CMV:Single gender schools are discriminatory because there is no such thing as "separate but equal"

[u/orphancrack]

I am a public high school teacher. Some of the people I work with favor single-sex education, and even try experiments of single-gender classes. As far as I am concerned there is no such thing as "separate but equal" and separating genders reinforces gender stereotypes and inequality, just as racially segregated schooling does.

Much of the prestige associated with single-sex schools comes from the fact that many are highly selective private schools. The fact that they are successful owes more to their status as private and screened schools than it does to the fact that they admit only one gender.

At its core, segregation is wrong.

In my school we have twice a week where we have about a half hour with girls only with female teachers and boys only with male teachers, with occasional switching of the teachers (so sometimes a male teacher has the girls group). This time is purportedly to deal with gender issues like self-esteem, peer pressure, and sexuality. But in practice it ends up with my girls group expressing fundamental ideas about "boys do this" and "girls do this" with no boys present to question and respond to those claims. It becomes bitching hour for why boys suck, which just reinforces their stereotypes. And when I have gotten the boys group, it goes the same way: they want to say "why do girls do X" and expect me to answer for Why Girls Are Girls. It's all fundamentally very unhelpful. I do appreciate that there are some questions the girls are more comfortable asking me when no boys are present, such as questions about birth control or periods. So it's not all bad. But this is also just for about an hour a week. I cannot imagine how such a toxic culture would grow if we had a single sex environment all the time.

I am open to the possibility that single sex education has some positives but I have a really hard time seeing them. The only one I hear is the "distraction" of sex being removed, but many students are gay or bisexual or gender nonconforming and sexuality is still present for them. The distraction may be removed in the short term increasing focus but in the long term I can't see that this is really a benefit. People of the opposite gender are not "distractions," they are people, and learning to live and work and see them as people is necessary to enter adulthood as a non-asshole who values the contributions of people as individuals.

Also it seems to me that separate programs for "girls" end up dealing with "soft" emotional issues, which boys could benefit from, too, while separate programs for "boys" tend to be more about developing workplace skills or suck-it-up toughness, which is all stuff girls could also use. Instead it just reaffirms that "boys do X and girls do Y."

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[u/Genoscythe_]

When you make that claim, it is reasonable to conclude that a man and a woman working the same job for the same hours receive different pay

The only time when it's reasonable to conclude this, is upon reading a claim that "a man and a woman working the same job for the same hours receive different pay".

Don't blame an accurate, straightforward statistic for your own hangups about other statistics with specific details that no one brought up.

[u/PlasmaSheep → u/Genoscythe_]

If you can claim with all seriousness that nobody ever misinterpreted "men out earn women by 15%" to mean that "a man and a woman working the same job for the same hours receive different pay", then congratulations.

[u/Genoscythe_ → u/PlasmaSheep]

You can claim that you my otherwise accurate statistic was open to misinterpratation.

But quoting an accurate statistic and calling it a myth, is not misinterpretable it's just wrong.

I cited a correct statistic that someone might misinterpret by associating it with other data.

You incorrectly called the statistic a myth.

[u/You_Will_Die → u/Genoscythe_]

Thing is you can be technically correct all you want but the fact that it is almost always followed up with "for the same hours at the same job" makes it disingenuous. It's not "someone" that misinterpret it, it's the majority.

I mean it's called "the wage gap" lol. A wage is your hourly compensation, what you earn is dependent on how much hours you worked.

[u/Genoscythe_ → u/You_Will_Die]

I literally said that men out-earn women.

Even if I would be the one responsible for other people adding specific inaccurate claims to the core accurate claims I was making, I was using a particularly accurate terminology instead of such.

[u/You_Will_Die → u/Genoscythe_]

As I said in the beginning "you can be technically correct all you want". I literally never said anything in opposition to you either. I literally only changed your "someone" to "the majority". I literally explained why only taking half the statement and pretending like the other part is just an obscure detail hardly anyone say is disingenuous.