Comment by tathougies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tathougies | Hacker News Reader

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As a man, I'll say I absolutely agree. I went to an all-boys high school, and teenage boys simply do better without girls around. Boys are more likely to engage in not traditionally masculine activities when girls are not around because there is no need to impress. Furthermore, girls often mature faster than boys, and this leads to unnecessary stress for both girls and boys at this stage. Furthermore, a lot of what drives teenage boys is competing against other boys for attention from girls. This dynamic is messed up if there are girls around. This damages girls too. Girls often complain that boys are uninterested in competing with them. This is because beating a girl does nothing for boys. They want to compete with boys. If each gender has their space, they both get to flourish.

I don't think single sex environments harm future gender relations either. If anything, they make it better. Both genders need friends of the same gender uncomplicated by romantic feelings. Furthermore, from my own experience, the boys at my high school, and the girls at our sister school, found no trouble getting married, having kids, etc.

Speaking of our sister school, the women they produced were independent minded, competent, competitive, and had leadership experience. Without the need to compete with boys, the girls developed their own leadership and competitive structures that they excelled at.

> Without the need to compete with boys, the girls developed their own leadership and competitive structures that they excelled at.

I think there are several arenas where girls and women benefit when men are excluded; secondary education isn't the only one. A few others to mention:

- Sports and physical competition. Excluding men enables women to compete on their own plane, set world records, etc.

- Restrooms, locker rooms, and the like. Excluding men protects women from unwanted advances, privacy invasions, etc. I know this isn't a popular opinion, but the primary benefit of segregated restrooms is that women do not have to be afraid to go to the bathroom. Besides sanitation, this is one of the greatest benefits to society of having restrooms in the first place. (In areas with no restrooms, such as rural India, women often have to risk being molested when trying to relieve themselves.)

Another unpopular opinion: desegregation efforts in the above areas (including those motivated by wanting to achieve "gender equality" or allow transgender women into areas designated for women only) will result in harm to women.

Another one is public transport. I have been groped a few times during peak transit time in the BART. It was incredibly unpleasant and ruined the whole week for me. It’s creepy and the violation of personal space feels like rape.

So segregated public transport is the solution?

Apparently segregation is the new answer, according to progressives on HackerNews.

It’s not suggested as a ‘solution’. It’s an ‘option’ some of us women would like...that’s all.

Well, that seems to be the policy solution that Japan picked. In addition to the cultural development of well-intentioned men holding their hands in the air on crowded mass-transit to prove their good intentions, and thus throwing suspicion on men who don't do the same.

Though it's worth noting that mass-transit in Japan is frequently packed so tight that if you don't have your hands up, you're literally touching someone else anyway. Not hard to see how that amplifies the molestation problem significantly in Japan even if other countries (presumably) have the same % of men with a propensity towards such actions.

I really can't overstate how skeptical I am of all the supposed benefits of gender-segregated schooling when attendance of a gender-segregated school is so strongly correlated with socioeconomic class.

I agree that all of your explanations fall well on my metaphorical ears. They seem right, and I can nod along while I read them.

But I can't help but have a nagging suspicion that you'd get extremely similar results if you just tossed a random sample of kids into a school after filtering for household income > $XXX,XXX/yr.

I'd also argue that even if you compared gender segregated schools vs a mixed-gender private school of the same price, you'd still be left with a confounding variable of "whose parents clearly valued education enough that they either specifically picked, or tolerated (depending on their views on this matter) a gender segregated school.

Remember that parental involvement is a very powerful predictor of academic success (though I'll admit I don't know if it trumps the predictive power of just socioeconomic class).

Socioeconomic class wrt schools is directly related to people’s reproductive choices. What you say is absolutely correct.

How I see it is that the burden is on people who choose to bring children into this world. It’s an important decision. It is the basis of our evolution. The answer to the question re whether my progeny or kin can compete for the same limited resources. Economically lower classes of the population need cohesive and supportive communities that will act as the village..as it were..to collectively raise children. It is the strengthening secret sauce. Community and community support is everything here.

And of course..that’s wildly variable. There is no way to come up with standardized solutions. However, if we look at it as a resource issue..of resource allocation and resource density rather than a species encompassing human collective issue, we can find solutions for all.

It’s difficult to see this as a resource issue rather than a people issue, but smaller tight knit communities with minimal socio economic deltas work better than trying to homogenize large populations inefficiently.

> I really can't overstate how skeptical I am of all the supposed benefits of gender-segregated schooling when attendance of a gender-segregated school is so strongly correlated with socioeconomic class.

I went to an all boys school with mostly working class boys of color (54% hispanic, 26% white, 13% asian, 6% black -- 75% non-white students ) next to Compton, though, so while I do agree that private schooling is associated with higher socioeconomic class, that was not my experience, and all I gave was my experience.

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