A new qualitative study published in PLOS One on February 24, 2026 has revealed a striking disconnect inside England’s primary school classrooms: five- and six-year-old pupils say yoga is for everyone, while their teachers describe boys as reluctant participants. The mismatch raises hard questions about how the gendering of yoga is created — and by whom.
Conducted by researchers at Northumbria University across deprived areas of North East England, the work is among the first to ask children themselves whether they see yoga as a “feminine” activity — and to compare their answers with the perceptions of the adults teaching them.
What the Study Found
The research team — Karen Wilkin, Claire Thornton and Georgia Allen-Baker — recruited six Key Stage 1 (KS1) teachers and 23 KS1 pupils (11 boys and 12 girls, all aged five or six) from schools across the North East of England, an area where 31.25% of pupils in the participating schools are eligible for free school meals. Teachers were interviewed individually. Pupils completed a child-friendly art task in small groups, talking about their yoga sessions while they drew.
The findings, analysed using Qualitative Content Analysis through the lens of Gender Schema Theory, can be summarised in three layers:
- Pupils show no shared “feminine” view of yoga. Nine boys and ten girls physically demonstrated yoga poses during the task. Four boys and three girls also reported practising yoga at home — a near-even split.
- Ingroup bias dominates pupils’ answers. When asked whether yoga is “for girls, for boys, or for everyone,” ten pupils (five boys and five girls) said it is for their own gender. Nine pupils (five boys, four girls) said it is for everyone.
- Teachers, however, describe boys as reluctant. Five of the six teachers said some male pupils appeared less willing to join in. One teacher recalled: “Some boys just aren’t happy to, it’s just, you know, they struggle, they’re not happy, they feel like they’re very much on show.”
The Reluctant-Boys Paradox
The headline tension in the paper is the mismatch between what teachers see and what pupils report. The boys themselves were just as enthusiastic about demonstrating their poses as the girls, equally likely to practise at home, and several considered boys to be the “better” yogis. Yet the adults observing them detected hesitation.
The authors suggest several explanations. Adult yoga culture is heavily marketed to women, so teachers may unconsciously expect male pupils to disengage. Teachers also tend to anticipate more competitive behaviour from boys — and only one teacher in the study reported observing any competition during yoga sessions. The other five denied seeing it at all. If teachers expect competition and yoga delivers calm, the framing of “boys aren’t engaged” may be partly a perception artefact.
Another factor: at this age (around six), children’s adherence to gender stereotypes is just beginning to soften. Younger children apply gender “rules” rigidly, but flexibility increases from age six onward. The KS1 pupils in this study may simply not have absorbed enough yoga-related marketing yet to develop strong gendered beliefs. Commercial kids’ yoga content — Cosmic Kids, Yoga Bugs, Salamander Yoga — tends to use gender-neutral cartoon characters and animals, in contrast to adult yoga marketing.
Why It Matters
Yoga is becoming a fixture in UK primary school PSHE (Personal, Social, Health and Economic education) and wellbeing curricula, alongside its rising presence in U.S. classrooms. A 2026 meta-analysis already showed school yoga boosts executive function in children as young as three, and the school yoga movement has grown rapidly worldwide.
If teachers carry an unconscious belief that boys will disengage from yoga, that belief can subtly shape who gets encouraged, who gets noticed, and who quietly drifts to the back of the mat. Decades of research on classroom expectations show teacher perceptions of pupil engagement often become self-fulfilling. Wilkin and colleagues warn that, while strategies exist to promote gender parity in school sport, almost all of them have been developed for competitive, team-based activities — not for slow, non-competitive practices like yoga. That gap, they argue, needs filling.
The paper also lands at a moment when the broader culture is paying more attention to boys’ wellbeing and the so-called “masculinity crisis.” Yoga has well-evidenced benefits for emotional regulation and stress — benefits that have been documented in UK studies of disadvantaged teenagers. Excluding boys from that, even unintentionally, has long-tail costs.
What This Means For You
If you teach yoga to children: Watch your own assumptions before watching the kids. The study suggests adults may “see” reluctance in boys that the boys themselves don’t feel. Use gender-neutral language, avoid framing poses as “graceful” (feminine-coded) versus “strong” (masculine-coded), and resist the temptation to introduce competition to “engage” boys — the children in this study weren’t asking for it.
If you’re a parent of a young boy: Don’t assume your son won’t enjoy yoga because adult yoga “looks feminine.” The under-sevens in this study were equally confident demonstrating poses regardless of gender, and just as likely to practise at home. The ‘yoga is for girls’ message is something children absorb later, often from adults around them. A short home practice with you — animal poses, partner breathing, story-based flows — can help establish yoga as a normal, everyone-friendly activity well before stereotypes harden.
If you’re an adult man who has avoided yoga: The gendering of yoga as a “women’s activity” is a learned belief, not a fact, and you may have absorbed it without noticing. Communities like Broga exist precisely to ease this discomfort, but the deeper takeaway from this study is that there’s nothing intrinsically feminine about the practice itself — only about how it has been marketed to adults for decades.Limitations of the Study
The researchers are upfront about the study’s limits. The sample is small (six teachers, 23 pupils), all teachers identified as female, and 22 of the 23 pupils were classified as White British, restricting how widely the findings can be generalised. The study also treats gender as binary, which the authors note oversimplifies young children’s evolving understanding of gender identity. And because the pupils’ verbal responses were brief — typical of five- and six-year-olds — the data are richer on the teachers’ side than the children’s.
Still, this is one of the first qualitative studies to document a teacher–pupil perception gap on yoga, and the authors call for more work in Key Stage 2 and Key Stage 3 to see if and when a more uniformly gendered view of yoga begins to crystallise.
Key Takeaways
- Five- and six-year-olds in this UK study did not share a consensus view that yoga is a girls’ activity. Boys and girls were equally engaged in school yoga.
- Five of six teachers reported some male pupils being reluctant to join in — a perception that may reflect adult assumptions more than pupil reality.
- Only one of six teachers reported any competition during yoga sessions, which may explain why teachers anticipating boys’ competitiveness can read their quiet focus as disengagement.
- The findings suggest the gendering of yoga is something children learn from adults, not something they bring to the mat.
- School yoga programmes may benefit from gender-aware teacher training that focuses on yoga’s non-competitive nature, alongside the wellbeing curriculum.
Source: Wilkin K, Thornton C, Allen-Baker G (2026). Gendered perspectives of yoga in the Key Stage 1 classroom: Qualitative content analysis indicates contrasting views of teachers and pupils. PLoS One 21(2): e0343622. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0343622
