Dr Jennifer Buckingham quoted in ‘Opinion: Philip Roth said fiction readers will die out. Maybe he was half right’ by Jacqueline Maley in The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 May 2023.
Dr Jennifer Buckingham is the director of strategy for MultiLit, a publisher of reading programs, and a research initiative associated with Macquarie University. She tells me there are complex reasons for the divergence between boys and girls, and different theories. “It used to be the case that boys’ lower performance in English and literacy was counterbalanced by superior performances in science and maths,” she says. “That’s not even necessarily the case any more, so educational disparity is much more broad across the curriculum.”