When you are a guy who is a teacher, there is one topic that comes up over and over again, especially when you’re working at an elementary school.
Kyle Joseph, a 23-year-old now in his second year teaching Grade 6 at a school in Calgary, wishes this topic was civics, because he loves the subject and wants his students to feel as inspired and excited by it as he is.
But that’s not the theme that keeps following him around. When you are a guy who is a teacher, all anybody wants to talk about is the fact that you’re a guy who is a teacher.
It came up all the time as Mr. Joseph was pursuing his degree in education at Calgary’s Mount Royal University. Considering the demographics of the program, this was inevitable – he was one of only six male students in a graduating class of nearly 90.
He was close with three of the other guys, and they talked about it “all the time,” Mr. Joseph said. “Growing up, none of us really had male elementary teachers, so we kind of bonded over that.”
There are only three other male teachers out of about 24 at the school he works at now, most of them older guys, and they also bring up this disparity, he said.
Many things drew him to the profession, Mr. Joseph said.
His Grade 6 social studies teacher, a man who inspired his love of civics and made him want to spark that curiosity in other kids. The prospect of a stable job with a good pension, summers off and a decent work-life balance should he have kids of his own.
And perhaps most important to him of all, as a Black man: The chance to be a role model.
“I teach in a predominantly white neighbourhood, so to have a male person of colour for a lot of these young boys, who unfortunately don’t have that male person of colour role model in their lives and don’t really see themselves in positions of leadership, I think is important,” he said.
Kyle Joseph studied to be a teacher at Mount Royal University in Calgary, where he now works at a school.Amir Salehi/The Globe and Mail
For many young men, the calculus is very different. There are questions of money and prestige. And society still views male teachers as outliers – in part because they are. Just 24.2 per cent of educators in elementary and secondary schools in Canada are men, down from 30.5 per cent in 2002.
The gender disparity is even greater at the elementary level. Women make up 84 per cent of kindergarten and elementary school teachers across both public and private institutions in Canada, according to the latest census data.
Male teachers are constantly talking amongst themselves about what’s behind those numbers – about why so few men enter the profession, and what that might mean for boys.
It is increasingly important to have that conversation in public. With jobs in many traditionally male-dominated industries disappearing and artificial intelligence throwing the future of so many other careers into uncertainty, teaching holds out the promise of a rewarding job less affected by those destabilizing forces.
And there is a massive shortage of teachers across the country. Recruiting more men to the field is one way of addressing that problem.
Plus, statistics show many boys are struggling academically and socially. They might just be in need of the sort of role models the best male teachers pride themselves on being.
The gender divide
There is an elephant in the room when it comes to investigating why more men aren’t going into teaching.
When I began contacting people to ask them why declining numbers of men are entering the field, and what that might mean for students, a discomfort slowly became apparent. Many men in education seemed averse to speaking publicly. Deans of education departments, men pursuing education degrees, teachers and even representatives from teachers’ organizations declined to speak on the record.
Most of the people who did agree to speak with me wanted to make it absolutely clear that saying it might be good for more young men to become teachers, and that it could benefit boys in classrooms, did not mean they weren’t also concerned about girls and women.
They stressed that they weren’t saying female teachers aren’t great teachers, and they weren’t saying we should take focus away from doing more to break down barriers for women in male-dominated fields. But they suggested, gently and with many caveats, that if representation matters in boardrooms and engineering firms and police forces and the skilled trades and so many other professional settings, then surely it matters in classrooms, too.
“It’s about having that equitable representation so that in any school community, every child can be known and seen and feel like they belong, and feel like they have an adult, whether it’s a male or female, Black or Asian or whoever it might be, that they can look at and say, ‘Hey, that person is what I need right now in my life,” said Blair Pike, associate director of education programs at Tyndale University in Toronto.
He added that this is especially true for the youngest kids in the system. “The dearth of men in K to 12, especially K to 8, is an age-old conversation.”
