Abstract
I elucidate the educational and occupational struggles of boys and men using an evolutionary framework. This perspective is useful in explaining boys’ relative disadvantage in language and reading development and their advantage in visuospatial and mechanical abilities. I show that classroom settings and the behavioral expectations of formal schooling are more of an evolutionary mismatch for boys than girls because of sex differences in physical activity levels and social relations. This results in boys being disproportionately identified as having behavioral difficulties. Further, there are universal preferences that influence occupational choices: More men than women, for example, show an interest in working with things, and these interests align with boys’ and men’s relative strengths. I argue that secondary schooling does not fully capitalize on boys’ evolved capacities to help prepare them for the modern workforce, and suggest how schools can adapt to better accommodate boys’ strengths.
The academic competencies that students carry into adulthood will have a lifelong influence over their later educational and occupational opportunities (Bynner 1997; Rivera-Batiz 1992) and influence the ease with which they navigate the complexities of daily life (Richmond-Rakerd et al. 2020). Reading, writing, and mathematics are the most fundamental of these competencies, and their acquisition is an arduous and drawn-out process that spans many years. The difficulty of learning in these domains stands in sharp contrast to the ease with which young people can, for instance, acquire language or develop a cognitive map of their local neighborhoods. The development of the latter competencies only requires species-typical behaviors, such as socializing or exploring the local area, and become refined over the many years of childhood. The relative difficulty in mastering reading, writing, and mathematics reflects their evolutionary novelty, which is to say that learning in these areas is not supported by the same types of built-in brain, cognitive, and behavioral biases that ensure the full development of language and other evolved competencies (Geary 1995, 2007, 2024).
From this perspective, it is not surprising that modern schooling emerged in societies in which literacy and numeracy were important for many daily activities (e.g., commerce) and has only recently become a universal requirement of children in developed and most developing nations (Eskelson 2020; Ramirez and Boli 1987). The recency of modern schooling highlights why the associated activities, such as sitting for long periods in classrooms or doing homework, are far from natural for children (Geary and Berch 2016, ch. 2). In traditional contexts, such as hunter-gatherer societies, children and adolescents engage in activities that prepare them for adulthood, but most of the associated competencies emerge from a combination of evolved cognitive biases that are elaborated through engagement in species-typical activities and observational learning and imitation of adults and older children (Geary and Berch 2016, ch. 2). The associated knowledge is typically instrumental, focused on a culturally important outcome (e.g., hunting, foraging), and does not include abstract academic competencies (Legare 2017).
The differences between the developmental activities of children in traditional contexts and children in school settings indicate an evolutionary mismatch. The evolved cognitive and behavioral biases of children are not a good fit to school settings or the rigors of academic learning, and this is especially so for boys. To address this mismatch, a common approach sets out to modify academic activities to better match students’ preferences (Geary and Berch 2016, ch. 3). Although intuitive and sometimes appropriate, a wholesale child-centered approach will not be sufficient for the abstract learning required in many academic domains (see Geary 2024; Geary and Berch 2016, ch. 9; Sweller 2023). The first section of this article focuses on the relationship between evolved cognitive abilities and the way that academic competences are built from them. The second and third sections address in-class behavior and occupational interests from an evolutionary perspective. All sections focus on implications for boys’ education.
Evolved Cognition and Academic Development
Evolved cognitive abilities are termed biologically primary to distinguish them from evolutionarily novel, secondary academic abilities (Geary 1995). Primary abilities can be organized around folk psychology, folk biology, and folk physics (Atran 1998; Geary 2005; Leslie et al. 2004; Wellman and Gelman 1992), with the core subdomains and knowledge bases shown in Figure 1. The social level reflects the evolutionary importance of other people and their behavior (Brothers and Ring 1992), and the ecological level (biological and physical ecologies) reflects abilities that support survival activities in traditional contexts (Kaplan et al. 2000). The third level represents different combinations of abilities and knowledge that can be put together in building-block form to meet current demands (Geary 2005). For instance, the “Individual” level under folk psychology captures the abilities (e.g., language, face processing) and knowledge (e.g., person schema, that is, knowledge about specific others) that are engaged during social interactions and that support the development and maintenance of social relationships.
