Sex-Segregated Education Is an Early Step Backward

Perhaps, because I grew up in the South, I get nervous when people extol the virtues of segregation. When I hear about schools “designed for girls” and programs that segregate girls and and boys for math and science, it’s unsettling. The promotion of such policies, coupled with my recent return from Doha, Qatar, where women are not allowed to be in the company of men unless they are covered from head to toe in black, make me want to ask the question: Where are we going with these recent “advances?”

In the Harlem Girls’ Leadership School in New York City, the environment is one of small classrooms with Oriental rugs, rocking chairs, tea, croissants and photos of every girl in the school lining the walls. We are told that girls learn better in this positive environment, free from the outbursts of confident and aggressive young men.

Despite contradictory research, we hear repeatedly that girls have lower math aptitudes and that boys dominate the classroom. A recent article about Miss Porter’s School stated that when boys and girls come together, “life tends to be on boys’ terms . . . girls are socialized to be accommodating and in a coed setting, girls tend to defer to the boys rather than focusing on their own development.” What is wrong with this mind-set?

One thing that’s wrong is the notion that boys are bad and girls are weak. Why not teach better manners to the boys who are exhibiting rude behavior? And why not teach the girls who feel silenced by all the big noise to speak up?

The women of Doha told me that the cover they wear is for their protection from the uncontrollable lust of men. In Doha, there are no coed schools; the university has a Berlin-like wall to keep the sexes separate. Even the grocery stores are segregated; women are not allowed to drive. The Doha women are trying to break out of this “protection” by acquiring unprecedented levels of education and entering the labor market. They’re fighting for integration.

In their recent book, “The Futures of Women,” Pamela McCorduck and Nancy Ramsey present four scenarios about the possibilities for our collective future. One--”Separate and Doing Just Fine, Thanks!”--represents the zeitgeist of the moment. Women’s “frustration and impatience with intractable bias pushes many of them into de facto separatism.” In so doing, women psychologically check out of the economy, out of the day-to-day political debates, even out of traditional worship and the arts, while devoting their energies to women’s versions of these enterprises.

Separatism takes us backward, toward a way of life that the Qatari women have been trying to break out of for more than 100 years. Perhaps, as McCorduck and Ramsey note, we’ve become fatigued and are retreating to separate camps.

But, do we really want to live in a segregated world? Shouldn’t we be using our educational process to learn better ways of working together? We need to do more to foster integration, to work on inclusion and to discuss difficulties; we need to raise our expectations. No one ever said that social change is easy. Why can’t discrimination be remedied in a mixed-sex setting?

“Separate and doing fine” provides justification for separate spheres--women in the private sphere and men in the public. It denies women access to some of the well-worn paths to prestigious and remunerative positions. It perpetuates stereotypes, obstructs interaction and prevents boys and girls, men and women, from becoming comfortable and confident with each other. And as we learned in the South, separate is never equal.

Sure, sometimes we need to retreat to an enclave of like-minded women in the same way that ethnic groups sometimes withdraw to their communities to think together, to refuel and to create strategies for social change. And yes, of course, there is a place for single-sex institutions for those who prefer them. At least for now, the courts have ruled that single-sex institutions designed to compensate for past discrimination are legal. But let’s be careful that single-sex schools are not the only choice or promoted as the best choice for all girls.

In a recent issue of the Duke Law Review, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein put it succinctly: “The few advantages women receive from the social assignments that confine, isolate and shelter them are no consolation for the overwhelming disadvantages they suffer from being designated second-class citizens.”