Last week, Senator Matt Canavan spoke about what he called the “feminisation” of the Australian school curriculum, suggesting that young boys are sick of being lectured about how bad men are and that this is one reason they are being pushed towards the manosphere. He also suggested that perhaps we need more male teachers and male role models in schools (Armstrong, 2026).
Now, I am all for more male teachers.
Actually, I am all for more teachers full stop.
And there is absolutely a gender imbalance within the Australian teaching workforce. In 2025, 72 per cent of Australian full-time equivalent teaching staff were female and 28 per cent were male. That imbalance is particularly noticeable in primary schools, where only 17.6 per cent of teachers were male, compared with 38.5 per cent in secondary schools (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2026).
So yes, Mr Canavan, recruit more men into teaching.
Please do.
But here is where you lose me.
Have you actually spoken to young boys?
Because I have.
After hearing Canavan’s comments, I had a conversation with my Year 12 class. I asked the young men sitting in front of me what they thought about the suggestion that having predominantly female teachers was somehow contributing to boys feeling alienated at school.
Their responses were interesting.
Several told me that they actually learn more, and learn better, from their female teachers than they do from some of their male teachers. They said their female teachers make them focus. They make them complete their work. They make them participate. Meanwhile, they described experiences in some other classes where they were more likely to be left sitting on their phones, browsing the internet or having free time.
Now, before somebody comes for me, no, my Year 12 class is not a research sample.
I know that.
I am a researcher.
But they are young men currently sitting inside the Australian education system, and their voices are surely worth listening to if we are going to have national conversations about what young men supposedly want from their schools.
And when I told them what Canavan had said, the young men in my classroom were genuinely shocked.
Not because somebody was talking about boys.
Because somebody was talking for them.
So I have to ask: when a woman teaches a boy and expects him to focus, is that feminisation?
When she sets boundaries, is that patronising?
When she tells him to put his phone away, complete his assessment, participate in discussion and actually learn something, is she “lecturing” him?
Because if that is feminisation, I have apparently been feminising the absolute hell out of my classroom for years.
There is another problem with Canavan’s argument.
Where is the evidence?
When making his comments, Canavan described this explanation as being “in my view”. He argued that a “big reason” boys are attracted to toxic online spaces is that they are sick of hearing how bad men are at school (Armstrong, 2026).
That is an enormous causal claim to make about schools, teachers and the movement of young men towards misogynistic online spaces.
And the research we do have does not give us anything close to the simple answer that boys need male teachers in order to learn effectively.
Australian research by Martin and Marsh (2005), involving 964 junior and middle secondary students, examined whether teacher gender affected students’ academic motivation and engagement. Their findings did not support the idea that boys fare better when taught by men. Boys’ academic motivation and engagement did not significantly improve simply because their teacher was male.
A more recent review by Suter (2024) reaches a similarly complicated conclusion. The causal evidence surrounding male teachers and boys’ educational outcomes is mixed. Some studies find modest positive effects of having a same-gender teacher, others find no benefit, and evidence about long-term outcomes remains limited.
So more male teachers?
Absolutely.
Male teachers are valuable members of our profession, and our students should see diversity within the people standing at the front of their classrooms.
But more male teachers because female teachers are somehow driving boys towards the manosphere?
That is a very different claim.
And if we are going to talk about the “feminisation” of teaching, can we please talk about its history properly?
Because women did not simply wander into education one day, take over and push all the men out.
The history of teaching in Queensland tells a considerably more complicated story.
Between 1860 and 1902, decisions about where male and female teachers belonged were shaped by the educational and social beliefs of the time. Men were generally placed in charge of larger mixed schools, staffed boys’ schools and taught the upper classes of mixed schools. Women were particularly employed in girls’ schools, infant schools and the younger classes of mixed schools. Women could lead some smaller schools, but their opportunities for advancement were far more restricted (Clarke, 1985).
Why were women considered particularly suitable for younger children?
Because the men running the education system believed they were.
Clarke’s (1985) history records that nineteenth-century educational administrators considered women particularly suited to teaching infants because they were believed to be gentler, more patient and capable of exercising milder but effective discipline.
So perhaps the “feminisation” of education is not quite the modern feminist takeover some would like us to imagine.
Women were deliberately channelled into particular areas of teaching by an education system built around very specific ideas about what women and men were supposedly suited to do.
