According to the study, no. British researchers looked at 17,000 adults, all born in the same week in 1958. Men who had attended single-sex schools as children were more likely to divorce or separate from a partner by their early 40s than those who went to coed institutions. And men educated in single-sex environments were more likely to suffer depression or "a sense of malaise." Girls, however, did not appear to feel these adverse effects. Mary Bousted of the UK's Association of Teachers and Lecturers responded thus:

All the research shows single-sex schools are good for girls but bad for boys – both in terms of academic performance and socialisation. Girls seem to learn what the nature of the beast is if they have been to single sex schools whereas boys taught on their own seem to find girls more puzzling. Boys learn better when they are with girls and they actually learn to get on better.

As Bousted's "nature of the beast" comment shows, it's easy to inject anecdotal evidence into the single-sex schooling debate, and such evidence can easily turn to gender stereotype. For my part, boys I've known who had close female friends growing up — in school or out — tend to be more feminist and generally more comfortable around women. But it's hard to assign causality here — boys who are naturally well-disposed towards girls probably tend to have more of them as friends. And while I can certainly buy that being socialized with girls from an early age helps boys with relationships later in life, I'm not sure that girls are naturally "puzzling" while boys are easy to figure out. I wonder if the kind of school students attended affected the results — some were educated privately, some publicly, and it's not clear if researchers controlled for this. I also wonder if girls reap benefits from co-ed schooling that were outside the scope of the study. Lucy Hodges, editor of the Independent's education supplement, thinks they do. She writes,

As someone who was educated in a single-sex boarding school I believe my schooling might have been improved if I had spent it in the company of boys as well as girls. It would certainly have provided some welcome distraction in lessons. Instead of reading Georgette Heyer all the way through Latin and maths, I could have been making eyes at a real-life hero a few yards away and even had some improving discussions with him about my algebra prep. As it was, I didn't really get to know a youth who wasn't in a book until I arrived at university at the tender age of 17-and-a-half.

The relationship-building implications of single-sex schooling for heterosexual girls aren't totally trivial, but it's kind of unfortunate that Hodges chooses to frame them in terms of their dubious educational benefit. She also says that her daughter "would have been better off, certainly at sixth-form, at a school with some boys – and a few more male teachers – to bring a bit of spice and interest to her life." The idea that girls need sexual excitement to perform well in school is kind of depressing — can't academic subjects add "spice and interest" to life?

I'm not convinced that the excitement of the opposite sex helps hetero kids learn math. But it does seem logical that, regardless of sexual orientation, children learn social lessons from opposite sex peers. Potential confounding variables aside, it is possible that boys learn more valuable lessons than girls, or at least different ones. They may learn that girls share their interests and goals, that they can be smart and funny and fast and cool, and — most importantly — that they are people worthy of attention and consideration. Girls probably learn the same things about boys, but they may also learn that some boys don't like it when they speak up, or that some teachers have different expectations of them because of their gender. These lessons may be damaging to girls, and single-sex education may shield them from this damage for a time. But if it's true that sex segregation hampers boys' ability to relate to girls and later to women, that's not good for either gender. Single-sex education has benefits for many people, but it's not a gender-relations panacea — if we want boys and girls to grow up free of prejudice, we may ultimately need to pay more attention to what we're teaching them than to whether we're teaching them together.

Why Single-Sex Schools Are Bad For Your Health (If You're A Boy) [Independent]
Lucy Hodges: The Perils Of Single-Sex Education [Independent]

Law professor Gail Heriot says, "I had seen articles that suggested that some colleges and universities were discriminating in favor of men and against women in their admissions processes." She and her fellow members of the Commission plan to subpoena the admissions records and policies of 12 or more institutions to determine if such discrimination is occurring. Some, however, think there's no need. Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions at Kenyon College, says, "Is there evidence of this? Who has it? Where is it?"

As NPR's Claudio Sanchez points out, one of the people who has such evidence is Delahunty herself. In a 2006 New York Times op-ed, she wrote, "The fat acceptance envelope is simply more elusive for today's accomplished young women." She went on to describe an impressive female Kenyon applicant whose admission was still up for debate. She explained,

Had she been a male applicant, there would have been little, if any, hesitation to admit. The reality is that because young men are rarer, they're more valued applicants.

Here Delahunty seems to be outright confessing that Kenyon gives male applicants an edge. Why? She says,

At those colleges that have reached what the experts call a "tipping point," where 60 percent or more of their enrolled students are female, you'll hear a hint of desperation in the voices of admissions officers.

Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.

So favoring men is at least partly a numbers game. But Tom Mortenson of the Pell Institute says gender-imbalanced colleges are also bad for education. He tells Sanchez,

The people who work on these campuses say that boys frankly are not at their best where they are outnumbered two to one by girls. It's probably not a healthy situation for either gender.

It's tempting to suggest that boys who "aren't at their best" with too many chicks around might like to call the wahmbulance, or just cool their heels and wait for the day when they make more money than women for doing the same job. But given the recent focus on men's college woes (the president of the University of Alberta drew fire last week for declaring herself an "advocate" for underrepresented white men), it's worth examining whether or not gender "balance" is a good thing to strive for. It may not be particularly high-minded, but I can understand why straight women might balk at attending a college where they greatly outnumber men — a highly skewed dating pool can lead to some unpleasant social dynamics, not to mention reduced options. Then again, there's no reason women can't date outside their colleges, and the idea that a post-secondary education should also provide mating opportunities may be an outdated and damaging one. Maybe it's time we stopped thinking of college as a place of sexual awakening, and simply focused on learning.

