Men – in particular: young men – are more likely than women to hold populist attitudes and to vote for radical right parties, which has fueled the rise of those parties across established democracies. Research on gender gaps in populist attitudes mostly explains these with reference to mens’ economic grievances and cultural value change. We contribute to these studies with a focus on experiences in adolescence, which is known to be a formative period for the development of political attitudes and opinions. More concretely, we argue that males’ propensity to develop populist attitudes – or: anti-liberal attitudes more generally – is crucially influenced by their experiences in schools. In schools, they interact with street-level bureaucrats – teachers – on a daily basis, most of whom nowadays are women. In addition, the stereotypical behaviors of boys are less conducive to academic performance than those of girls, resulting in boys being admonished more often and getting worse grades. Feeling treated more unfairly in school and lacking male role models, we argue that boys are more likely than girls to develop anti-liberal attitudes. We empirically test these claims with data from a large-N survey of 7th graders in three German Bundesländer that includes several measures of unfairness perceptions and a number of second-dimension attitudes. First analyses suggest that boys indeed are more likely to feel treated unfairly in school than girls, and that perceptions of unfairness are more negatively related to attitudes towards democracy and gender equality among boys than among girls.