Gender apartheid

Boy meets girl: now expect their grades to drop

Seeing that, according to the Cape Times, I don't believe in gender parity, I might as well go the full distance and call for gender apartheid. Yes, I want separate neighbourhoods for boys and girls, separate beaches and benches, separate entrances to public buildings. Heck, I might even demand separate homelands for men and women. And to be honest, this will be much easier than implementing racial apartheid because we already have separate schools, separate sports teams and separate toilets.

You might think that I do this because I believe that one gender is somehow inferior to the other, but in fact I'm basing my big plan for gender apartheid on science which says that separate gender development is better for both sexes. According to a paper published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, boys and girls do better at school if they interact less with the opposite sex. Here is the blurb for Andrew Hill's paper The Girl Next Door: The Effect of Opposite Gender Friends on High School Achievement:

This paper finds that a student's share of opposite gender school friends negatively effects high school GPA (grades). It uses the gender composition of schoolmates in an individual's neighbourhood as an instrument for the gender composition of an individual's self-reported friendship network. The effect occurs across all subjects for individuals older than sixteen, but only in mathematics and science for younger students. Additional results indicate effects may operate inside the classroom through difficulties getting along with the teacher and paying attention, and outside the classroom through romantic relationships.

Hill's paper comes at a time when there is some debate about whether single-sex schools or mixed-gender schools are best. His results show unequivocally that single-sex classrooms are better for kids because they get along easier with the teacher and are not distracted by opposite-gender friends. I would think that a romantic relationship might prove to be a valuable confidence booster, with a positive impact on grades. But alas, it seems like the opposite sex is bad news. One might also think that causality works in the opposite direction: that poor-performing kids tend to select into relationships with the opposite sex. Let me rephrase that: nerds have their books and jocks have their girls. But Hill's clever use of an econometric technique called instrumental variables avoids this possible causal problem: kids that live in neighbourhoods with lots of kids from the other gender tend to do worse in exams than kids who live in neighbourhoods where the other kids happened to be of the same gender. Causality runs therefore clearly from interaction with other kids to worse grades.

But somehow I am slightly uncomfortable with the policy implications of these results. Maybe it's because I attended a mixed-gender school and simply don't want to believe that these schools are necessarily worse than single-sex schools. (My mother and my wife attended a single-sex school, though, so I can't be too critical.) But maybe it's also because I believe that schools impart more than just our ability to do math and learn history. Maybe the social interactions in school are really important to teach values such as fairness, equality and diversity. Of course, many single-sex schools organise student interactions outside the classroom to accommodate this vital part of social learning. But taking Hill's findings literally, one would want to avoid even these social interactions.

The results also imply that with relatively little additional costs, the grades of high school students across the country can be improved by just making all schools same-sex schools. A sort-of Grand Gender Apartheid policy for schools. But I wonder what we'll lose in the process. If my own high school experience is anything to go by, I would think a lot. School is a multidimensional experience and shouldn't be reduced to only one criterium – grades. Gender apartheid, much like other forms of apartheid, is a bad idea.

*Photo by Torsten Dederichs on Unsplash.