There is an article in today’s paper extolling the benefits of single gender colleges for women, and the cited statistics are very impressive i.e. “* One third of female board members of Fortune 500 companies are graduates of women’s colleges”*
My question is why are single gender women’s colleges great stuff but single gender men’s colleges are evil and must be eliminated. Is this one those “We want to be equal until it is inconvenient” type of things?
Actually my local paper had a lengthy article just this week with the headline…BOYS BENEFIT FROM ALL BOYS SCHOOL
The article addressed the fact that BOTH genders seem to benefit from same sex education environments.
As the parent of a teen aged girl I can attest that it might not be a bad thing to eliminate the daily distraction of the opposite sex.
I’m also sure that there will be a few Dopers to come along with some cites for studies done on such things as the differences in “learning styles” of males and females. There may even be a cultural issue here since pretty much all same sex schools these days are private.
Needs2know
I attended an all-girls high school. My sons will attend all-boys high schools. Why? I sure as hell would have failed if I had to deal with the distraction that teenage boys create.
That, by the way, was not a slight against boys at all. I was a horny, catholic-school attending teenage girl. I had enough trouble making the time to line up boys to screw after school.
Aren’t all gender specific universities private, exclusive near Ivy league schools in the first place, tho? One needs to be cautious that we’re not assuming causality by one factor to the exclusion of others. (IOW, is the correlation caused by the gender specific nature of the school or the exclusive nature of the school? Could the same rigorous educational standards work and be effective in a mixed school?).
anyhow, felt the need to post to a thread started by Ring.
I don’t think you have any idea what you are talking about. No one is trying to eliminate private men’s colleges. The only men’s colleges that have ever had any trouble are state and military schools. This is because single-sex policies at these schools consitute government discrimination on the basis of sex, which is illegal.
Private schools are free to discriminate on the basis of sex. Every women’s college in the country is private, as well as every remaining men’s college. The only problem private men’s colleges have is in attracting students. Many have been forced to go co-ed simply because they could not find enough men who wanted to go to an all-male school.
It’s actually only state-funded military schools that were forced to go co-ed, most notably The Citadel in South Carolina and VMI in Virginia.
If I recall, there have been some studies that suggest that high school girls (I haven’t seen any about women in college) do better at math and science in all-girl classes. Sorry I can’t come up with a cite right away.
The Ivy League went co-ed in the '60s and '70s…except from Cornell and Penn, which were co-ed anyway, and Harvard and Columbia, which already had Radcliffe and Barnard attached as “ladies auxiliaries.”
But as far as I know the Seven Sisters are all still women-only, except for Vassar.
Curious…does this mean that women were lusting for a Princeton or Dartmouth degree, but men didn’t have any interest in attending Smith or Mount Holyoke?
Having spent some time studying this, I just wanted to mention that the theory behind single-sex classrooms is not simply that boys and girls distract each other. A number of studies found that when girls are in a mixed-sex classroom they tend to participate less and get less attention from the instructor.
The (newer) idea that boys do better in all-boy classrooms is based on the idea that boys are held to too restrictive standards of classroom behavior when they are subject to comparison with girls, who seem to have a better capacity to sit still at younger ages. As far as I know this only applies to children. I haven’t seen anything suggesting that single sex schools are better for college age males.
Lamia wrote:
Douglass College at Rutgers is women only and a state school. The logic seems to be that since Rutgers is co-ed, Douglass can be exclusive and not be considered discriminatory. I am not sure I buy this logic, but nobody asked me when they made the rules.
John
Not all, there are some less than exclusive women’s colleges out there. But I would bet that the ones the women who are on the boards of Fortune 500 companies went to were seven sisters type schools. And given what I would guess their relative ages are, they went to school when the best and brightest girls went to women’s colleges (and hung out with Ivy League men, and formed the semi-equivalent old girls network.)
If the statistic is the same in, say, 20 years - I would be willing to give more weight to the argument.
During the Citadel lawsuit it was made a part of the public record that almost all (I’m pretty sure it was “all” but I’ll stick the almost in there just to be safe) private colleges receive, either directly or indirectly, public funding. Does this mean that if a male wanted to attend a private women’s college they would be forced to accept him?
No it does not mean that!
But how could that be you ask?
Ya got me I respond.
wring - you have an almost great name.
Ring I had it first. 
back to your question - probably the difference will lie in if the funding is direct or indirect. Many places may get ‘indirect’ funding in a variety of ways.
** amarinth**, yea, I shouldda used “many” in my statement. But I did mean what you are saying, that if indeed the women checked out had gone to the prestigious places, we should be cautios as to the inference that their later success was due to the sexual exclusion vs. other possabilities.
Oh no Ring…you’ve peeped our hole card! Uncovered a female conspiracy to educate ourselves in an attempt to infiltrate Fortune 500 companies and make as much money as men.
Needs2know
I wouldn’t be surprised if they could be forced to let him attend class. Men are allowed to take classes at my school. I believe this policy is typical of private women’s colleges. A male student could take any class he liked here, he simply could not enroll as a degree candidate.
“Make as much money as men” is a very interesting comment. Over the last 10 years I’ve personally been responsible for identifying, seasoning (job rotations) and promoting nine women to staff management positions (large corporation - high pay - professional engineers and other managers reporting to them.) three of these women quit to have babies and never came back, and three quit because their husbands took out of state jobs.
This gets very trying after awhile - I’m done.
Cher3 Could you post a link to one of these studies? Or mention one that has been in a peer-reviewed journal? It isn’t that I don’t believe you; it is that I have heard a lot of questions raised about these studies.
Sorry for the hijack. This is something I’m trying to develop a well-informed opinion on, and that’s harder than one would think.
bashere:
They were all from peer-reviewed psych journals. (This was from back in my days of teaching gender psychology.) I’m doing something else now, so I don’t have any of them with me. I’ll see if I can find anything online.
I did find an article critiquing the whole business. Here’s a paragraph with some citations for classroom research:
“Research conducted in elementary school classrooms shows rather consistently that teachers give more attention to boys than to girls (Berk & Lewis, 1977; Blumenfeld, Hamilton, & Bossert, 1979; Minuchin & Schapiro, 1983, p. 228), although there is also research to the contrary (cf. Field, 1980). However, much of the contact with boys tends to be negative; it is managerial and disciplinary in nature (Bossert, 1981; Huston, 1983, p. 439; Leinhardt, Seewald, & Engel, 1979).”
I would add that the research is also pretty consistent about boy’s talking and interrupting more than girls in the classroom, but I couldn’t find any citations at the moment.
And here’s the URL:
http://www.uaf.edu/northern/schools/myth.html
The article also gives a lot of information on the research about boy’s classroom problems.
All in all, I agree with her conclusion that a lot depends on the individual classroom. I’ve had (and seen) teachers who blatantly favor one sex over the other, right up through the graduate level and others who seemed to be able to balance the various personalities in their classrooms.
Anyhow, my kid’s are going to public school.