As Canadian boys lag behind girls academically, educators have debated whether the gender of teachers makes a difference in how students stay engaged.Eduardo Lima/The Globe and Mail
Ultan Peters, a 53-year-old in Edmonton, has gotten plenty of dismissiveness from friends and strangers alike over the years when they learn he is an elementary school teacher.
“It’s almost like they don’t think it’s honest work,” he said.
“The investment and training versus the payoff and prestige is number one,” Mr. Peters added. He has three degrees, including a master’s. “If I were to put that across with any one of my friends with the same qualifications and same education, they’re making way more money.”
But there’s another belief that underpins many people’s ideas of teaching – that, as a so-called pink-collar profession, it is a woman’s job.
(There’s the elephant.)
The stigma goes even further: Men who want to work with children are sometimes seen as inherently suspicious. Male teachers are given the advice early to never be alone with a child behind a closed door.
Institutions have pointed out how harmful the disparity can be. In 2004, the Ontario College of Teachers, along with a handful of education leaders in the province, produced a report called Narrowing the Gender Gap: Attracting Men to Teaching.
“The disparity between the proportions of male and female teachers has accelerated, to the point that it has become a professional and public concern,” the authors wrote.
“Are we the diverse profession we want to be? In the development of character education, are we providing equitable role models for our students?”
Their top recommendation was for the provincial government to support the development and implementation of a three-year, provincewide marketing campaign to attract men to careers in teaching.
No such marketing campaign ever materialized.
Since then, the disparity the report warned about has become even greater, and the teacher shortage has become much worse.
The recruitment gap
Desperate times call for, well, if not desperate measures, then innovative ones.
Last spring, the province announced it was cutting the teacher education program from two years to one in order to get teachers into the classroom faster. (There have still been no recruitment campaigns aimed at men.)
Experts suggest part of the problem with attracting male students is that teaching is not perceived as lucrative.
“Men are more motivated by money and prestige, and you definitely don’t get that in teaching,” said Doug Gleddie, dean of the Faculty of Health, Community and Education at Mount Royal University in Calgary.
Many men who pursue education despite those perceptions have deeper motivations, he said. Some students told him, for example, that their fathers were not as present growing up as they would have liked, the dean said.
“And so they were like, ‘I want to be there for my family. And teaching is a profession that allows me to care for my family.’”
A new teacher might see many cohorts of students come and go before their annual pay reaches six figures.Mark Blinch/Reuters
The average starting salary for a teacher in Canada is just over $63,000, according to Statistics Canada. That increases to just under $110,000 after 15 years of experience. The median income for men with a bachelor’s degree was $68,000 in 2020, the last year for which data is available, according to Statscan.
The perception some young men have that teaching does not pay well enough is simply false, said Prof. Pike, from Tyndale University. “If you finish teacher’s college at 24 or 25, and you land your first contract, by the time you’re 30 you’re making six figures,” he said. For those who choose it, “certainly by 35, you can be supporting a family.”
The bigger concern might be whether the job comes with enough compensation to make up for its demands. In Canada, teachers are facing large class sizes and increasingly complex classrooms, leading to high levels of stress and burnout. These concerns are widely reported, and they are a big reason why many people, not just men, steer away from the profession.
With AI destabilizing the future of so many careers – and disrupting higher education – professions such as teaching that require interpersonal connections and a physical presence seem like a safe bet.
“There’s a high demand for teachers, and so if you’re really concerned about the labour force, getting into teaching is a good way to get established in the labour force fairly quickly,” said Daniel Laitsch, founding director of the Centre for the Study of Educational Leadership and Policy at Simon Fraser University.
While many other people his age who are completing postsecondary degrees are faced with the uncertainty of what AI will do to the careers they hope to pursue, Christian Wiebe, who is pursuing a degree in education at Mount Royal University, is free of those concerns.
“I just haven’t had to worry about that because there’s just that element of human connection within the teaching profession that is something AI will likely never be able to replicate,” he said.
Mic Smith/The Associated Press
The academic upside
Would having more male teachers in the system do anything to improve academic outcomes for boys?
