Network Structure and Sex-Stereotypes in Single-Sex Schools
Sparked by the publication of “The Pseudoscience of Single Sex Schooling” in the Science Journal on September 23, 2011, the debate around single-sex education has recently been given a lot of attention by the media. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/23/education/23single.html?ref=education, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110922141902.htm). As with most major debates, one can find evidence both for and against single-sex education, and individuals that span the spectrum in terms of how they feel about it. My intention here, however, is not to argue for or against single-sex education.Indeed, I believe that parents should have the right to send their children to whichever school they feel will be most beneficial to their child’s educational needs. With that said, my goal here is to understand how Social Network Analysis may shed some light on their findings.
According to the New York Times, the article’s major argument (based on a comprehensive review of past research) against single-sex education is that it “reduces boys’ and girls’ opportunities to work together, and reinforces sex stereotypes.” I believe most would agree that attending a single-sex school reduces interaction with the opposite sex simply by restricting the number of hours in a day that one has the opportunity to actually see a member of the opposite sex. Since school is a large part of a child’s socialization, it is important to explore this and the claim that sex stereotypes are reinforced among students, and my proposal is that this claim can be explored further via Social Network Analysis.
The first question that comes to mind in this endeavor is, “What would the communication/friendship network of students attending a single sex school (but not restricted to said school) look like? Drawing from Granovetter’s “The Strength of Weak Ties,” one might picture a network in which there exists a number of smaller dense clusters of ties formed between members of the same sex, and less dense clusters formed between members of the opposite sex. Taken a step further, we could classify these ties according to Granovetter’s definition of strength: “The strength of a tie is a combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.” A single-sex school gives its students much more of an opportunity to interact and build relationships with each other than with those of the opposite sex, so one might expect that the majority of strong ties are likely to be seen between members of the same sex. Similarly, students are less likely to develop strong relationships with members of the opposite sex, so that weak ties tend to occur between them. Furthermore, Strong Triadic Closure is not likely to be satisfied when two members of the proposed triangle are of the opposite sex, so common knowledge and a constant flow of information between the two groups may be constrained.
Following Granovetter’s intuition and findings, I find that it is quite possible for sex stereotypes to be reinforced in a network such as the one described above. Individuals in closely-knit clusters are often exposed to the same information since they are in constant communication with each other, and usually share similar interests, beliefs, opinions, and traits. Students may, therefore, subscribe to the same stereotypes as their peers – especially students who do not have much interaction with members of the opposite sex outside of school. By Granovetter’s claim, however, weak ties (in our case, ties between members of the opposite sex) can turn out to be beneficial in the spread of knowledge, and therefore in countering those stereotypes. In other words, weak ties between members of the opposite sex can serve to “correct” these stereotypes via the passage of new and different information (especially since it would actually be coming from the opposite sex that they are stereotyping). As such, the follow-up question becomes, “Is the strength of weak ties enough to counter the reinforcement of sex stereotypes within single-sex schools?”
I do not have an answer for this question, although, I do have some ideas as to how to begin to reach the answer. One possible way is via the comparison of schools that vary in their level of opposite sex interaction and communication, ranging from no interaction to daily interaction within the classroom. Three major types of schools worth performing a network analysis study on are single-sex schools, co-institutional schools (males and females attend the same school, but classes are segregated by gender), and coeducational schools. The results of such a study could give insight into the extent to which interaction between members of the opposite sex are necessary to counter stereotypes, and whether the fostering of weak ties between males and females outside of the school context will do enough to prevent the reinforcement of stereotypes.