UN Gender Education Initiatives Reveal Unacceptable Policy Gaps for Boys and Young Men

PRESS RELEASE
Contact: G. Lawrence DeMarco, LLM
Email: ldemarco@menandboys.net
Phone: +1-215-901-1930

UN Gender Education Initiatives Reveal Unacceptable Policy Gaps for Boys and Young Men

March 2, 2026 — Over the past decade, global education policy has focused overwhelmingly on advancing girls’ education. That focus has produced measurable gains for females, and at the same time, created new gender gaps.

Since 2015, historic gaps that disadvantage girls have narrowed significantly in most regions. At the same time, new and measurable education gaps have emerged affecting boys and young men — particularly in the areas of secondary school completion, tertiary enrollment, and academic engagement.

The United Nations education policy remains heavily focused on girls. Since the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals, the UN system has created an extensive global framework dedicated specifically to advancing girls’ and women’s education, including:

The United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative (UNGEI), hosted by UNICEF, coordinates global advocacy such as #Educate4Equality and drives policy alignment for girls’ secondary completion (1).
The UNESCO Strategy for Gender Equality in and through Education (2019–2025), including the “Her Education, Our Future” acceleration initiative mobilizing political and financial commitments for girls’ and women’s education (2).
The Global Platform for Gender Equality and Girls’ and Women’s Empowerment in and through Education, launched after the 2022 Transforming Education Summit to promote leadership, financing, and systemic reform around girls’ advancement (3).
The Education Plus Initiative (2021–2025), led by UNAIDS with UNESCO, UNFPA, UNICEF, and UN Women, targets adolescent girls and young women in sub-Saharan Africa through secondary education as a pathway to HIV prevention and gender equality (4).
Ongoing UNICEF and UN Women programs that focus on girls’ access, removal of harmful practices, gender-responsive budgeting, and expanded completion of secondary and tertiary education (5).

As a result, since 2015, approximately 50 million additional girls have enrolled in school worldwide (6).

There is no UN global infrastructure dedicated specifically to boys’ education. Programs that reference boys and young men exist, but they are limited in scope and embedded within broader gender frameworks, rather than established as stand-alone global priorities.

Examples include:

The HeForShe campaign, expanded post-2015 to engage men and boys as allies in gender equality for women and girls, including education-related components (7).
UNESCO’s response to its 2022 Global Report on Boys’ Disengagement from Education, including the 2024 “Lifting Barriers: Educated Boys for Gender Equality” initiative (8).
The Transforming MEN’talities initiative and related positive masculinity programs (9).

But there is no UN equivalent to the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative that is focused on boys, no strategy centered exclusively on male educational attainment, and no major UN-led global platform addressing boys’ academic disengagement.

Indeed, global education data show measurable disparities affecting boys and young men:

Girls now hold a modest but consistent advantage in upper secondary completion globally, exceeding boys by 2–3 percentage points (10).
In tertiary education, women are significantly more likely than men to be enrolled at higher levels: In 2020, women’s gross tertiary enrollment was 43%, compared with 37% for men (11).
Of the 272 million school-aged children not being educated globally, approximately 139 million are boys, compared to 133 million girls (12).
In Latin America, the Caribbean, Europe, and North America, boys lag behind girls in learning outcomes such as reading performance. Global data show similar patterns of gender disparity in academic achievement as girls consistently outperform boys in key assessments (13).

Sustainable Development Goal 4 commits the international community to inclusive and equitable quality education for all (14). Global education patterns are evolving, and policy must change with them.

The International Council for Men and Boys is a non-governmental organization working to end the 12 sex disparities that affect men and boys worldwide. The ICMB is a leader of the emerging global movement to address the 12 areas of male disadvantage. Achieving #GenderEqualityForMen will also benefit women.

Links:

A review of the publicly available UN education initiatives analyzed for this release may be accessed here:
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMi1jb3B5_cac11048-1198-45e6-ae67-59df5e6a051c

The ICMB analysis of the United Nations is available here: https://www.menandboys.net/un-2/

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