ResearchEducation & Skills, Employment
How pay and family patterns shape who teaches (and why there are so few men)
Michael Hansen is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy; Diana Quintero is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University’s Annenberg Institute. This piece summarizes their AIBM report on how teacher pay and changing family patterns relate to men’s representation in the teaching profession.
Since 1987, the share of male K-12 teachers has shrunk from 30% to 23%, with an even steeper drop from 48% to 36% in secondary schools. This trend raises important questions: What’s turning men away from teaching, and what can be done about it?
We consider two explanations. The first is teacher pay: relatively low salaries may be especially important for men, who are still more likely to be primary earners. The second is delayed and declining family formation, which could weaken teaching’s traditional appeal as a career that fits well with raising children, especially for women.
Several analyses suggest that when it comes to attracting men into teaching, pay is a bigger factor than changing family formation:
- Teaching especially attracts mothers—about 1 in 7 employed, college-educated women with children at home work as teachers (15%).
- Pay strongly shapes men’s representation: men make up 26% of teachers in the highest-paying locations versus 22% in the lowest-paying, a gap that may reflect men’s greater sensitivity to earnings as household breadwinners.
- Married men face a strong penalty for teaching: male-teacher households with children have total earnings of $132,000 annually, compared with $193,000 for households where neither spouse works as a teacher.
- Shifting marriage and family patterns explain little of the decline: Millennial men, who marry later and are less likely to be fathers, are only about 1 percentage point less represented in teaching than Gen X men at comparable career stages.
- Pay, not family formation, appears to be the primary deterrent—and also the more actionable policy lever.
Men teach in higher-paying locations, whether or not they have kids
We sort geographic locations into quintiles based on average teacher pay and examine who teaches in each. If teaching’s compatibility with family life is an important reason men enter the profession, we might expect that fathers would be especially willing to accept lower teacher pay in exchange for its family-friendly schedule. We might also expect to find a weaker relationship between teacher pay and men’s representation among fathers than among men without children.
Instead, men are more represented in higher-paying teaching markets, regardless of whether they have children. Men account for 26% of teachers in the highest-paying locations, compared with 22% in the lowest-paying locations, and the pay gradient is similar for fathers and men without children.
Figure 1
Women show the opposite pattern. Mothers are especially concentrated in the lowest-paying teaching markets, where schedule alignment with children’s routines offsets lower earnings, particularly when a partner’s income fills the gap. The ratio of mothers to childless women in the teacher workforce is 1.6:1 in the lowest-paying quintile, shrinking to just 1.1:1 in the highest.
This asymmetry reflects an important dynamic. Teaching, with its calendar aligned to children’s schedules and daily work centered on young people’s development, fits naturally around caregiving. Roughly one in seven employed women with children work as pre-K–12 teachers (14.9%), compared to about one in eleven among otherwise similar women without children (9.2%). For men, the parallel figures are 5.2% and 3.7%, a real but much smaller gap. Because mothers disproportionately take on caregiving roles within households, they presumably value teaching’s schedule alignment more than fathers do. Fathers, more likely to be primary earners, appear more sensitive to the pay penalty.
Shifting family formation patterns are not driving men away
If declining marriage and childbearing rates were meaningfully reducing men’s interest in teaching, we would expect younger cohorts to be less likely to enter teaching during their prime family-formation years. We track Gen X teachers (born 1965–1980) and Millennial teachers (born 1981–1994) across ages.
At comparable ages, the share of teachers who are male is about one percentage point lower among Millennials than among Gen X (not shown), a modest decline. More telling is the split by pay level: in high-paying locations, men’s representation peaks later and remains more stable into their 40s; in low-paying locations, it peaks earlier and declines faster. The most meaningful variation is thus explained by pay, not by generational shifts in family life.
Figure 2
Teaching imposes a larger household income penalty on men
When we examine married couples with at least one child at home, the household income consequences of teaching differ sharply by which spouse is the teacher.
Table 1
Male-teacher households earn about $23,000 less annually than female-teacher households, and over $60,000 less than non-teacher households, far more than the teacher pay penalty alone would predict. Two dynamics may help explain this gap. First, a husband’s lower earnings may be associated with lower earnings for his wife as well, consistent with evidence that some couples adjust labor supply around a norm that husbands should out-earn wives. Second, gender earnings gaps are larger in other fields, so men stand to gain more by leaving teaching than women do. For men, choosing teaching often means being a primary earner on a relatively low salary. For women, it is more often a secondary-earner role backed by a partner’s higher income.
Implications
The main takeaway from our analysis should be encouraging for policymakers: men’s underrepresentation in teaching is driven by pay, not by deep or irreversible shifts in family life—and pay is something policymakers can act on. Raising teacher salaries, particularly in the lowest-paying states and districts where male representation is weakest, is the most direct lever available. And the benefits would extend well beyond men: higher earnings would of course reward the many women who currently make up the overwhelming majority of the nation’s teaching workforce.
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