should we have women only universities like they do in USA?

[darleneconnor]

In secondary education, girls schools tend to top the league tables so would single sex universities help more women get 1sts? Ive read that men still outperform women at uni, doing more lucretive degrees and getting more 1sts, might womens unis help this?

I dont think i would have wanted to go to one but id be happy for dd to go.

I should point out that whilst Cambridge has 3 all female colleges, that doesn't mean that those women are educated in a women only environment as lectures/practicals are on a University wide basis. Depending on the subject it may mean that their tutorials/supervisions are female only, but probably only in 50% of cases, as many supervisors are "out of college".

What do you mean by 'effectively'?

Maybe women would be able to deal with men more effectively, colditz, as they wouldn't have learnt to be "cowed" by men? It's possible, I think.

The women I know who were in single sex school environments seem to be more confident in standing their ground at work when men get aggressive assertive than others but that's just anecdotal.

There's a lot of sexual harassment in schools, it can't be nearly as prevalent in single sex environments as in mixed. I'm not sure those experiences lead to the most desirable sort of effectiveness in terms of dealing with the opposite sex.

I don't think this is a good idea nor could it be done in practice.

Do any of the "definitely not" people see any value in single sex schools?If so, what is the value that you see? And at what age does there stop being value, and why?

Colditz-but in reality the workforce is so sex-segregated that a single sex education is a more reflective precursor than a 50/50 one.

Colditz-but in reality the workforce is so sex-segregated that a single sex education is a more reflective precursor than a 50/50 one.

Possibly in some areas, but arguably far less so for university graduates.

How would this work in reality? Would you have universitys delivering the same course to both the male students and female students seperately so lecturers would have to deliver the same lecture twice and you would have seperate seminars for male and female students. That would surely lead to masses of replication which would be highly inefficient leading to either the cost of degrees going up further or a reduction in the number of people going to univerisities, neither of which are desirable.

Hmm. I remember some debate on this when the Oxford all-female colleges were talking about going mixed - and one point that stuck with me was that some students might be prevented from pursuing their higher education career if they didn't have an all-female college option. Mostly women from certain religious and cultural backgrounds, where they weren't expected to mix with boys or men until they got married - and I felt then (as now) that it should be an available option to allow these highly-restricted young women the chance at a university degree.

I don't know whether things have got much more liberal, or whether there is still the same level of restriction on some young women - but I do believe that university education should be available for all who want it, and that removing choice from them is counterproductive.

I went to an all-girls school and was very glad that I did. But we were next to an all-boys school, so we still had some social interaction with the boys, and by 6th form, we could do "mixed options" between the schools, so for 2 hours a week we had co-ed classes in different subjects, some in our school, some in theirs. It gave us a bit of an introduction to mixed classes.

I am glad I went to a mixed University but I still think the option should be there for girls to go to a female-only college if they want/need to.

I find this depressing. Instead of saying 'women don't perform as well as men at university ... let's put them in a single sex environment', why not talk about changing the co-ed environment so women do do as well as men?!

I think single-sex colleges can be an excuse for male-dominated institutions to carry on merrily doling out the same sexist crap everywhere else.

Imo, much of the reason men do better than women at university is that women have often not been taught to believe they should be aggressive and argumentative. There are expectations that women will behave a certain way - a quiet girl is, imo, much more likely to be written off as 'shy' than a quiet boy.

Taking men out of the environment is changing it though?

Erm, no, it's not! Taking men out does nothing whatsoever to change the co-ed environment.

well it changes it from a co-ed but yes yes I know what you mean

how could a mixed sex environment be altered then?

sadly i wonder if they'd get enough students and lecturers.

i studied maths and physics and was one of about four girls in fifty for physics with only about 1% of the teaching staff female.

i don't think that a female only university could offer world-class physics teaching unless they took almost every female physicist in the country... and to have an all female student body taught by an all male teaching staff would be horrible.. and to have an all female university that didn't offer subjects like physics would be horrible...

so i just don't think we could

If anyone's interested, here's the web page for an American women's college:
www.sbc.edu/

You have to be careful about terminology here. In the USA a "college" is a small university, not a part of a large university (except at Yale). All the residence and academic services at a college would be part of the same organization.

I think I had the same experience as sassyTHEFIRST. I spent a year at a women only liberal arts college in the US. The experiences I had there, and in a traditional red-brick Uni in the UK, are hard to compare because it was so different in every way (imagine a whole year of Uni without one night spent in a pub ).

Thinking about any benefits it may have had, you have to separate those that are just to do with funding from the women only element - e.g. the classes were small, the teaching quality was high, the facilities were great.

The women only element means that all the "top jobs" went to women - from hall monitor to class president to college paper editor - something that was definitely not what I witnessed in UK even where the % of women students outweighed men. This gave those women amazing experience and confidence that they could then take to their co-ed grad schools and their now, very successful careers.

The environment was also one in which those who were uncomfortable around men (for whatever reason, and sometimes I found this hard to understand as I missed my BF, brother and father so much) could concentrate on their education without those concerns (although there were plenty of same-sex distractions going on!).

So would I send DD to a women only Uni? No, not even to a single-sex secondary school. It was an unrealistic environment. What I hope to do is ensure DD believes in herself and her talents regardless of her gender, and is in an environment that celebrates achievement. Those are the two things that I benefited from during my time in the US, and have more to do with the type of people you are surrounded by than the gender of them.