Compared with girls, boys tend to get lower marks and lower grades in most subjects, are less likely to graduate high school on time and are less likely to attend university.
Girls are also more likely to finish high school on time. In 2023-24, 86 per cent of young women graduated high school on time, compared with 82 per cent of young men, according to Statscan. And at the university level, women now account for 59 of the student population.
Boys also appear to be disengaging from school.
In a study published last month based on a survey of approximately 750,000 15-year-olds from 61 countries, Canada had one of the bigger gender gaps on questions measuring students’ attitudes toward school, ranking 11th. When asked whether “trying hard at school is important,” 62 per cent of girls strongly agreed, compared with 51 per cent of boys.
Indonesia and Vietnam have some of the most gender-equal attitudes to trying hard in school, according to a recent study published in PNAS Nexus. Canada was one of the most unequal of 61 countries.Muda Sagala/AFP via Getty Images
As a father of two boys who have had male teachers themselves, Paul Morgan was pretty sure research would back up his view that male students benefit from being taught by men. So, he was surprised by the results of a study he co-authored last year in the United States.
Prof. Morgan, director of the Institute for Social and Health Equity at the University of Albany, and colleague Eric Hu analyzed a U.S. Education Department dataset that followed a group of 8,000 students from kindergarten through fifth grade, from 2010 to 2017. Half were boys and half were girls.
Researchers separated out the 1,300 boys who had at least one male teacher, looking for differences in their academic performance and behaviour. The researchers found no difference in math, science or reading scores, or in behavioural measures.
“From a policy perspective, it doesn’t look like you’re going to get much bang for your buck in terms of greater levels of achievement by diversifying the teacher work force along gender lines,” Prof. Morgan said, based on the findings focused on younger children.
But diversity might play a bigger role in boys’ academic achievement in middle or high school, when students are developing a deeper sense of their identities and genders and gender roles or stereotypical ideas of social expectations around gender, he said.
Having more male teachers might lead to other outcomes not measured in his study, Prof. Morgan said, such as helping students feel a greater sense of belonging or giving them more diverse role models.
Researcher Paul Morgan says he believes the gender of teachers may be less critical to academic success at the elementary level than at middle and high school.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Broader research studies have found a significant positive impact when kids see themselves in the people who are teaching them.
For example, in a study published by the U.S. Institute of Labor Economics in 2017, researchers at Johns Hopkins University tracked 100,000 students from Grade 3 to Grade 12 and found that for low-income Black students, having at least one Black teacher in Grade 3, 4 or 5 reduced the probability of Black boys dropping out of high school by 39 per cent and increased their likelihood of considering college by 29 per cent.
Research specifically measuring the impact of teachers’ gender diversity on students’ academic achievement is more limited and results have been mixed, with some studies showing positive and others finding no correlation.
Some academics are outspoken about the potential benefits, though.
Thomas Dee, a researcher at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, has estimated that the gender gap in middle-school English performance could decrease by approximately one-third if half of English teachers in Grades 6, 7 and 8 were men, based on his analysis of the U.S. National Education Longitudinal Survey.
Mr. Peters, the teacher in Edmonton, has anecdotal evidence that this could be the case. He is always pushing his students to read more, especially the boys.
There’s one kid, a great kid, he said, who gravitates toward him because Mr. Peters played football in university.
“He actually said that he thinks reading is a waste of time,” Mr. Peters said. “I turned and I was like, man, no, if there is only one thing you’re going to do at school, it should be to read. If you’re going to do one exercise, it should be squats. If you’re going to do one thing, it should be to read.”
Mark Humphrey/The Associated Press; Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle via AP
The social upside
Ryan Cho, a high-school English teacher in Port Coquitlam, B.C., was thinking about the need for more male teachers last fall at a spoken word festival featuring the 14 best young poets and spoken word artists in his school district – 13 of them were girls, one of them was a boy.