Taxonomy of Evolved Folk Domains
These primary abilities can be modified through repeated exposure to similar contexts or information (e.g., instructional material) and through the top-down engagement of the associated brain systems through the prefrontal, cognitive control systems (Geary 2024; Menon and D’Esposito 2022; Ünal et al. 2025); the details of how this occurs are not important here. The most relevant issues here are the primary abilities associated with sex differences in core academic outcomes. These include language competencies, which typically favor girls and women, as related to reading and writing, and visuospatial abilities and mechanical reasoning (i.e., tool use), which typically favor boys and men, as related to certain, especially inorganic (e.g., engineering) science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields (Geary 2021). These differences are especially evident for students’ best academic subject, with reading being the best subject for most girls and science or mathematics being the best subject for most boys throughout the world (Balducci et al. 2024; Stoet and Geary 2018). These academic strengths in turn influence academic majors in college and later career choices (Humphreys et al. 1993).
Primary abilities and reading development
Girls’ and women’s advantages in reading and writing are well documented and found in every country in which they have been systematically assessed (Reilly et al. 2019; Stoet and Geary 2013). These differences are found for early, foundational aspects of reading, such as skill at matching language sounds to letters (Sigmundsson et al. 2017), through reading comprehension and essay construction (Reilly et al. 2019). At the completion of secondary school, 62 percent and 70 percent of U.S. girls have better reading comprehension and writing skills than the average boy, respectively (Reilly et al. 2019). There are 50 percent more boys than girls with very poor literacy skills and more than twice as many boys as girls with very poor writing skills—a factor that contributes to the sex difference in enrollment in higher education (Stoet and Geary 2020). These sex differences are well recognized and assumed to occur because “females are born with an advantage in skills that support reading” (Arnett et al. 2017, 723). There is no consensus, however, about the source of the female advantage. The proposal here is that the advantage results in part from an evolved enhancement of the language system in girls and women (see Geary 2021).
Indeed, reading and writing are supported in large part by the evolved language network (Turkeltaub et al. 2003; Ünal et al. 2025) that is part of a suite of folk abilities that support the development and maintenance of social relationships (Geary 2021). This network has an inherent structure but also experience-dependent plasticity (i.e., aspects of the network can be modified, within limits, by experiences). These experiences include species-typical social activities that trigger synchronized activity of associated brain regions that, in turn, strengthens the network and adapts it to local conditions (e.g., local language). These same experiences do not promote reading or writing skills, but the plasticity of the network enables aspects of it to be coaxed into processing evolutionarily novel information (e.g., word reading). Orthography, or the translation of letters and words into sounds, is the key gateway reading takes into the language network (Bradley and Bryant 1983). The building of this gateway requires children to learn the association between language sounds and corresponding letters and words and to then build fluency in the visual processing of words. Instruction on processing letters and meaningful words, as well as engaging in the act of reading, modifies an area of the brain that processes visual details and creates a visual word form area, which, once developed, supports automatic, fluent reading (McCandliss et al. 2003). Critically, this part of the brain does not become specialized for reading without instruction on the basics of reading (e.g., word decoding) and frequent engagement in reading (Saygin et al. 2016).
There are sex differences in the specifics of language development and associated brain regions that remain to be resolved (Etchell et al. 2018). Nonetheless, girls typically have advantages in early language development, such as vocabulary acquisition, and more boys than girls experience substantive language delays (Rinaldi et al. 2023). The brain network that supports language processing appears to be better integrated in girls and women and thus contributes, in turn, to more efficient language processing and later more efficient (e.g., faster) reading (A. Hu et al. 2024; J. Hu et al. 2024; Xu et al. 2020). These sex differences in the language network almost certainly contribute to the sex differences in reading and writing competencies, although writing engages additional brain areas that support fine-motor movements (Planton et al. 2013).
The implication is that more boys than girls will require interventions focused on early reading skills, such as phonemic awareness (i.e., knowledge of letter sounds) and word decoding (i.e., sounding out printed words); such interventions have been developed and validated (e.g., Ehri et al. 2001; Logan and Johnston 2010). The point here is that boys on average have a biological disadvantage in aspects of language development that contributes to the risk of reading and writing issues. Children with early language delays, which will include more boys than girls, might especially benefit from early interventions on basic language and related reading competencies. In addition, enhancement of reading fluency and comprehension requires considerable reading, and girls engage in more of this than boys (J. Hu et al. 2024). A contributing factor is that books that are made available in many educational settings are skewed toward girls’ reading interests (Clark 2012). Providing more of the types of reading content that appeals to boys, such as science fiction and war/spy books, might help promote boys’ engagement in reading. Moreover, the fact that boys are also more physically active than girls and prefer to play in large social groups (elaborated below) contrasts with the more sedentary and solitary activity of reading.