And those women were hardly entering a profession designed in their favour.
In Queensland, a regulation introduced in 1902 required female teachers to resign when they married. Married women began to be re-employed on a temporary basis in 1940, but permanent employment for married women was not provided until 1969 (Clarke, 1985).
Promotion was another matter.
Up until the mid-1960s, Clarke (1985) describes an underlying principle within Queensland education that women should not be placed in positions of authority over men. Female teachers had fewer opportunities to become school principals or education inspectors, were paid at lower rates than men, and the requirement that they resign on marriage created another barrier to career advancement.
So perhaps if we are going to blame women for the historical feminisation of education, we should acknowledge that the systems which channelled women into particular teaching roles, paid them differently, restricted their careers and kept many positions of authority overwhelmingly male were not exactly systems created by women.
And here is my favourite part.
We have actually heard this argument before.
In Queensland.
More than fifty years ago.
In 1972, former Queensland teacher Henry Schoenheimer publicly expressed concern that primary schools were “over-feminised” and that children would suffer because of a lack of father figures. According to Clarke’s (1985) history, he also argued that female teachers were less committed to their careers and education.
Several years later, a male Queensland primary teacher reportedly warned that boys taught solely by women would become “sissies” and was concerned about women supervising boys’ sports such as football and cricket (Clarke, 1985).
Apparently, female teachers have been on the verge of destroying boys for quite some time.
Yet here we all are.
And perhaps instead of continually asking what women in classrooms are doing to push boys towards the manosphere, we could look at the place where the manosphere actually lives.
Online.
The Australian eSafety Commissioner’s 2026 position paper on recommender systems states that these systems play a foundational role in spreading manosphere content. Importantly, boys and young men can be repeatedly recommended this content regardless of whether they actively seek it out. Seemingly harmless self-help and advice material can also act as a gateway to increasingly extreme manosphere content, with repeated exposure contributing to an echo-chamber effect (eSafety Commissioner, 2026).
That seems fairly important.
Because I struggle with the suggestion that a woman standing in front of a classroom saying, “Put your phone away and treat the people around you with respect” is somehow responsible for the misogynistic content being pushed onto that same phone.
I also struggle with the idea that teaching boys about respect somehow means telling them that being male is bad.
I certainly do not teach that.
I work incredibly hard to make sure every young man in my classroom has somewhere safe to learn, create, talk, ask questions and sometimes get things completely wrong without being humiliated for it.
And as a Visual Arts teacher, my classrooms are not scarce of boys.
They choose Art.
They make things.
They paint.
They draw.
They discuss ideas, identity, politics, culture and sometimes uncomfortable social issues.
They are perfectly comfortable doing all of that with a female teacher standing in front of them.
And none of them selected my subject because they thought it would be a “bludge”, because I do not allow it to become one.
They work.
I expect things from them.
I set boundaries.
I challenge them.
I care about them.
Perhaps that is the part of Canavan’s comments that frustrates me most.
He suggests boys need direction, male role models and people who understand what is going on in a young boy’s mind.
I agree that boys need direction.
They need boundaries.
They need adults who care about them.
They need people who expect something from them.
But I reject the idea that those things are inherently male.
The boys in my classroom are cherished.
Not because they are boys.
Because they are my students.
And maybe instead of telling young men that the women teaching them are part of the reason they feel alienated, men in positions of political influence could spend a little more time listening to the young men sitting inside those classrooms.
Because when I asked mine, they had plenty to say.
The manosphere can tap at the windows outside my classroom as loudly as it likes.
But it will never enter.
And my students know that.
References
Armstrong, C. (2026, September 2). Algorithm opt-in best way to stop big tech serving manosphere content to young men, says advocate. ABC News.
Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2026). Schools, 2025.
Clarke, E. (1985). Female teachers in Queensland state schools: A history, 1860–1983. Department of Education, Queensland.
eSafety Commissioner. (2026). Recommender systems: Position paper.
Martin, A. J., & Marsh, H. W. (2005). Motivating boys and motivating girls: Does teacher gender really make a difference? Australian Journal of Education, 49(3), 320–334. https://doi.org/10.1177/000494410504900308
Suter, C. (2024). Do male teachers matter to boys’ education? The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 716(1), 129–140. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027162261429523
Leave a comment