I think a big part of why there are so few male primary school teachers is pretty simple and basic - money

Teacher salaries in the USA are very low compared to the salaries paid to other college educated professionals. Considering that our sexist society provides more opportunities for men as opposed to women, it makes sense that male college grads with other professional options would chose them over the low paying teaching profession.

I'm a volunteer guardian ad litem with an organization called CASA. We get appointed to kids whose families are in the family court system because the parents are abusive and/or neglectful. Our role is to meet with the kids once a month, get to know them and their circumstances, and make recommendations in court with the end goal of having them in a safe, permanent home by the time their case closes. I'm not sure what the figures are for CASAs across the country, but in a large metropolitan city in the Midwest, only 13% of our volunteers are male.

Obviously, being a GAL and being a teacher are two different gigs. But I've always wondered if the gender disparity in our voluteers is a result of men thinking that this sort of work with children is something that women do, what with women being the ones who are nurturing and motherly and understanding of what children need.

I recall that my first grade teacher absolutely hated children and I always wondered why. Years later I discovered that she had gotten into teaching when few other options were afforded women and after having made tenure and thus achieved a steady job for life, she felt no compulsion to leave it.

All of my teachers in elementary school were female. It wasn't until I was in middle school that I had a teacher who was male. He was, it so happens, a football coach, which almost doesn't count. By the time I finished high school, I think I had been taught by three, or at most, four men.

I have no grand unifying theory of why men opt out of teaching until higher ed. The pay for a beginning teacher is usually less than 40K a year and the only way to make a substantial salary is to get into administration. This might be part of it, but I'm sure established tradition plays as much a role as anything else.

I have nothing really insightful to say, but I just wanted to add that I also agree that the lack of male teachers IS a serious problem, and a major reason why boys are beginning to lag behind girls academically. Thanks for this post.

I dunno... is it such a problem? Women have historically done much more parenting than men, and as schools become surrogates for overworked parents, this just seems to mirror that. The number of male teachers increases in highschools, and, as someone else noted, coaches will tend to be men, and fill that paternal role as needed.

It seems to me the real impact on not having male teachers is at the adult level: the profession isn't taken as seriously if it isn't populated by men who are primary wage earners for their families. So yes, money plays into it, but there's a reciprocal relationship there: the salary won't go up if the profession isn't taken seriously, and the profession won't be taken seriously if men aren't going into it as primary wage earners, and men won't go into it as primary wage earners if the salary doesn't go up.

And also, built into the nature of inflation is the idea that it's useless to raise one group's salary unless everyone else's stays level or goes down, because otherwise the increase is eaten up by the depreciation in the currency of the salary. Until we say teachers are MORE important than something else, teachers won't get their salaries raised in real terms.

So does this all matter? Does it matter that we don't respect teachers in anglo societies? Does it matter that non-sports teachers are seen as either beta males (in the humanities) or autistics (in the sciences)?

I know that, at least in upper-middle-class, college-bound U.S. communities, teachers are the people who stand in the way of your perfect child getting into the college of his or her choice, and they have to be given a cocktail of coaxing and brow-beating to make sure your perfect child gets the 'A' he or she needs to get into the right school. The intense achievement culture of schools today has diminished the teacher's role by highlighting the potential for arbitrariness in teachers' decisions about things that will change the course of a child's life. So there's overlap there, too: men, and particularly men who see themselves as role models, won't go into a profession that isn't taken seriously. But also, when teachers aren't taken seriously, it undermines their ability to teach sincerely. A more chauvinistic teaching profession would be a more effective teaching profession.

If men were the dominant gender in teaching the only people concerned about it would be feminists, worried about women's lack of entrance to a profession. They'd be the only ones worrying about girls lacking role models, and we wouldn't be getting any stories about girls lagging behind boys regularly, either.

Whenever someone says "oh I hope my child gets a male teacher" we can infer there is something lacking in a woman teacher, and that there is something inherently good about a man. Yet does gender affect ability to teach? No.
The conversation devalues women and their work.

Not just teaching. The number of women entering medicine and law is also such that qualifying doctors and lawyers will be predominantly female in the West (in those countries where they aren't already such as, I have read, the UK). Even allowing for a haemhorraging effect due to childbirth, the majority of doctors, teachers and lawyers will be women in all these societies soon.

The reason it is a problem is not that the women aren't as good. It's that as long as 80+% of politicians, judges, CEOs and other powerbrokers are male, and society is very sexist, we can expect the lobbying power of medicine, law and education to decrease, because they won't have sufficient top-level people with the necessary access (eg old boy networks, entrenched privilege, shared experience, assigning credibility in your own image etc) to demand funding, attention and prioritization. Meanwhile those professions dominated by men, like, say, the military, will continue to be glorified and funded accordingly.

