The comments to this post on racial and ethnic segregation in higher education have converged on the interesting topic of single-sex colleges.

Didier asks, "what do the readers here think about the women's colleges remaining so? Is such separation socially warranted in the US? How should women's colleges justify allowing a woman to enroll as a woman and then remain enrolled following gender re-identification? Should "sex" or "gender" be the criterion that permits one to enroll in a woman's college?" In a subsequent comment, Didier expands the query: "should the criterion for admission be sex or gender? How is this different from national origin? It is important to recognize that neither or these attributes are considered one of the student's merits, since birthplace and gender are games of chance."

Other commenters have noted the all-important distinction between what private and public colleges and universities can legally do to restrict enrollment, as well as the way in which the very concept of the women's college as a scene of feminine empowerment may be understood as utterly self-negating (as Rene writes, in a tone of what I take to be sarcasm, "Women are more insecure and need a safer environment, free from male threat, competition, and interest. Just as it's okay to have all black colleges and schools, it's also okay to have all women colleges and schools. Likewise, there are colleges in the US that accept only Japanese nationals. It would definitely be wong to have all white or all male colleges, however. That would be discriminatory").

Peter Wood took up this question in his excellent Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, and again in The Chronicle of Higher Education in the spring of 2003. The article is restricted to subscribers only, but I have summarized and excerpted it here. Wood makes some excellent points about how, while it is quite possible to justify the existence of single-sex colleges, the current rationale for them--which hinges increasingly on a peculiarly limited and self-serving concept of diversity--is illogical to the point of hypocrisy. Wood is worth reading, if you've got access to the book or a subscription to CHE. And even if you don't, the questions raised by Didier are well worth discussing. Readers are welcome, as ever, to join in.

I was an undergraduate at Amherst College in the early 70's, and I spent my senior year living off-campus in Northampton and taking 3/4 of my courses at Smith. Both schools were single-sex in those days.

At that time, Smith students were head-and-shoulders above Amherst students intellectually. Co-education had not yet arrived or was just starting at many of the high-prestige institutions. (As I recall, for example, Princeton admitted its first women in the very late 60's.) Women's colleges like Smith were therefore a first choice for many of the brightest, most highly motivated women. These colleges had a very exciting mission simply by virtue of being gathering points for so much talent and energy.

I never felt that my Smith courses were sheltering women from the competitive atmosphere of co-education. On the contrary, many of the women in those courses would have dominated classrooms at Amherst, which weren't all that competitive anyway.

As I understand it, there have been discussions from time to time among faculty at Smith about the possibility of giving up their single-sex identity. I have very mixed feelings when I hear about these discussions. On the one hand, it would be painful to admit that the Smith I knew was a thing of the past. On the other hand, I suspect that it really is a thing of the past, now that co-education has spread so widely (including to Amherst).

I don't a view about whether there is a need for a single-sex environment for some women students. (It's not my place to have a view on that question.) My point is that there was a time, not so long ago, when women's college's had a very exciting mission quite unrelated to such a need.

(In the interest of full disclosure: both my mother and my wife graduated from Smith.)

-- DV

"It's not my place to have a view on that question."

What on earth could you possibly mean by that? I don't have a strong or well-developed position on the subject of single-sex colleges simply because I haven't thought at much length about it, but the idea that it's not someone's "place" to even have an opinion about something unless they're members of some particular group is the worst sort of PC multiculti claptrap.

It's worth noting that men's colleges still exist in this country. They include: St. John's in MN, Wabash in IN, and Hampden-Sydney in VA and Moorehouse in GA.

I attended Wabash for a year. They are proudly all-male, do not have a 'sister' school and have no intention of ever admitting women. They also take no public money and have an endowment that will probably let them live-out their stated desires to remain all-male.

I too am somewhat conflicted about segregating based upon some characteristics. I wonder about the new all-queer HS in NYC, women's colleges and the like. On the other hand, all the women I know who went to women's collges are amazing folks. Might they have been had they gone co-ed? Probably...

t

I've never been thrilled with all-woman and all-black colleges. I mean if diversity is sooooo important like the PC folks say it is, then how come these homogenous schools get a free pass?

actually, i don't think any of the HBCU's are still all-black. i thought that since 1980 at the latest all of them were accepting students who identify as 'not black'...

and, the difference seems to be from my perspective: there is major debate at each of these schools about what diversity means in the climate they are in. specifically, they are also able to talk about different types of diversity being important that we typically stuff under the rug and think about the ways that different categories intersect.

for example:
What does it mean to be a transgendered woman of color at Smith?

