Quote:coeducation hurts girls: why we need single-sex public schools in Western countries

argument in title. in my (Western) country, you cannot access an all-girls education unless you shell out $$$$ for a private, usually religious school. this ensures that young girls of limited means are forced into coed public schools filled with boys who are violent, pornsick, and exhibiting extremist misogyny at younger and younger ages thanks to influencers like Andrew Tate.

I fundamentally disagree with coeducation. Girls cannot thrive in coed schools. Girls rarely thrive with male teachers. Say what you will about the Muslim world and its awful attitude toward women, but there are more female engineers and mathematicians coming out of countries like Egypt, Jordan and the Emirates than in more gender-equal regions like Europe, North America and Latin America. Why? Because in the Muslim world all schools are single-sex and teachers usually match the sex of the students, so little girls learn math and science from female teachers. Little girls have women STEM role models and learn STEM in all-female environments You can read about more about this phenomenon here, "The STEM Paradox: Why are Muslim-Majority Countries Producing So Many Female Engineers?"

Meanwhile in the West, I went to a coed STEM magnet public school where all the engineering and math teachers were male and all the humanities and soft science teachers were female. The result? Boys bullied the girls harshly in STEM classes. A boy told me in a sixth grade compsci class that "computers are for boys" and the emotionally cold male teacher just laughed when I complained. My only safe haven was English/history class where I had kind women as teachers. As a result, my natural love for science was crushed and I ended up going into the humanities because I associated math and science classes with being bullied by boys. This is a systemic phenomenon in the West; I know many girls and women who pursued humanities despite being good at math and science because they felt that math was "for boys".

Other issues with coed schools:

• School shootings are a big problem in my country. It's gender unequal: boys are doing the killing, girls are doing the dying. Almost no school shooting has ever been perpetrated by a girl or woman, but women and girls are always included in the victims. If we made public schools single-sex tomorrow, I believe we would see a 50% decrease in school shootings. Why don't we care enough about our daughters' safety to make this happen??
  
  
• Sexual harassment and misogynistic bullying. Depending on my age and location, I was sexualized by some male peers while others told me I was ugly and should kill myself because of my ugly face. Almost all of my school bullies were male; girls rarely even insulted me while boys made sport of calling me an ugly b*tch, flat-chested, denigrating my facial features, saying my nose was too big etc... A boy threw a chair at my face once just because he thought I was ugly and wanted to hurt me. So much for "Mean Girls": my problem was never mean girls, it was cruel and violent boys. I'm sure others can relate.
  
  

I haven't seen this topic discussed enough in 4B spaces, but I truly believe we must help the next generation of girls by campaigning for single-sex public education in the West. It's unfair that only rich girls can enjoy the safe haven of all girls schools. Coeducation hurts girls.

(Sep 12 2025, 6:17 AM)Magpie Good post overall but I don't think the part about the decrease in school shootings will end up being true. Single-sex schools have many advantages for girls but there's really nothing stopping an incel wannabe-terrorist from targeting a girls' school instead of his own boys' school.

(Sep 12 2025, 10:29 AM)scrambled-brains-on-toast TLDR - Girls' schools allow girls to learn in a safer environment, but once the baseline of single sex education is established, there is yet more work to do in order to give every single student an equal opportunity - this means combatting classism, racism etc, which are still problems within girls only schools.

I attended girls' schools from kindergarten until around when I left for university. My secondary school is the kind of school proposed as a solution by OOP, as it was a secular, single sex, publicly funded school. The benefits and drawbacks of girls' schools are something I have thought about a lot; I hated school, but one of the few things I wouldn't change about it is that it was girls only.

From my point of view, the greatest advantage of being in a girls school - particularly during my secondary school years, as we were beginning to form our identities - is that we were never compared to boys. There weren't any boys for us to compare ourselves to, or for the teachers to favor over us. It meant that we could develop our natural interest in STEM subjects without constantly feeling pressure from male teachers or classmates. It was actually a shock to me, once I headed to college, that subjects were so heavily gendered - ie. psychology having mostly female students, and physics having mostly male students - because there were plenty of girls who liked physics and other stereotypically "male" subjects at my school and all of us considered that perfectly normal. Most of our teachers were female, and funnily enough, the few male teachers I can remember taught History or Art - again, no one ever thought they were 'unmasculine' for teaching 'female' subjects..

However, even in that environment, we weren't all budding little feminists. I remember students from other schools had strong reactions to us. Once, at a multi-school gathering, a male student from somewhere else yelled at my friend group "you need to suck a dick!" I also heard kids - both male and female - from other schools call us "dykes". A lot of girls I spoke to from other, mixed-sex schools assumed we found our single-sex setting disappointing, and if we actually appreciated our all-female space, they thought we were 'antisocial'.

In turn, many of the girls who attended my school felt ashamed of their lack of connection to mainstream, heterosexual/patriarchal culture. One of my friends who went to the same college as me said that she never learned - at our girls school - how to do 'girl things' like makeup and she had to 'catch up' now that we were in a mixed sex setting. I found her mindset rather baffling, but she seemed excited.

"So much for "Mean Girls": my problem was never mean girls, it was cruel and violent boys. I'm sure others can relate."

I know that in many ways I was lucky with my school environment, as I never had to experience harassment from boys, but - speaking from the side of the fence where the grass is greener - girls' schools are not magical feminist utopias where everyone gets along. There was a lot of bullying and ostracism between students, such as an incident where a group of girls set up a Facebook page to harass their target for her disability. It was a uniquely toxic environment in a way I've only ever heard described accurately in Rachel Simmons' book "Odd Girl Out". Girls can most certainly be cruel - they're just better at hurting each other in subtle, psychological ways that are easy to hide from an outside observer/teacher. I still have social anxiety due to some of the ways I was bullied in school and it derailed the rest of my educational career. The almost all female staff, too, were unwilling to accomodate anyone who didn't fit the white-middle-class-stable-home mold, which I personally suffered from as I had a particularly awful home life compared to the average student at this school.

ETA: (I had to go and do something else, so I'm editing to add the conclusion of my post) 

All of this is to say that single sex education isn't the end goal - it's the starting point; once single sex education is established, then our focus has to shift onto combatting classism, racism, etc within the educational setting. Single sex education shields girls from the worst excesses of sexual harassment by males, at least while they are on school grounds. However, the girls still have to interact with a wider society that encourages misogynistic ideas - education is just one part of the puzzle of undoing social conditioning. My experience in a secular girls school has shown me that single sex education isn't immune to fostering other forms of discrimination, too, which means that girls from ethnic minorities, girls with disabilities, or girls from working class backgrounds will struggle to benefit fully from their education even within a single sex environment. It may seem strange to talk about the issues within single sex schools when they seem so far away from being a reality in countries such as the US, but solving them is part of the process of ensuring every girl - every single one - is delivered the promise of a free,safe and high quality education.

(Sep 13 2025, 10:03 PM)Impress Polly Obviously nothing per se would stop this beyond normal law enforcement, but I think you'll find that school shooters have a high tendency to shoot up schools they attended, not so often ones they didn't.

Quote:unless you are planning to go the separatist route fully, eventually girls are going to have to deal with boys, and the question becomes when and how are you going to do this.