By Liam Mannix
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My daughter is only 3½, but my partner and I are already debating school choices.
When it comes to schooling, does gender segregation matter?Credit: Getty Images
We’re both public school kids and know the research: after accounting for socio-economic factors, all those thousands of dollars parents pay in private school fees don’t seem to make a jot of difference to academic outcomes.
I figured we were aligned – we’d send our child to a state school.
“But it’s not just the academic outcomes that matter,” my partner told me last week. “It’s also the culture. Being schooled with girls is good for boys – but it’s not good for girls.”
So much for alignment. She started looking up single-sex schools on her phone. I started plotting my next Examine. Should boys and girls really be going to different schools?
This debate is as old as the history of schooling itself. Victoria had held two royal commissions on the subject before the turn of the 20th century.
Reading through Carole Hooper’s fascinating history of Victorian schooling, it is striking how much today’s arguments about single and co-ed schooling mirror the attitudes and debates of the 19th century.
Back then, there was much concern about young women needing to be protected from young men. “They needed to be protected from the possibility of associating with uncouth boys whose behaviour and ribald language posed a threat to female modesty and ignorance,” Hooper writes.
Parents feared boys would “corrupt the minds of the girls by obscene drawings”. Boys were “too fond of fun”, and association would cause girls to become “wild and unruly”.
Today’s parents hold the same fears. An all-girl classroom is a quiet temple of learning; an all-boy classroom is a zoo. Girls have an opportunity to excel without being spoken over by over-confident boys; they don’t learn to defer.
Moral panics about the effect of boys on girls’ “modesty” have been replaced with modern worries about the effect of boys on girls’ confidence.
“What girls’ schools do differently is to purposefully educate girls in order to develop girls’ self-concept, self-efficacy, and self-confidence so that girls develop the knowledge and skills required to reject and overcome the gender stereotypes that attempt to define them,” the then head of South Australia’s Loreto College Marryatville, Dr Nicole Archard, told The Educator in 2022. “Single-sex schools take away gender stereotypes.”
There is strong evidence children experience a deep drop in self-esteem as they go through adolescence; this drop is sharper for girls and sets up a gap that does not close over a lifetime. Could that be caused by co-ed schooling?
A 2021 study by the University of Queensland’s Terry Fitzsimmons of 9414 children at single-sex schools showed both genders had similar confidence levels (the study received in-kind support from the Australian Girls School Alliance). “There’s something going on in co-ed environments that’s creating this confidence-gap,” Fitzsimmons told me. “There is no doubt, in this study, the girls are advantaged [when compared with their co-ed counterparts].”
This is an interesting argument. But schooling is only part of a child’s environment, and we know gender stereotypes are fairly well formed by age three. Can co-ed schooling really be to blame?
Fitzsimmons’ study is interesting, but it is singular. We need to read the breadth of the literature to find out what is really going on. Unfortunately, that literature “is all over the place”, Associate Professor Wang-Sheng Lee, from Monash University’s Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability, tells me. “You can always find papers that suit whatever viewpoints you want.”
To sift through noise and isolate signal, scientists turn to systematic reviews and meta-analyses that combine large numbers of studies and try to correct for bias.
I could find only one, but its results are quite striking. It combined 184 studies with more than 1.6 million participants; importantly, there were a dozen high-quality randomised controlled trials included – South Korea randomly assigns students to single-sex or co-ed schools – so we can be reasonably confident of the results.
Was there a difference? “No, or not much,” the authors conclude.
This is not just for academic outcomes but also for attitudes to maths, science, confidence, aspiration and even body image.
Looking locally, the Australian Council for Educational Research found no difference in academic outcomes for single-gender schools, and the National Centre for Vocational Education Research found minimal difference in outcomes or attitudes.
Last year, Lee published a paper comparing the subject choices of students graduating from single-sex and co-ed schools.
He combined university entry data with ATAR scores, looking for students who could have gone into high-end maths and science degrees.
Were girls with high ATAR scores from single-sex schools more likely to study science, engineering or maths – fields that are dominated by men – compared with girls from co-ed schools? No.
Lee enrolled his son in a single-sex school, but not because he was concerned about gender-mixing.
“I didn’t think actively if he needed to go to a single-sex or co-ed school,” he said. “The main issue was whether it was the best school he could get into.”
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