Why Men Drop Out to Fit In: Conforming to Gender Roles Makes Men Less Ambitious
The Gender Gap in Ambition
There’s this widespread idea that men are more ambitious than women, especially at work. It’s called the “gender gap,” and it shows up when people are asked about their ambitions to get into politics, to complete advanced degrees, and to seek out promotions and raises.
The thing is, it’s mostly nonsense. Like a lot of ways that men and women are supposed to be different, the ambition gender gap is mostly a matter of context and individual variation. In other words, super motivated, aspiration-driven men and women have about the same level of ambition, and ditto on the opposite end of the spectrum. What determines where on the spectrum they fall has not all that much to do with gender and a lot to do with stuff like parental encouragement and workplace culture.
When someone’s ambitions are supported and encouraged, those ambitions grow. When ambition is met with hostility, disbelief, or lack of support, it withers. This means that just being born male or female doesn’t have much effect on our level of ambitiousness, or on our achievements in our careers or in other areas of life.
Gender is still relevant to ambition, though. Masculinity itself can become a kind of context—like parental support or workplace culture—that nurtures or hinders the growth of ambition.
Education: When Masculinity Gets In the Way
In much the same way that we tend to think of men as being more ambitious, we tend to think that women are more studious. The stereotype is that boys don’t like to learn, preferring to roughhouse, play, or horse around. It’s an expectation that can set in as early as preschool, and when teachers believe it, boys in their classes rapidly lose motivation to learn.
(Much the same is true for parents, of course: if they expect their kids not to care about school because “boys just aren’t interested in that,” the kids are a whole lot less likely to care about school.)
What this means early on is that there’s basically one type of ambition—doing well in school—where boys start falling behind almost right away. This isn’t because of their hormones or their neural development, it’s because of how we talk and think about boys and young men: we expect them to read less, pay less attention in class, be more disruptive, and resist instruction.
Those same expectations pay off later, when assertiveness and self-confidence are perceived positively for men but negatively for women, but for boys in school, it’s a problem.
The effect is pretty specific. It shows up more for boys who identify with traditional kinds of masculinity, like being brash and outspoken or stoic and tough. It also seems to be specific to educational contexts—boys are at least as ambitious about other aspects of their futures, even early on.
How does thinking of ourselves as more masculine have this kind of negative, de-motivating effects? Some scientists think a good explanation comes from “social determination theory,” or SDT, which has proven itself a reliable way to predict when people will be motivated and engaged.
The basic idea is that everyone has fundamental psychological needs, and our motivation depends on having them met. Those fundamental needs, for SDT, are competence (feeling like we can accomplish things we set our minds to), autonomy (feeling like we have choice and self-control), and relatedness (feeling connection and belonging).
Studies using SDT consistently find that for girls, internal self-motivation seems to be more strongly linked to better grades. Meanwhile, boys tend to say that school environments are less supportive of their needs, which often leads to reduced motivation. Those effects then combine.
Say two kids start off equally interested in school. One, a boy, gets funny looks when he shows interest in reading, or doesn’t get help and attention from a teacher on a subject he struggles with because the teacher assumes he doesn’t care anyway. The other, a girl, finds out that people think it’s just normal for her to care about her grades and work hard on homework.
Of course, all of this is outrageously over-simplified. What matters is that our ideas about being a man shape the world our kids grow up in. There are a lot of good ways to be masculine, and lots of different kinds of good men. For young men, and especially for boys, it’s important that we not give them too narrow a view of what it means to succeed in manhood. If they like books, let them read!