What I find amazing is that this is even a subject for debate. We are supposed to be going to college to get an education. Some people learn better in a single-sex environment. Some people learn better in a coeducational environment. I think that the only question should be where do you fit to make the best of yourself and let it go at that.

The whole question of diversity should not even enter into the equation. It is used to batter people into the round holes where we are supposed to fit whether we really do or not. If we don't then we are just supposed to shut up and try to fit where they want us to fit. If we still can't fit, then we are supposed to go away.

Since this nation is supposed to be about the individual having the opportunity to make the best of himself, where does the individual fit here and where should the individual fit here. That should be the main question.

I find it interesting that the post treats the concept of an all-male institution as so unthinkable - now that men are a minority in the university system and the spate of studies is coming out about how the grade schools are structured so as to systematically discriminate against young males and to teach contrary to their best learning styles. I thought that, in our new PC universe, once a group became a discriminated against minority then the world has to kill itself to kiss the minority's posterior (or is the PC crap revealing itself as just a cover for legitimizing prejudice against white males?).

There is an irony about the "diversity" fetish that is noticed too little: as practiced, and often enforced, in the U.S. these days, the demand for "diversity" threatens to produce its opposite, i.e., uniformity. And nowhere has this oddity been clearer than in the debate over single-sex schools.

Consider one of the big cases, dealing as it happens with a college not far from where I live, the Virginia Military Institute. A good case can be made -- indeed, was made -- that there is something obnoxious about public funds being used to support an institution that by policy excludes some of that public. (It is possible, however, to make too much of this "public funds" argument. The University of Virginia, for example (which is even closer), receives considerably less from the commonwealth of Virginia than I suspect many "private" schools do from the federal government in one form or another.) And it is no doubt true that a VMI with women enrolled, as they are now, is more diverse than it was when all the cadets were men.

Still, I think it is also true that the aggregate amount of "diversity" in the country was reduced, not increased, by forcing VMI to admit women. An educational buffet that contains a selection or two or single-sex schools has more variety, more choice, than one where each dish contains the prescribed amount of minority ingredients.

Note that I'm not saying the VMI case was wrongly decided -- that's another matter -- only that it reduced the amount of "diversity" in the nation's, and Virginia's, educational offerings.

m, could you provide readers with references to those studies that show how grade school education is not well suited for male students?

George, I wonder about that too. Only the comment wasn't "not well suited", it was "systematically disciminate". I can't see school adminstrators, some of whom are male after all, sitting down and figuring out how best to screw up the education of half the populace under age 12.

I agree with dick. It's best to have a variety of schools and let people pick the one they want. I went to Miss. Univ. for Women because it was close to home and they offered me a scholarship. Comparing my experience and the preparation I got for the work world to that of other women (and men) my age, I think I got a good deal and would be happy for my daughter to follow in my tracks.

I think I would support all-male and all-female schools, but would frown on all-black or all-white schools. What's the difference? Because black people and white people and purple people with yellow spots--we're all the same. But I couldn't say that about men and women: males and females are biologically distinct. So it could be that each gender learns better in different environments, whereas the same could not be said about each race.

Besides, I don't get distracted from my studies by the presence of a black person in my class; a cute guy, however, could prove quite distracting.

All male and all female colleges are okay. So are all black, all asian, all hispanic, and all euro-american colleges. As long as they are privately funded. None of the above are appropriate for publicly funded schools.

As for boys being discriminated against in public schools, you need to understand the history of public education and curriculum planning. It's not a pretty picture, and extremist ideologues play a prominent role.

What sources might one go to in order to read about this history?

The argument that public schools are discriminating against boys--largely through false claims of discrimination against girls-- is being made most prominently by Christina Hoff Sommers. See The War Against Boys, and her related Atlantic Monthly article. Diane Ravitch has also argued this point, and documented aspects of it in her recent book on textbook bowdlerization, The Language Police. Here's a good Salon piece summarizing the history of the argument and the various political interest groups involved.

African Americans have been discriminated against by white americans for over 400 years. Is it too much to ask that we be allowed to have our own schools? There must be places where african american children and young adults can go, where they are free of the bias and hostility directed against them in white society.

Look at how african american boys are hounded out of high schools, driven into gangs for survival. Look at how african american men are kept out of the workforce by systematic discrimination, driven to a life of crime and incarceration.

