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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Schools are structured environments for the socialization of youth, as much as they are learning environments. Attending a single-sex school might lead to knowing a little bit more about Plato or the Crimean War (let's just concede the point for the sake of argument), but they're kind of ignoring the negative impact it'll have on the emotional intelligence and gender-relations of the kids who will be stuck in a place where they never get a chance to learn from the perspective of someone of the opposite sex.

I would like the article to answer this: how well do the kids in the single-sex schools do later on in life, when they end up having to work alongside people of the opposite sex? What are the relative rates of rape, spousal abuse, divorce, unplanned pregnancy, etc. between adults who came from the single-sex vs. the co-ed schools?

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> I would like the article to answer this: how well do the kids in the single-sex schools do later on in life ...

A little googling led me to this article about a study which looked at the same:

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/graduates-of-all-girls-...

And what I thought would be of interest to us here:

In an indication of greater, though still low, interest in the field of engineering, alumnae of single-sex independent schools are three times more likely than those from coeducational independent schools to report that they intend to pursue a career in engineering (4.4 percent vs. 1.4 percent).

Am I the only one who puts on their 'skeptical hat' when I hear a claim of 'three times more likely'?? Especially when I see numbers as low as 4.4% and 1.4%.

sigh statistics... amirite?

Would very much like to see data on this.

My folks sent me to a very good, private, single sex school from the age of 7-18. Came out with an awesome education and no idea how to even have a conversation with a woman. Women may as well have been aliens.

That was a good few years ago now and I'm fairly normalised I think, but it took a while. Would never do that to any kids I have, though that ain't looking exactly likely any time soon.

I second this. I went to a single-sex school. I would never do this to my hypothetical children.

Perhaps having single-sex classes for some subjects would help?

WRT anecdotes, you need to statistically correct for the vast number of guys who would agree with the same statement with "same sex" crossed out.

I agree, not knowing how to talk to women is hardly unique to people who went to single sex school, and I will never know how I would have been had I not been in a segregated school so it's very hard to make an absolute judgement.

Maybe it would have been worse for my academic career, but again, maybe not. But I can only think that it couldn't have been worse in terms of social weirdness.

IMO the most interesting takeaway from this is the 2013 update:

that working in consonance with gender differences can help to boost achievement for both girls and boys, even in a coed classroom

Which means that we can't simply say that there are no gender differences - it doesn't work, probably because of the interplay of societal and cultural factors which perpetuate/reinforce existing biases

and also this part:

They randomly assigned 401 8th-graders either to single-gender physics class or to coed physics class, for one school year. At the end of the year, the girls who had been randomly assigned to the all-girls classroom were more engaged in physics and less likely to agree with statements such as "physics is for boys." Girls who had been randomly assigned to coed physics class were more likely to agree that "physics is for boys."

Which means that for certain limited set of subjects where gender bias is already present in the culture of the society, this methodology could potentially be used to help in removing that bias, (as a temporary transitional state)...

Would it be possible to study divorce rates or other inter-sex socialization cues of single-sex vs coed kids over time? What other factors could one look at to ascertain how well they were socialized?

What lesson would you draw from numbers like divorce rates anyway?

Say children from single-sex schools grow up to be in relationships that have lower divorce rates. Does that mean that single-sex schools better prepared them for marriage? Or are they just in unhappy relationships that children that grew up in coed schools would know to end earlier since they've more inter-sex socialization experience?

I honestly don't have a hypothesis. I am curious if less socialized (with the other gender) kids grow up to have more stable relationships as adults.

I think this perspective is one of the things that poisons our current system. Social promotion enjoys a nearly untouchable status in U.S. schools and ends up with some chunk of most classes board to tears and some other chunk hopelessly lost (the time of both groups is being wasted).

So I think there is an interesting question to be asked, what sort of activities can provide an appropriate context for social interaction given the organization of our present day cities, without interfering so much with teaching and mastery?

The article also talks about having just a few classes single-sex. It's not as black as white as either having total seggretation or not - maybe we can get the good sides of both arrangements.

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