Primary abilities and STEM development
In contrast with girls’ and women’s advantages in language and some other aspects of folk psychology, boys and men have advantages in most areas of folk physics, including many visuospatial abilities and mechanical reasoning (Geary 2021). Men’s enhanced visuospatial ability is likely related to the larger ranges of travel associated with traditional activities (e.g., hunting, intergroup warfare), and their prowess in mechanical reasoning can be traced to tool construction in traditional contexts. In these contexts, men’s travel ranges are two to four times larger than women’s (MacDonald and Hewlett 1999), and most tool construction is done by men (Daly and Wilson 1983). A large travel range is supported by complex spatial-navigational abilities and tool construction in part by smaller-scale visuospatial abilities, mechanical reasoning (Hegarty 2004), and an interest in how objects can be used as tools (Greenberg et al. 2018). As with language, there is an inherent structure to these abilities, but their full development requires engagement in related activities, such as exploring the local area or engaging in play that involves building things (Gredlein and Bjorklund 2005).
Boys’ and men’s advantages in these areas range from moderate to large depending on age and the complexity of the task (Lauer et al. 2019). For instance, more than four out of five men are better than the average woman in generating mental images of objects and rotating them (Masters and Sanders 1993), although this sex difference is smaller in children and adolescents (Lauer et al. 2019). Similarly, about four out of five boys and men score higher on complex mechanical reasoning tasks than the average same-age girl and woman (Hedges and Nowell 1995). These sex differences are important because they are related to interest and success in some STEM fields (Humphreys et al. 1993; Kell et al. 2013). These fields, which include white-collar (e.g., engineer) and blue-collar (e.g., mechanic) positions, are well suited for boys with advantages in visuospatial and mechanical abilities.
Unfortunately, because schools do not assess these competencies as they do mathematics and reading achievement, boys (and some girls) with strong spatial and mechanical abilities are overlooked. Students with strengths in these areas are less engaged with schooling and less likely than other students to attend college, even if their mathematics and reading achievement is above average (Gohm et al. 1998). Better assessments of spatial and mechanical abilities and increased opportunities to express them in school settings (e.g., shop courses) would be beneficial for these largely overlooked students, which will include many more boys than girls.
Behavior in Classroom Settings
Boys are more physically active than girls from prenatal development through adolescence and into adulthood (Eaton and Enns 1986; McCormack et al. 2010). Almost three out of four school-age boys are more physically active than the average girl and more likely to organize themselves into large, coordinated groups focused on competing with other male groups (Deaner et al. 2012; Geary et al. 2003). In traditional contexts, these activity differences result in more exploration of the local environment, thus improving spatial abilities, and the formation of social groups that are prepared to act in a physically coordinated manner (Geary 2021). The latter is important for hunting large game and for between-group male-on-male warfare. By self-organizing into such groups, boys practice for the large-scale coordinated action needed in adulthood.
Situating boys with these biases in a modern classroom results in an evolutionary mismatch. Of course, boys (and girls) need modern schooling and need to be attentive in classroom settings to learn the basic academic skills that will prepare them for adult life in the modern world (Geary 2024). Nonetheless, the mismatch provides a deeper understanding of sex differences in in-class behavior as well as behavior in other contemporary contexts. Specifically, boys’ biases contribute to the well-documented sex differences in attentive behavior, with about twice as many boys as girls diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; Li et al. 2021; Willcutt 2012). But there are also differences for children and adolescents without ADHD (Arnett et al. 2015); just under two out of three boys are more physically active than the average girl. These differences typically manifest as inattention rather than hyperactivity and negatively affect achievement (e.g., grades) in school (Rietveld et al. 2004). From a mismatch perspective, the less attentive behavior of boys is not a psychiatric or behavioral disorder but rather results from the impact of an environment that is substantively different than childhood environments in traditional contexts. Of course, classrooms are evolutionarily novel for girls as well, but girls’ social groups are typically smaller, less physically active, and involve greater attentiveness to the social behavior of others, including more attentive listening (Maccoby 1990; Savin-Williams 1987). In other words, classroom settings are less of mismatch for girls than for boys.
Although the results are mixed, there is some evidence that increasing recess times, and thus increasing physical activity levels, can improve in-class attentive behavior (Sullivan et al. 2017). Barros and colleagues’ (2009) large-scale study of third graders, for instance, indicated that relative to students with no recess, about 15 minutes per day of recess improved students’ in-class attentive behavior, although additional recess time did not add to these benefits. Classroom management interventions, such as seating students where they can be monitored and keeping a consistent classroom structure and routine, will also likely improve academic outcomes for students with poor in-class attentive behavior (DuPaul and Eckert 1997; Gaastra et al. 2016). These interventions typically include contingency- or consequence-based strategies that can be implemented in classroom settings (e.g., praise for appropriate behavior).