Yes, you allow african american girls and women to succeed, because you are not threatened by females. Yet by refusing to allow the males to prosper you commit genocide against the black race. We are growing very tired of this.

I am growing very tired of the crime rate in my city. I'm tired of thinking twice before I put my nose out of doors after dark. I'm also tired of carrying a tax burden for the underemployed. You think we like having the cities we live in blighted by gangs? You think we like paying for prisons? Why in the hell would you think that we white folks like it like this?

Kacie--
Why is the fact that males and females are biologically distinct translate into genders having different learning styles? Don't those perceived differences, if they do exist, exist b/c of the differences in the way girls and boys are brought up? A similar argument, about immutable biological differences between races, has been used to "prove" innate disparities in abilities between blacks & whites.
As for the question itself, I think it's OK to have schools geared towards groups of population previously excluded by the educational system, such as women or African-Americans. Why whites or men would need a similar environment I cannot understand.

There are some fields where women will never equal men, on average, no matter how much women are encouraged, or favored in a financial or an affirmative action manner.

You know, neuroscientists have known for some time that testosterone affects the developing human brain in a dose dependent manner. And the brains of male humans experience significant more exposure to testosterone during development than female humans' brains.

Because of this, it was suspected that there might be biological differences in the structure and function of male brains and female brains. Further study has confirmed this suspicion.

Furthermore, female brains that are exposed to male-like levels of testosterone in the womb or early infancy almost always lead their owners to behave in a male-like manner. Playing with boys over girls, playing with boys' toys instead of dolls, wanting to wear boys' clothes, and eventually working in a male dominated field where historically women have not performed well.

Similarly, boys who are "gender adjusted" in infancy due to accidental emasculation, do not grow up to feel or act like girls, no matter how much their parents, teachers, and doctors try to make them into girls. There have been several recent stories of such "experiments."

Male brains, on average, really are better at spatial tasks than female brains, unless the female brains have had the same early testosterone exposure advantage. Female brains, on average, really are better at some verbal tasks and fine motor tasks than male brains.

There are more male dyslexics, ADD/ADHDs, autistics. There are more severely retarded males than females, but there are also more male high geniuses than females.

There will always be more males who are superb at mathematics, theoretical physics, advanced theoretical computer science, or advanced engineering, than females. More of the hottest fighter pilot jocks will always be males, more of the best helicopter pilots will always be males.

Many women will perform extremely well in each of these areas, especially if they have the early exposure to testosterone. But there will always be more males at the top levels.

In the linked article, the author states that women's colleges do not make the argument that women's colleges create a shared identity, work better for women etc. etc.. I teach at a girls' school where women's colleges recruit heavily and use exactly the arguments the author says they don't. I smell stinky cheese, quite frankly. And the "war against boys" stuff boils down to girls do better than boys on the verbal and girls are catching up on the math, therefore there is systemic discrimination against boys and then a whole bunch of anecdotal evidence (NB: I don't buy Gilligan either). Tolerating disruptions in class is not a war against boys. And if you look at boys' schools, they really don't allow that type of thing at all.

Boys learn differently, but the schools are oriented toward girls' learning, thanks to feminists in high places. As a result, girls are dominating in higher education, in all but a few fields.

At the highest levels of math, physics, and theoretical computer science, girls will never catch up. Some women will be very good in those areas. But a lot more men will be good than women.

I admire all those optimists who see a world where women are equal in all areas. But until we enter a "Brave New World" of embryo development, it won't happen.

So we keep investing billions of dollars trying to make the system work better for women, because a few men are always going to be superior in a few limited fields. Does that make sense?

I'm left with the impression of an odd argument that looks like this:

*When women don't do well in a subject, it's because they are biologically incapable of doing well in that subject.
*When men don't do well in a subject, it's because they are being discriminated against.

Am I getting this wrong?

Clearly you have dyslexia. There are programs to help you with that. I encourage you to seek them out.

There are probably some readers capable of understanding the line of reasoning here. For their sake, I'll rehash:

Women are capable of doing as well as or better than men in 95% of all occupational fields. But there is a 5% area where women's brains, on average, do not allow them to perform as well as men.

As I said several times before, there will be women who are excellent in these fields, such as Marie Curie etc., but there will be many more men who are excellent, than women, in these few limited areas. This is almost certainly due to testosterone exposure in the early developing brain. No matter how hard teachers of girls try to get them to reach the heights of these professions, they are doomed to fail. Society can spend many billions of dollars trying to bring women to parity in this paltry 5% of human knowledge, but it will be money trying to bring water from a stone.

