Single-sex schools offer no advantages and feed stereotypes, psychologists told

There are no advantages to single-sex schools, which may foster gender stereotyping and sexism “in a world that’s far more diverse than ever before”, a US psychology professor has said.

Diane Halpern, a past president of the American Psychological Association, said the basis for single-sex education needed to be re-examined when there was no research to show that boys and girls learn differently.

The psychology professor at Claremont McKenna College in California has specialised in sex, gender and cognition for 30 years, and addressed the Australian Psychological Society congress on Wednesday morning.

Halpern pointed to a 2014 meta-analysis of 184 studies, representing the testing of 1.6m students of all ages from 21 nations, that failed to find any advantages of single-sex education.

The study, co-authored by Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, found that many of the claims made by advocates of single-sex schooling were unsubstantiated.

Attending single-sex schools could be in fact be disadvantageous for children and teenagers, with evidence to show segregation caused people to develop strong stereotypes and in-group bias, said Halpern.

She was unavailable to comment to Guardian Australia but said in a statement the “underlying biology, physiology and social psychology of learning” was exactly the same across the sexes.

Few environments, apart from schools, were single-sex, she said.

“In fact, children are going to live in a world that’s far more diverse than ever before – they are going to have to interact with females and males, they are going to have to understand that sometimes the girls are going to outscore the boys and that sometimes the boys will outscore the girls.

“After graduation, virtually everyone will work for and with females and males – students need to learn mutual respect and the social skills of interacting.

“We don’t have sex-segregated workplaces so why would we have sex-segregated schools?”

Halpern told the ABC on Tuesday that evidence of better academic performance of students at single-sex schools could be attributed to more extracurricular activities and more advantaged backgrounds.

She said there was much “pseudoscience” published on the subject.

The three-day APA congress concludes on Thursday.

Loren Bridge, the executive officer of the Alliance of Girls Schools Australasia, said respected researchers had found benefits to single-sex education, and particularly for girls.

She said research carried out in the US did not easily apply to the education sector in Australia, and pointed to the findings of a recent paper authored by Dr Chris Ryan of Melbourne University that showed girls enrolled at single-sex schools were more confident in maths and science.

She said academic performance was not the only measure of a good education: “For girls in particular it’s about confidence, opportunities, great role models – all those sorts of things do contribute as well.”

She also argued that it was a matter of personal preference. “There are going to be girls who prefer a co-ed environment and do well there and girls who prefer a single-sex environment.”

The effectiveness of single-sex education comes under scrutiny periodically and is discussed both in terms of preparing students for life after school and their academic performance.

The headmaster of the coeducational Brighton College in Brighton made headlines in January with his comment that pupils of all-girls schools could be at a “huge disadvantage” in later life because they had not socialised with boys.

The remark was widely condemned by teachers and former pupils of girls’ schools across England, and a subsequent analysis of pupils’ results in 2015 found that all-girl secondary schools slightly outperformed those for boys.