8 organizations working to solve the gender gap in education
by Siobhan Neela-Stock and Chase DiBenedetto
Published on Mashable on August 27, 2022
Progress is happening but there is more to do.
You might not spend much time thinking about the gender gap in education — that is, the difference in educational outcomes between boys and girls — but you should. These disparities affect people from childhood all the way through adult life, via the careers they choose and beyond.
Girls and boys receive different messages (both implicit and explicit) about who’s smart and who’s not. By age six, girls are more likely to call boys “really, really smart,” and shy away from games or activities that they view as for kids who are “really, really smart.” Race and class also have an impact. And this continues: Boys who go to school districts that are mostly white, high-income, and suburban usually test better than girls in the same districts.
Edward Morris, who teaches sociology at the University of Kentucky, researches the intersections of gender, class, and race in education. He thinks schools and teachers can help reduce the gender gap by not separating boys and girls in classes or expecting students to do well on certain tasks because of their gender or race. “Black boys are definitely the most behind in terms of all these educational outcomes,” says Morris, explaining that part of this is because Black boys are more likely to be disciplined in school than white boys (even for the same behavior).
There are organizations working to change these disparities, and you can help them in the fight. Each of the organizations listed before gets three or four stars, the highest rating, from the charity watchdog website Charity Navigator, or has been rolled into Charity Navigator’s new Encompass Rating System, which was created to allow them to rate more nonprofits. (Organizations assigned stars retain those ratings.) Pick one, or several, and donate if you have a few spare bucks — or simply raise awareness of their work on social media. It all helps.