Now in the 95% of all human endeavors where women can on average match or exceed men, on average, there is very real evidence that boys are being shortchanged during the early years of education. When women make up almost 60% of all college graduates, and are making huge inroads in business, law, medicine, biology--and dominating psychology and the writing professions--one can readily see that girls are thriving in the american academic environment more than boys.

That should make a curious, intelligent person wonder why that is, if as feminists claim, the educational system is biased against girls.

But feminists are very influential in the theory of education, and affect the curriculum of colleges of education where teachers are trained. A teacher trained in most schools of education probably doesn't understand how his mind has been molded.

"Clearly you have dyslexia. There are programs to help you with that. I encourage you to seek them out."

Thanks for providing me with another example of the current sorry state of conversation in the American public sphere; my students will find it useful.

Rene, do you have any documented sources to link to that provide evidence to back up your claims? Assertion is not argumentation.

George makes a lot more sense to me than Rene does.

Even War On Boys mentions that girls do better in part because they're more likely to do their homework. Even if they do homework, boys are more likely to race through it and therefore get lower grades. Maybe assignment of homework is part of a systematic attempt to keep boys down. Maybe teachers should stop assigning it, in order to level the playing field for the poor oppressed boys. My conscientious homework-doing daughter would be thrilled.

I was going to say the same thing about the sorry state of your summary in the post before last. My friends and academic associates have already been amused by the confusion it exhibits.

When comparing the numbers of male Nobel Prize winners in physics vs. female, or male Fields Prize winners in math vs. female, a curious person would want to know why the enormous difference exists. The easy, no-brain feminist answer would be to claim that women have been discriminated against, and haven't been able to display their "true" abilities in math and physics.

But that doesn't square with the reality in education. Women are dominating psychology, social sciences, education, journalism, language departments, communications, etc. etc. etc. without any special funds, foundations, fellowships etc. to make them achieve. And Marie Curie, one of the few female physics winners, won her prizes a hundred years ago. Women have had increased access to higher education for over 60 years now, and there are no new Marie Curies in sight.

Like I have said several times, there are many excellent women mathematicians and physicists. But there are ten times more males who are excellent in those fields. There would be more males in that class, but gifted males are far more psychologically fragile than gifted females, on average.

Look at medicine. Women make up more than 50% of classes in several medical schools. Women dominate obstetrics, family practice, pediatrics, and are doing very well in internal medicine and its subspecialties. But can you guess in what specialties women are lagging in medicine? Year after year. In spite of overwhelming dominance in other specialties where men (who else was there) previously were also dominant, chauvinistic, and resistant?

No, women do exceptionally well, often better than men, in over 90% of all professions not requiring extreme size, strength, or quickness.

But why do they keep lagging in just a few particular areas? Neuroscience has an excellent hypothesis, which is supported by a wide array of experiments.

It will be decades before people in your profession are educated in this knowledge, far too late for you and your students. The rigidity and density in educational theories is too great for new science to penetrate. But there certainly are individuals in your field with their eyes open, willing to learn from other fields.

So the answer to my last question is, apparently, "No."

Actually, yes, I have an abundance of scientific documentation supporting the early testosterone exposure explanation for male (on average) superiority in spatial/math function. That should have been clear from my last post, if you read it. Where is that documentation? Where it has always been, free and readily available to anyone with the curiosity to seek it out.

"Daddy, how do you spell stegisoris?" "Look it up in the dictionary, for goodness sakes! You're twelve years old. You're not helpless. And you spelled it wrong when you asked."
:^)

Male minds are not superior to female minds. Females are wiping the planet with male posteriors. The future of earth belongs to the female, as long as secular western culture prevails. (which is questionable)

Since women are doing so well, performing in so dominant a fashion in so many fields, why aren't they dominating all academic and intellectual fields?

Good question. A sign of healthy intellectual curiosity. I hope you'll follow it up.

Okay, Rene, enough playing games.

I would provide a link to an interesting Scientific American article from 2002 by Doreen Kimura, but my computer went on strike.

Try doing a Google search for Doreen Kimura Scientific American. You should see links to at least one article on innate sex differences. Ironically, a lot of the researchers who are finding innate gender differences are women.

Steven Pinker's book The Blank Slate discusses some of the ideas of innateness and its detractors.

