One of my favorite research projects I ever did for school was the effect of single-sex education on children. I’ll tell you why.
My initial research (mostly news articles) all said that there’s no benefit to sex-segregated education. They acknowledged outliers like that school for young black men with such incredible graduation statistics, but said that, generally, there’s no benefit.
But then I kept looking. And it turns out that yeah, if you look at all children overall, there’s no benefit - because sex-segregated education is great for girls, and terrible for boys.
Girls in all-girl schools get better grades, have closer and healthier social lives, and have better mental health.
Boys in all-boy schools get worse grades and get in trouble more.
When attempting to make sense of this, journalists and researchers usually fall back on “girls do better because they’re not distracted by boys/boy drama, and boys do worse because there’s no girls to impress.”
Which is ridiculous, of course, because these effects are seen even grade school - 8 year old boys are not doing well in school to impress girls. It’s also ridiculous because teenage boys are also not doing well in school to impress girls. That’s not how teenagers work.
The answer is obvious to women. Girls learn better away from boys because they are not being assaulted, harassed, belittled, or compared to their male peers at every turn. Boys do worse away from girls because, without a socially acceptable target, they turn their antisocial urges on each other. Even adult men do this when separated from women - see hazing scandals at fraternities, or the constant man-on-man sexual harassment that is just “part of military culture.”
But because it doesn’t benefit men, sex-segregated education is considered pointless. Send your daughters to girls-only schools.
