Gender-stereotyping and sex-segregated peer relations in single-sex and coeducational secondary school students

Abstract

The recent revival of single-sex schooling has attracted much attention among psychologists, educators and policymakers. The ongoing debates over sex-segregation in education settings highlight the need for scientific evidence that leads to more convincing conclusions. While prior research mainly focused on investigating the academic benefits of sex-segregated school settings, this study aimed at revealing potential gender cognition outcomes and social outcomes of single-sex schooling. By measuring students’ gender salience, gender centrality, gender-stereotyped attitudes, gender typicality, felt pressure for gender conformity, heterosocial anxiety and friendship status, this study was conducted to investigate how single-sex and coeducational school students differ in these psychosocial aspects and explore the potential mechanisms underlying such differences. Addressing the social outcomes of single-sex schooling is important because a mixed-sex environment is inevitable in the real world outside school. Self-reported questionnaires were administered in one all-boys, one all-girls and two coeducational secondary schools in Hong Kong. Respondents were 2,083 local students (M age = 15.79, SD = 2.06) from form one to six (i.e., seventh to twelfth grade). Even controlling for students’ background differences (i.e., monthly family income, parental education, parental age, student age, student ethnicity, number of siblings, and school banding), results were consistently in favor of coeducational schooling. Compared to coeducational school students, students in single-sex schools reported higher gender salience and gender centrality, felt more gender typicality and pressure for gender conformity, were more anxious in mixed-sex interactions, and maintained a more sex-segregated pattern in friendships. Besides, single-sex school students also showed a marginally significant trend of having stronger gender-stereotyped attitudes than coeducational school students. Mediation analyses were conducted to investigate the underlying mechanisms of how gender cognition and social outcomes differ between single-sex and coeducational school students. The results suggested a serial mediation effect in which gender salience (as mediator 1) and gender centrality (as mediator 2) mediated the effect of sex-segregated schooling on gender stereotyping and felt pressure for gender conformity. This form of mediation was not found on heterosocial anxiety, suggesting that the underlying mechanisms of sex segregation effects may be different for social outcomes compared to gender cognition outcomes. This study provided the first demonstration of how the sex-segregated school context is related to adolescents’ anxiety in mixed-sex interactions. It also highlighted the importance of taking the social aspects into regard in the debate over single-sex schooling, providing potential directions for future research.