An article was published last week in SCIENCE entitled "The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling." The lead author is Dr. Diane Halpern, former president of the American Psychological Association. You can download the full text here. The article contains a section entitled "Negative Impacts of Highlighting Gender." This section has received extensive coverage in national and international media. It was the basis for an article last Friday in the Washington Post, "Single-sex education may do more harm than good"; "Children at single-sex schools more likely to be sexist" (The Daily Telegraph); "Single-sex schools make students sexist" (The Daily Beast) and so forth. But ALL the studies cited in the SCIENCE article regarding "negative impacts" with regard to sexism were in fact studies involving a small number of PRE-SCHOOL students attending a COED pre-kindergarten, all of which were authored or co-authored by one or more of the authors of the SCIENCE paper. The files are their references #24 (Martin & Halverson 1981), #25 (Hilliard & Liben 2010), #27 (Martin & Fabes 2001) and #28 (Fabes & Martin 1997).
We're talking about that section of the article in Science under the heading, "Negative Impacts of Highlighting Gender." The authors begin this section by acknowledging that "some proponents of SS [single-sex] education claim it is well suited to countering sexism. . ." They then conjecture that "gender divisions are made even more salient in SS settings because the contrast between the segregated classroom and the mixed-sex structure of the surrounding world provides evidence to children that sex is a core human characteristic . . ."
Perhaps Halpern, Eliot, Bigler et al. believe that if we didn't have any single-sex classrooms, then children would have no evidence that "sex is a core human characteristic." More importantly, these authors provide no evidence for their conjecture that "gender divisions are made even more salient in SS settings." In fact, this conjecture has been tested, and proven false, in multiple studies, none of which is cited by Halpern et al. One of the most compelling of these papers is the study published by Ursula Kessels and Bettina Hannover, in their paper entitled "When being a girl matters less: Accessibility of gender-related self-knowledge in single-sex and coeducational classes and its impact on students' physics-related self-concept of ability." These investigators randomly assigned 401 8th-grade girls from coed schools either to study science in an all-girls classroom or in a coed classroom. They found that girls in the all-girls classroom were less aware of "being a girl" and less aware of gender stereotypes regarding science, compared to girls who were randomly assigned to the coed classroom. This study directly refutes the conjecture of Halpern et al., yet they never mention it. (We will consider another similar study, by Carol Cronin Weisfeld, in a moment.)
The authors then solemnly state, "Research has demonstrated that, when environments label individuals and segregate along some characteristic (e.g. gender, eye color, or randomly assigned t-shirt groups), children infer that the groups differ in important ways." Well, certainly. This is a robust finding which I discuss at length in my book Girls on the Edge, chapter 6, especially pages 174 - 180. I and others refer to this effect as "group contrast effects" although it goes by various names. People, including children, do tend to exaggerate the differences between groups. In their article published last week in Science, Dr. Halpern and her colleagues then provide another conjecture (bottom of the 1st column, p. 1707): ". . .it is likely that these effects would be even more powerful when sex is used to divide children into entirely separate classrooms or schools rather than merely into separate lines to go to lunch." What evidence do the authors provide in support of this conjecture? Zero. Zilch. Nada. They got nothing. More troubling, they show no awareness that this conjecture has been tested and found to be false. For example, consider the classic study by Carol Cronin Weisfeld and colleagues, who videotaped girls in Chicago playing dodgeball, first girls against girls, then girls and boys together. Then they did the same thing with Native American children on a Hopi reservation in New Mexico. When Chicago girls played against other Chicago girls, there was lots of variation in the style and quality of play. Some of the girls were really serious about the game: as soon as play began, those girls would adopt what coaches call the "athletic stance," knees bent, arms flexed, eyes focused, ready to jump for the ball. When play got under way, these girls were competitors: they would jump for the ball, grab it, sometimes even wrestling the ball away from another girl. The girls who were most engaged were, not surprisingly, the highest-skilled girls at playing the game. Other girls were not particularly excited about the game and certainly were not jumping and grabbing for the ball; again, not surprisingly, these girls were less skilled. Weisfeld and colleagues found the same variation in engagement and skill among the Native American girls in New Mexico. When boys were brought into the gym so that there were an equal number of girls and boys playing, the picture changed. New Mexico Hopi girls still participated in the game, but the high-skill girls no longer demonstrated their skill. They didn't want to fight the boys for the ball. When the boys were playing, the high-skill Hopi girls looked very much like the low-skill girls. Most of the high-skill Chicago girls didn't even hang around for the game when boys were playing. Instead, they left the playing area altogether and went off in little groups to dance with one another or to snack on potato chips. Most of these kids, girls and boys, were 12 years old. In this study, the average girl in Chicago and in New Mexico was bigger and taller than the average boy in Chicago and in New Mexico, respectively. Nevertheless, the high-skill girls seemed to lose much of their enthusiasm for the game when boys were playing. This study, and others like it, demonstrate that group contrast effects are most pronounced when girls and boys are TOGETHER. When they are separated, girls are more free to explore different ways of being, and likewise boys. The best way to get boys to play the flute is to create an all-boys band (see the closing chapter of my book Why Gender Matters for an example from Calgary Alberta in this regard). When girls and boys are together, boys are more likely to say, "Flutes are for girls." Likewise for cooking. Likewise for dance.
What's stunning is that Dr. Halpern - a former president of the APA - and her colleagues, all tenured professors, show no awareness of the extensive literature on this topic. On this topic, in this section, they cite only papers written by their co-authors. They literally seem not to have read anything which they themselves did not publish.