Occupational Interests
Girls’ and women’s advantages in some areas of folk psychology are likely related to the benefits of forming same-sex friendships that in traditional contexts are important sources of social and emotional support and alloparenting (i.e., helping to care for their friends’ children; Hrdy 2009). These same social skills are an important component of female-on-female relational aggression, that is, a subtle form of maneuvering (e.g., spreading unflattering gossip) for increased social influence and resource control (Geary et al. 2014). As noted, boys’ and men’s advantages in folk physics are likely related, in part, to navigation in large-scale space and tool construction.
In developed economies, these sex differences are reflected in occupational preferences, among other ways. Su and colleagues (2009) found that women are more interested in occupations that involve interacting with and helping people (e.g., physician), whereas men are more interested in occupations that involve working with things (e.g., engineer). There are three to four times as many men as women interested in (top 25 percent of interests) the latter fields. The differences are even larger for the most things-oriented profession—engineering—where between eight and nine out of 10 men are more interested in these activities than the average woman is. King (1914) found a similar pattern for adolescents more than a century ago, as did Stoet and Geary (2022) across 80 countries and economic regions. As shown in Figure 2, there is not a single country within which as many girls as boys aspire to a things-related or STEM (including non-things occupations, such as mathematics) occupation nor a single country where as many boys as girls aspire to people-related occupations. This said, these sex differences in preferences do not explain all of the sex differences in entry into many of these fields (Dekhtyar et al. 2018; Reeves 2022).
Sex Differences in Occupational Interests
As noted in the section on primary abilities and STEM development, things-oriented occupations include blue- and white-collar jobs and are well suited for individuals, including more men than women, with strong mechanical and spatial abilities. The availability of such jobs in the broader economy thus has important implications for boys’ schooling and their long-term economic prospects. Over the past several decades, automation and international trade have resulted in reductions both in the number of available blue-collar jobs and in wages associated with certain occupations (e.g., automotive manufacturing)—a change that has disproportionately affected men in developed economies (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2020; Bloom et al. 2024; Lerch 2025; see also Kistler and Dougherty, this volume). This shift from manufacturing to knowledge-based, white-collar occupations has disadvantaged primarily men without a college education and created more jobs for college-educated individuals, a cohort that now includes more women than men.
One approach might be to encourage these men to enter skilled, white-collar professions (e.g., health care), but these professions do not align well with many of their strengths (e.g., mechanical reasoning) and preferences (i.e., working with things). A more sustainable approach might be to better align training in secondary school with anticipated gains in skilled, blue-collar occupations that cannot be outsourced, such as carpenters and electricians. Despite losses in some manufacturing sectors, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2025) projects growth in these and many other skilled, blue-collar trades that are well suited to the strengths and preferences of many boys and men. Due to the lack of assessments for spatial and mechanical abilities in school settings, and in many cases only sporadic availability of relevant courses (e.g., engine repair), many boys who would do well in these areas are neither identified nor adequately supported in secondary school.
Conclusion
The educational, behavioral, and occupational struggles of many boys and men have been well documented, but a complete understanding of the sources of these struggles and what to do about them remains elusive. An evolutionary approach provides a broad perspective on the sources and potential solutions to these struggles. Boys and men and girls and women have different cognitive strengths that have an evolutionary basis (Geary 2021), but the educational implications have not been fully explored. Reading and writing are of course critical aspects of modern education, and boys’ disadvantages in these areas are well known (Reilly et al. 2019). Framing these disadvantages in terms of the evolved language system suggests that boys, especially ones with language difficulties, should be provided with additional instruction on early reading competencies, such as phonemic awareness and word decoding, and schools should consider broadening reading material to better align with boys’ interests (Clark 2012).
At the same time, boys and men have well-established advantages in visuospatial and mechanical abilities that are neither recognized nor appreciated in most school settings. The failure to assess these cognitive abilities results in an underestimation of the potential of many boys, especially those who do not excel in reading or mathematics (Gohm et al. 1998). Many boys and men with these cognitive advantages have an interest in working with things, whether as a blue-collar (e.g., mechanic) or white-collar (e.g., engineer) professional. However, they have fewer opportunities, relative to students with advantages in reading or mathematics, to express these interests or refine the associated competencies in school settings. These students would be better served if secondary school programs were expanded to provide more opportunities for training in mechanical and related professions (e.g., carpentry, auto repair) that cannot be outsourced and that are predicted to increase in demand in the coming decades (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 2025).
Footnotes
David C. Geary is a Curators’ Distinguished Professor in the department of psychological sciences and interdisciplinary neuroscience program at the University of Missouri.