Although scholars have long argued that boys’ academic engagement is undercut by dominant masculinity norms, these norms have been largely invisible in quantitative research. Instead, researchers have been restricted to documenting disparities by binary sex, collapsing the entire gender spectrum into a 0 or 1. Analyzing four decades of high school cohort studies, the current study moves beyond this binary approach to advance a new perspective on masculinity and the rising gender gap in education.
Dr. Joel Mittleman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, with affiliations in the Population Studies Center and the Program in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. His research analyzes inequality in schools and society with a focus on LGBTQ+ populations. Across projects, he shows how LGBTQ+ populations encourage new ways of conceptualizing gender and new approaches to measuring the dynamics of gender inequality. As such, much of his research advances innovative methods for analyzing inequality beyond the binary categories of female and male.