You can find a lot of articles and books on this subject, but you may have to look carefully. The firestorm around these topics means that some groups feel threatened by the new learning. As for some university departments, if you waited for someone in Women's Studies, or the School of Education to propagate this data you would wait until the next ice age at least.

Thanks, Helen. Those two references look like useful aids to understanding the issues.

Not the best references, Helen, but not the worst either. I particularly respect Kimura for wading into the fray, certain to be criticised harshly for even considering the question.

African American women are very successful compared to African American men. There's no comparison in achievement. But African American women are still hired preferentially to men. Yes, whoever called that genocide was right. Black women want to marry successful men, just like any woman. A professional black woman making over 100K a year won't marry a bricklayer or a cab driver. She'll marry a white doctor or an asian professor if she can't find a successful black man. Yes, that's genocide.

You know, when feminists plotted their strategy they failed to take into account biological differences.

Where would western civilization be without male explorers, male inventors, male scientific discovery, and male innovations in finance and commerce? Feminists bask in the wealth of male achievement and debate the obsolescence and eventual disposal of males.

You see the parallel phenomena of indigenous male destruction necessitating the importation of foreign males to keep the male-derived machinery of civilization proceeding. A necessary compromise, for now.

Rene,

How do you think Carol Gilligan would respond to your characterization of feminist strategy?

Only a panhandler would care what Gilligan thinks. But purely as a guess, I suspect that Gilligan's intellectual powers limit her to blowing it out her posteranus. What an excellent carnival act that would be, in one of the back tents.
:^)

Okay, Critical Mass readers (if any of you are still reading this thread), I call "Sockpuppet!"

Helen, have you read the book "Decline of Males" by anthropologist Lionel Tiger? His nuanced presentation spans several decades, giving a multi-generational societal perspective that many writings on the subject lack.
Warren Farrell has written some books that touch on this issue. He used to be on the board of NOW before he grew more brain cells.

Just thought I would make some comments on the Fields Medal comment by someone else. (Wow, is the Fields Medal that famous now? I remember when the layman had no idea what that was....)

The number of women Fields Medal winners is zero. The way the comment was phrased, it wasn't clear to me (and I believe others) how great the disparity really is.

Also, as far as I know, there's not been a single woman that's even been considered, and there doesn't appear to be any hotshot female anywhere near the horizon that stands a shot at winning it. Of course, that's hard to predict, but typically one hears of the kind of hotshots that eventually win such a prize.

Puzzling?

I find it inconceivable that somehow all women colleges are ok, but all black ones aren't. Those in this discussion that have this view, I suspect have never been ostracized or discriminated against based on their race. All the reasons given for womens-only environments, such as lack of bias, strengthening of confidence, etc., hold for blacks-only environments.

That said, I believe that black colleges must go. Simply because they are no good. I know someone who went to graduate school (in a technical subject) at Howard, and he told me stories about it. Basically it was a joke and didn't sufficiently prepare him. Even the most well-funded black university (like Howard) look pitiful in terms of resources compared to the average university. My friend finally ended up transferring to another place, where he found out that the knowledge he had acquired in several years at Howard was equivalent to one year of grad school there.

I can't believe how some well-off black families even send their kids to these schools. They must really be blind to the difference in education.

Ultimately, the poor education outweighs the advantages of a friendly environment.

Most intelligent people know about the cognitive differences between the male and female brains. But there are a lot of people who graduated in the "soft" disciplines, perhaps by social promotion, who are unaware. And since lower IQ "intellectuals" tend to go into journalism and the media, most laypersons are exposed to the outdated and unscientific PC viewpoints that have currency among that lower class of intellectuals.

Someone compiled malpractice statistics by medical school, and found that Howard and Meharry graduates ranked at the top of doctors sued. You might expect something like that to be publicized as a national scandal, and on 60 Minutes, 20/20, or Dateline. Uh--nah.

It's interesting that most large universities are creating black universities cocooned within the larger university. Black dormitories, black student unions, black eating places, black studies departments, and so on. Combine this PC segregation with effort promotions and social promotions, and you can see mainstream university diplomas sinking in value to match the HBC diplomas.

Women's colleges give women an opportunity to self actualize, which is denied them by coed educational institutions. I disagree that women are incapable of doing anything a man can do. It may take time and research, but eventually women will be able to completely displace men from every occupation. By the time that happens, cloning will be perfected. No need for messy seminal fluid all over the bedsheets. Clone all babies to be female, and use genetic engineering to produce women with the full spectrum of abilities. It's possible. We must try.