We hope you read our last article in September about the gradual decline in reading abilities amongst teenagers. As we mentioned before, the only way to solve this problem is simply to start reading, so with that said, we hope you use your essential reading skills for this article as well. For more studies focus on another growing gap in reading comprehension, revealing how males specifically are falling behind females and that there is a gender gap in reading arising.
Teens’ reading scores and ability to read whole books have been on a decline for the past two decades, but boys in particular have been struggling with reading more. It isn’t strange that boys have scored less than girls on reading tests because it has been this way for about 50 years. However the alarming factor to this is that each year reading scores for boys are getting worse and worse. A similar situation played out for girls with math and science, but with the right attention and encouragement for girls’ presence in the math and science world they were able to shrink that gap. Maybe all boys need is that same attention for reading.
But where does this gap begin? A survey conducted by the National Survey of Children’s Health shows that girls, while only by a little, are overall ahead of boys in Kindergarten academics, motor skills, and behavioral actions.
According to an article by The New York Times in May of 2025, academic gender gaps have grown since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 that prioritized children spending more time sitting still and learning math and reading. While this may seem like a positive contribution to children’s education, it expands the gap since many boys do not enter kindergarten with the necessary skills to live up to these standards, possibly setting them behind for the rest of their education.
However this isn’t the only reason boys are more prone to falling behind, as the isolation of the pandemic and the increase in screens for young children also adds on to the problem. These things affect all children, but they especially affect boys, who scientists have found are more at risk of misfortune due to a combination of boys’ biological features. A boy’s brain has higher impulse control, lower motor control, and in teenage years their frontal lobe is still in its stages of development and maturing. All causing boys to be more inclined to distraction, so it is understandable to see how reading is the last thing on their minds.
But what does it matter if boys fall behind in school at a younger age? Well, scientists have found that falling behind negatively affects boys for years to come. Unfortunately, children who struggle in school, whether that be academically or behaviorally, start to develop a negative view of themselves and school. Jayanti Owens, who specializes in inequality in schools at the Yale School of Management, discovered that boys’ behavior at ages as young as four and five foretells the amount of schooling they finished by their twenties. With this self-doubting attitude they are limiting themselves to achieve what they could be capable of.
This gender gap is more than just boys not wanting to read more but studies show it is also directly affecting their attendance in school and acceptance into college and universities. This means not only are their grades in English declining, but with it the rest of their classes because of the lack of important skills reading teaches you. Without actively reading you don’t obtain the helpful learning skills it gives you. Over the past fifty years enrollment in college has flipped, causing women to dominate the college and university portal. According to the Educational Policy Institute, which is an organization specializing in college educational research, “While men had a 58 percent share of total enrollment in 1970, by 2025 they are estimated to have a 43 percent share with the women’s share reaching 57 percent.”
In the year 1830, women were finally allowed to attend colleges and universities, and in less than 200 years they have exceeded their expectations, pushed standards, and surpassed male attendance. The sole reason for this isn’t just because of a decline in reading for boys, but it still has something to do with it.
In an interview with Ms. Canfield, who is the director of academic support at St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes, she explained what she noticed with students’ perspective with reading. “When something is hard, we don’t want to do it. So when we think about reading comprehension, and when I think about the cycle of reading being difficult for me because of either my, training or exposure, or it’s hard for me to stay focused, and so I don’t want to do it, so then you do it less, and so that you don’t build those strategies and skills that would help you persist, and you don’t get swept away by the story.” Ms. Canfield brought to light that reading may feel like a task more than a pleasure. As mentioned earlier, boys are more susceptible to distraction due to their developing cognitive skills and brain; so it would make sense that the simple task of reading is harder to take on for them. Maybe because of boys’ habits earlier on in their lives, they never truly got the chance to fall in love with reading and reading for pleasure. With that being said, it would make it harder for them to find it in themselves to pick up a book and start reading out of nowhere.
Here at Saints, Ms. Canfield also noted how“[Teachers] have noticed that students’ stamina in reading, like their ability to persist in a long form piece has declined, that students kind of can run out of steam after fewer pages than they used to” but that she didn’t notice a specific gender gap here at Saints. However, our upper school librarian Ms. Tomljanovich provided us the female and male statistics for checked out fiction and nonfiction books from the beginning of this school year up until now. The statistics for females show 82 females checked out 175, while only 49 males checked out 82 books. Although teachers have not expressed concern over a decline of reading and reading scores for boys at Saints, there is a clear gender difference in activity in our library.
If girls were able to lessen the gender gap with math and science with the right support and encouragement, boys are just as capable of diminishing their gender gap with reading. Hopefully this article serves as inspiration and motivation for boys to start reading more, and if you are a boy, know you already took the first step by reading this article.
