“A male student outright refused to take my feedback on his work. He said, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re just a woman,’” says Ellie Coverdale. “It was shocking; not just the words but how confidently he said them. When students disrespect you simply because you’re a woman, it makes classroom management harder, and it also affects how much you’re able to reach them. It chipped away at my authority.”
Ellie is just one of many women facing an onslaught of misogyny and racism in the classroom across the UK. Teachers are seeing classrooms flooded with these attitudes, with more and more pupils, especially boys, mimicking figures like Andrew Tate, and female teachers are enduring the worst of the consequences.
From a teacher being upskirted to primary school teachers encountering boys who refuse to speak to them because of their gender, misogyny is infecting classrooms and leaving women vulnerable to potential violence, aggression, and harassment.
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In the teachers' union NASUWT’s Behaviour in Schools Survey, 27.3% of female teachers reported experiencing verbal abuse several times a week, and 14.3% of them reported it daily. A significant proportion of this abuse is misogynistic or racist. Women report boys blocking doorways and even barking at female staff, as well as male pupils watching increasingly violent pornographic material. All in an environment where teachers should feel safe in their roles as leaders in education.
As a direct result of this surge in misogyny, Ellie Coverdale quit teaching and transitioned to become an online educator with UKWritings because “The slow build-up of everyday misogyny wore me down”. “When you are constantly second-guessed, and your students challenge your authority in ways they wouldn’t with male teachers — and I felt that if I raised those issues, it would just make me seem ‘difficult’ — it all started to take a real toll,” she tells GLAMOUR. Despite loving teaching, Ellie couldn’t carry on enduring the normalisation of these attitudes or the impact that they had on her mental health.
Other teachers are still working in these environments, simultaneously attempting to combat misogyny while protecting their well-being. The incidents range from minor to severe. Holly*, a head of history at a high school, has never encountered any threats of physical violence, but has noticed a significant uptick in male students using language to convey disrespect, like switching “Miss says” for “She says”, a contrast to how they’ll also respectfully call male teachers “Sir”. It extends beyond language changes, though.
“I’ve also overheard older sixth-form students ‘rating’ female staff members' physical attractiveness; they did apologise when confronted, but it’s concerning that they felt it was okay to do that in a public hallway,” Holly tells GLAMOUR.
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The situation only worsens for female teachers when racism and misogyny are weaponised together, which former teacher Jody Findley discovered while working across primary, secondary and higher education. “I’ve been subjected to racism and mistreatment in schools. I’ve witnessed these behaviours manifest as microaggressions, disrespect, and being talked over or dismissed,” she tells GLAMOUR.
“Misogynoir, the specific oppression faced by Black women, is especially insidious in this context. The intersectionality of race and gender is still not widely understood in schools, which allows these behaviours to go unchecked. These experiences have had a profound impact on my mental health, adding to the emotional burden of navigating these spaces.”
Jody has seen these behaviours escalate significantly since the pandemic, fed by the deterioration of young people’s mental health and the intense pressure on family units. “Schools are being asked to shoulder these burdens without adequate funding or staffing,” she adds. “Teachers are expected to be social workers, counsellors, mediators, and educators all at once. In this overstretched system, issues like racism and misogyny slip through the cracks. Without proper training and mental health infrastructure, staff are left reacting to crises rather than preventing them.”
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The growth of misogynistic attitudes in classrooms beyond mandatory schooling, too. University lecturers also note a distressing increase in misogynistic attitudes. “I’ve seen women, especially women of colour, experience horrendous sexism and racism from students and staff,” Andrea*, a lecturer in music at a UK institution, tells GLAMOUR.
“Personally, a lot of my experiences of sexism are covert; it’s often unconscious bias, especially from students. I struggle with cliques of all-male students who don’t value or respect my feedback or integrate it into their work like they do for my male colleagues. Culturally, we’re also seeing a gender divide — my seminars of 30 to 40 students often segregate themselves by gender, which I challenge and encourage them to mix.”
It also can't be forgotten that misogyny is steamrolling over female students’ confidence and comfort in school, too. “I saw brilliant girls go quiet because they didn’t want to be mocked,” Ellie says. “Male students would talk over them, tease them because they're 'too emotional' or 'bossy' if they showed leadership. Girls were picked apart for how they looked or acted. While boys just got to… exist.”
While we're getting better at recognising the impact of rising misogyny on students, the mental health pressures placed on female teachers have been largely ignored. But it’s there and it's getting worse. “I’ve worked in schools where misogyny was prevalent, and at times, I’ve felt genuinely unsafe,” says Jody. “The stress is constant, and your safety takes a backseat to keeping students regulated, engaged, and supported. There isn’t time to process the psychological impact in real time. You’re in survival mode and don't have time to deal with it.” The impact of this stress is reflected in the number of women leaving teaching; while not all related to surging misogyny in schools, over 9,000 women left the state education sector in the 2022-23 academic year, compared to around 3,400 men leaving.
