The younger the student, the more gender-skewed the teaching force is. Male teachers at a daycare or preschool are an extremely rare bird. At elementary schools, schools are often lucky if they even have 20% of their teachers with a y-chromosome, and more often than not, they’re the P.E. teachers, or maybe music. Getting into secondary school, you start seeing more males, but it’s still generally at least 60% female. The males are typically in administrative roles, P.E. teachers, or regular academic teachers who also coach a sport.
In case it’s not obvious, boys in public schools aren’t seeing many male educators as role models (and those that are typically are affiliated with a sport). So then the whole process of learning and academics can also start to be linked as a “gendered” idea since the vast majority of the teaching force is female. All of which can contribute to males turning away from higher education as well.
To get actual data, rather than just my impressions, 11% of public of elementary school teachers are male while 36% of secondary teachers are male (source).
Below is a key quote from this article on the effects of having a black teacher by third grade on enrolling in college.
Black students who’d had just one black teacher by third grade were 13 percent more likely to enroll in college—and those who’d had two were 32 percent more likely. The findings, led by researchers from Johns Hopkins University and American University, were published in a working paper titled “The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers” today by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Now, imagine the impact that would happen if we switch the category to males. If boys had at least one male teacher by third grade, maybe they’d be 13% more likely to enroll in college, and if they’d had two male teachers, they might be 32% more likely to attend college. And that would pretty much make up the gap that people are observing with respect to college enrollment for U.S. males.
So, why don’t we have more male teachers, especially in younger grades? I suspect the top reason is probably the pay, and the second reason is that teaching students who aren’t even teenagers isn’t considered “manly” enough. Male teachers in elementary schools who aren’t P.E. teachers are usually very secure about their own identities. Those that aren’t might well be too afraid of the associations of joining a “feminine” profession.