In other words the problem is in the OTHER fields as much as teaching. And of course if there were more opportunities for women to be top judges, politicians, CEOs and so on, there wouldn't be so many of them "trapped" in teaching, and then more spots would fall by default to the men they'd out-competed for the top posts in other fields. Unfortunately these will be second-tier men, but at least the punching power of teaching overall will go up as the old girl networks start to take shape. Plus, female politicians will not have the above negative assumptions in dealing with female teachers (though they may have other ones, eg 'Jane Doe has a math masters too and she's broken through the glass ceiling to make millions in pharmaceuticals, while Jenny Doe makes 50K a year as a headteacher, ergo Jenny Doe is not worth listening to').

I do think a decline in the quality of teachers in the last 50 years is partly attributable to the fact that there used to be a captive workforce of all the smartest women, who had to become schoolmistresses or 'go out for a governess' if they didn't want to become a husband's property or starve. There's no way around this without massive social injustice though. The best option, in my view, is firstly not to tax teachers' pay (since they are state employees and it'd spare paperwork) and secondly to make sending your brightest and best staff out for teaching sabbaticals for a year or two a tax deduction for big companies.

I think its because teaching is seen by men as a lower type of field because it is one primarily dominated by women. I think the pedophile assumption is idiotic and shocking. I also bet you wont see any female teachers pulling a North Country or beefeaters (ref:tower of london, moira cameron) scenario on any male teachers (or nurses for that matter).

From what I've seen teaching in both elementary and middle schools, the observation that there tend to be more men teaching the higher the grade level is not simply coincidence. There is a very strong correlation, and I think it is more strongly tied to our ideas about gender and nurturing than it is about pedophilia and salaries.

The higher the grade level, the more teaching entails specific academic subject matter - this is why we departmentalize. The lower the grade level, the more teaching is about nurturing and more significantly overlaps with parenting. When was the last time you saw a high school teacher zip a coat or tie a shoe for a student who didn't have a medical issue? How about the last time you saw a 6th grade teacher do it? We don't, as a culture, expect men to do this outside of their own kids, if that. We don't train them into doing it. Growing up as a girl, people put babies in your arms whether you ask for it or not, something that doesn't happen for boys. Girls are encouraged to babysit in a way that boys aren't. There's a lot more enculturated education and expectation towards nurturing for girls.

Not only that, but we tend to stigmatize men who display nurturing tendencies as being feminine and therefore less of a man. How many movies are there playing on the trope of "big man takes care of the kids"? Sure, part of that joke is the power inversion of Hulk Hogan or whoever getting owned by a six year old, but it's also the joke of taking someone hypermasculine, putting them in a "feminine" role of caregiver and laughing at it. In fact, there was a Schwartzenegger vehicle in the early 90s called "Kindergarten Cop" which involved him going undercover as a kindergarten teacher. Men in early ed. is explicitly a cultural punchline. Until we can change that attitude, there's going be fewer male teachers, and fewer role models of nurturing men.

The stats are for the UK and Australia. I remember there being at least one male teacher for every grade in my elementary school and the same for middle and high school. There were still more women, but there wasnt a great sparcity of male teachers either.

Historically in the US, the disparity is very much about money. Teaching was a vastly male-dominated profession until the early 1900's. When public education began to be viewed as something for the general public, and not just the advantaged, there was a sort of education boom, and we needed more teachers. Obviously, that was going to be expensive, and so women were recruited for those jobs, because they would be expected to be paid only a fraction of what their male counterparts would earn. Teaching shifted to being a female dominated, proportionately lower paying job.

My point is that the way we frame and respect (or don't respect) teaching as a culture has its roots in history. There's not just one answer here, but a variety of influential factors;people are asking what the factors are that make us view teaching the way we do, and this is certainly one of the reasons we still see it as (and it is still perpetuated as) a predominately female profession---pink collar work. (I'm a teacher, too, and we're lucky that the salary difference is negligible NOW, but that had a lot to do with unionizing, and it certainly wasn't the case at the beginning of the last century.)

As for the elementary/secondary divide, I teach grad classes for future teachers, and more than once I have had women suggest to me privately that teaching beyond middle school is too "intimidating." The women are certainly not less intellectually capable than their male peers, but I think they sometimes view themselves that way, and lack the confidence to teach older kids, perceiving that the teens might give them an intellectual run for their money they're not ready for. (And maybe this accounts for fewer women in higher ed, as well? And the fact far more men go into administration?)

And, of course, let me just say that I fully understand that thoughtful, reflective elementary school teaching is very intellectual work---I'm just talking about the perceptions of the inexperienced future-teacher students that I have. They haven't actually taught yet, so we spend a lot of time debunking mythology of teaching!

I'm a highschool teacher because I'm an unmarried dude and if I were a kindergarten teacher in this country people would assume I was a pedophile.