The misogyny wore Ellie down over time as well, leaving her feeling constantly on edge and anxious to enter school, which made her question if she was cut out for teaching. “That’s one of the reasons I eventually left,” she says.
Facing a constant stream of misogyny has untold consequences on women’s mental health. We know what it’s like living with the weight of society’s ingrained sexism, but the impact takes on new life when it infects the workplace. “When that behaviour comes from students, who teachers are there to support and guide, it can feel especially destabilising,” consultant psychologist Dr Elena Touroni tells GLAMOUR. “It chips away at self-esteem, creates chronic stress, and can leave individuals feeling unsafe, undervalued, or constantly on edge.”
Aside from the mental health toll associated with feeling unsafe and disrespected, running this gauntlet on a daily basis can erode women’s confidence in the workplace, as it did with Ellie, and prevent them from reaching their potential. “It’s not just about one-off incidents — it’s the cumulative weight of being questioned more often, overlooked for leadership, or expected to carry emotional burdens her male counterparts are not,” leadership advisor Elina Teboul tells GLAMOUR. “This steady erosion can blunt her passion, reduce her sense of agency, and ultimately push her out of a profession she once loved — and when this happens en masse, schools lose not only talent but wisdom.
But what’s behind this surge in misogyny, and how do we start to stamp it out or shield teachers from the worst of it? NASUWT’s survey of its union members concluded that 59% of teachers cite social media as a major contributor to poor student behaviour. The correlation between rising misogyny and social media is undeniable, especially as Vodafone research data shows that boys aged 11-14 are exposed to harmful content within 30 minutes of being online, and one in 10 are seeing it in as little as 60 seconds. Over half of boys are familiar with influencers with ties to the ‘manosphere’; this translates to over 70% of teachers noting a rise in sexist language in the last 12 months.
Amy*, a teacher in London, certainly feels that the surge flows directly from influencers like the infamous Andrew Tate into the classroom, after all, it was students who first introduced her to his content when a 14-year-old boy started challenging her to “fact check herself”. “It got so bad that enough complaints had come in via safeguarding that our Head of Politics did an assembly to each year group about Tate,” she says. Amy also connects a global swing to the right to the change, noting that several of her students have expressed support for Trump, the first president to be found liable for sexual abuse. It’s a shift echoed by Gen Z insights specialists Pion, who report growing polarisation in youth attitudes.
Although the influence of social media is evident, this surge of misogyny doesn’t exist in a vacuum. “I think it's a situation of chickens coming home to roost,” explains Holly. “Social attitudes have been deeply sexist for generations — locker room talk, negging, man up, stop acting like a girl — and so it's not a case of this generation's young men being unusually rotten, it's that we as a society have never really come to terms with how these existing attitudes impact boys and young men.” She also emphasises that easy access to pornography is reframing sex and relationships as transactional for young boys, and the growing extremity of sex work, like the now infamous Bonnie Blue, is normalising “a dehumanisation of women” that is making its way into schools.
Regardless of what the root of the problem is, something has to be done to protect both students and teachers from the onslaught of misogyny infecting our schools and contributing to the broader resurgence of sexism running rampant through society. Some schools are introducing phone bans to counteract the rising tide. Still, at last month's NASUWT annual conference, Patrick Roach, general secretary, said that although there have been “positive discussions” with ministers about tackling the problem, restricting mobile phone access during the day does not go far enough “to tackle what has become a national emergency.”
It’s important to add here that several teachers and lecturers who spoke to me were uncomfortable being named for fear of their institutions retaliating or refuting their claims — how can any educational system combat the misogyny or racism endured by teachers if they are too scared to speak publicly? They also all stressed that misogynistic and racist behaviour in schools is not new, only taking on a new form as social media twists its knife.
“Sexist and misogynistic attitudes and abuse may have attracted greater attention of late, but it is clear from our reports from teachers in schools that these behaviours are not a recent phenomenon,” Jane Peckham, NASUWT Deputy General Secretary, tells GLAMOUR. “Teachers cannot be left alone to deal with these problems. We need a multi-agency response to improve social media literacy, critical thinking skills, and to expose disinformation and false narratives.”
While she agrees with using phone bans to start tackling the issue, Holly believes “a wider social revolution needs to happen with men supporting women and openly challenging bad behaviour in their immediate circles and evaluating their own behaviours and attitudes.” But, while protecting women from the consequences of misogyny is essential, we also have to help young boys build their confidence to avoid leaving them vulnerable to the influence of misogynistic influencers.
“We have to address issues of insecurity in young men so that they can feel more confident in themselves and know their value doesn't rely on them degrading others,” Holly says. “Confident and empathetic young men are also less likely to fall for the nonsense peddled by far-right misogynist grifters who use young people's insecurities to improve their views, sales, or relevance, since they don't need someone else to tell them how to feel good about themselves.”