A few months later, as his school’s English department awards were being handed out, more than 75 per cent of the awards in the Grade 12 class went to girls.
Perhaps if students had more male teachers, especially at the elementary level, role modelling reading and a love of literature, boys would read more, said Mr. Cho, author of the book Brotherhood is a Constant Possibility: Asian Masculinity in a World Made for Whiteness.
Ryan Cho teaches high-school English in Port Coquitlam, B.C.Supplied
But the importance of teachers acting as role models doesn’t end there, especially with male students being exposed to misogynistic ideas online, he said.
“How amazing would it be if there were more men there to be male role models, to show that caring and caring work is something men can and should do and are able to do,” Mr. Cho said.
It could make young men less likely to succumb to the ideas of personalities such as Andrew Tate, a popular promulgator of misogyny in the online “manosphere.”
“If you listen to Andrew Tate online but then are surrounded by nurturing, supportive teachers and coaches, Andrew Tate is not going to have the impact that he would have within isolation of those things,” Mr. Cho said.
Andrew Tate, at right with brother Tristan, is part of a ‘manosphere’ culture that teachers like Mr. Cho must sometimes contend with in their classrooms.Alexandru Dobre/The Associated Press
Mr. Cho has sponsored the feminist club at his school, and co-sponsored the queers and allies club as well. “I’m pretty explicit with my students that I’m a straight cis person, and I do make a point of modelling being open to diverse ways of gender and being and sexuality,” he said.
Several of his students want to become teachers, and some have even enrolled in pre-college teacher programs, including one of his recent graduates, a man who identifies as bisexual, Mr. Cho said.
“I can’t say for sure that me showing them that you don’t have to be a stereotypical bro to be in that role is something that has opened that up, but I do like to think that we don’t always know the impact we have just by being ourselves,” he said.
Having more male teachers in classrooms would also benefit boys from low-income households, he said.
“If you are a lower-income boy, you’re less likely to have a male role model you’re connected with, in part because your parents are so busy, but also in part because low-income boys are more likely to be raised by single moms,” Mr. Cho said.
Research published last year by the RAND Corporation, a U.S.-based non-profit think tank and research institute, found that for boys and young men between the ages of 12 and 21, only 41 per cent of those from households with annual income of less than $50,000 had a male mentor for help with school work, compared with 72 per cent of those from households with $100,000 or more in annual income.
“Sometimes people see it as just a gender issue,” Mr. Cho said of the dearth of male teachers and its impact, “but it’s also a class issue.”
Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
A snowball effect?
Convincing more men to enter teaching poses several steep challenges, but the more men who do enter the profession the more likely there is to be a snowball effect, said Ben Smith, head of research at the American Institute for Boys and Men.
Mr. Smith is currently undertaking a study in partnership with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago of why male teachers were motivated to teach. He said early findings show that more than 60 per cent of male teachers surveyed said they were encouraged to enter teaching by another male teacher.
And of those teachers, 69 per cent said it was a very effective recruitment strategy.
Mr. Smith pointed out that the survey is based on a small sample of just 145 current teachers, but its findings seem to point to one benefit of having more male teachers.
“The more men we get into teaching, the easier it seems to get other men into teaching,” Mr. Smith said.
Policy makers could also look to successful efforts in recent years to encourage women to enter the traditionally male-dominated fields of science, technology, engineering and math, Mr. Smith said.
“What did they do to get more women into STEM, and can we adopt some of those techniques and strategies?”
The Grade 6 teacher in Calgary, Mr. Joseph, said he always enjoyed working with kids, whether it was babysitting or being a camp counsellor.
But his biggest inspiration to become a teacher came from his Grade 6 social studies teacher. “The way he talked about democracy, the way he talked about government, it just really resonated with me,” he said.
The example that teacher set stuck with Mr. Joseph. The passion for learning. The passion for civic engagement. The ability to inspire. To make students think. To make them better.
“I wanted to have the ability to give that back to kids,” Mr. Joseph said.
Amir Salehi/The Globe and Mail
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