So do students learn better in a mixed-gender setting? In primary and secondary school, there's some evidence that single-gender education has benefits, and many who attended women's colleges swear by the experience. On the other hand, there is something to be said for an educational experience that mimics the real world — but gender aside, colleges may be moving farther and farther from this goal.

Ultimately, the gender makeup of selective colleges may be a moot point. As college costs rise and real income falls, the "traditional" college experience is becoming out of reach for more and more students. Probably more important than the gender balance of a place like Kenyon is the growing gap between those who can afford Kenyon and those who can't. While some colleges had begun beefing up their financial aid prior to the recession, many are now in dire straits and forced to relinquish need-blind admissions. It's worth examining whether female applicants are suffering discrimination, and the underlying reasons for boys' educational problems deserve study as well. But the biggest problem facing America in the coming years isn't going to be about who gets into what top college. It'll be about who never had the money or support to apply in the first place, and couldn't attend even if they did get in. And unfortunately, this underrepresented group is growing.

Do Colleges Favor Male Applicants? [NPR]
Women Push Back [Edmonton Sun]

Related: To All The Girls I've Rejected [NYT]

• Researchers have found that the children born to mothers that have undergone weight loss surgery are healthier than older siblings born before the procedure. The younger siblings were found to have improved heart health and a lower risk of obesity. • A Sudanese judge has ruled that journalist Lubna Hussein, who was arrested in July for wearing pants, will not be flogged (flogging is a legal punishment for indecency). Hussein is still facing a $200 fine, which she is not planning on paying. "I will not pay a penny. I won't pay, as a matter of principle," she said. •  Health workers at a clinic in rural Peru were frustrated at the low rate of births taking place inside the clinic (only 6%), and so they decided to ask local women what they were doing wrong. The mothers were happy to help. The clinic will now respect traditional practices, ensure that they have a doctor on hand who speaks the local language, and allow relatives to stay and help with the birthing process. • Celebrity polar bear Knut is getting a new pal: Giovanna, a female polar bear from Munich. However, since both bears are not yet sexually mature, there is little chance they will consummate their relationship. • Scientists are attempting to pin down gender differences in brain function, yet even the study of the brain does not provide an easy way out of the "old nature/nurture dilemma." What they found is something many have long suspected: "Individuals' gender traits-their preference for masculine or feminine clothes, careers, hobbies and interpersonal styles-are inevitably shaped more by rearing and experience than is their biological sex." • Al Franken has a cool party trick, which he recently displayed at the Minnesota State Fair. Click here for a video of Franken drawing the entire US map from memory. • Women in Australia are in luck: the Bluetongue Brewery plans to hire 10 to 15 professional beer tasters in the next year. And since women apparently make better tasters, they are looking for boozy broads to fill the open positions. • This weekend, Linda Rice became the first woman to win a training title at Saratoga. Rice has been training since 1987, but this is the first time she has taken home a title. • An op-ed from this Sunday's New York Times argues that the cyberbullying laws under which Lori Drew was tried are "too vague to be constitutional." • The mayor of German border town Vierlinden has announced plans to deter prostitutes from gathering on the B1 motorway through the use of butyric acid, which apparently smells like vomit and body odor. • In October 2007, Afghan journalist Sayed Perwiz Kambakhsh was jailed for blasphemy after she was caught downloading an internet article about women's rights. A few weeks ago, President Hamid Karzai finally pardoned Kambakhsh, and she has since been freed. • The Justice Department is urging a Santa Ana court to toss out a lawsuit that challenges President Obama's Constitutional qualifications to be president. The birthers' suit claims that Obama was not born in Hawaii and is a citizen of Indonesia, and "possibly still citizen of Kenya." • A Jewish community leader has condemned the AIDS awareness ad that features a man intended to represent Hitler in the throes of passion, saying that it both unsuccessful and offensive. We agree. • Feministing features an interesting video about gender and language. The Hariri Foundation introduced a program that replaced words that are generally read as masculine with accents that mark them as feminine. More here. • As of today, Girl Scouts will now be able to earn a new patch for "preparedness." "This new preparedness patch will increase citizen preparedness and enhance our country's readiness for disasters," said Homeland Security Department Secretary Janet Napolitano. • Farmers in India are facing increasing hardships as crops fail and debts pile up, which has caused many impovrished farmers to take the drastic measure of selling their wives. According to some reports, as many as several thousand men have sold their wives to money lenders, who then transfer the marriage contract to a third party. •

The study, which examined MBA students at the University of Chicago, found higher levels of testosterone in women coincided with riskier gambling behavior, but the same wasn't true of the men. Previous research suggests that women are generally less risk averse than men, and this new study suggests that these same women with higher levels of testosterone choose riskier careers like finance or investment banking. In the study, only 36 percent of women chose such risky careers compared with 57 percent of men in the study.

People were freaked out by Semenya's athletic ability, causing many to question how "female" she is. As the BBC reports today, the athlete is determined to have three times the "normal" level of testosterone a woman, and some asked she not be allowed to run as one. Both the study and Semenya's experience show us that when we see women emerging as in fields that are traditionally dominated by men, we look for a reason.

Semenya's experience aptly demonstrates that people became frustrated and confused when she didn't fit neatly into preconceived gender stereotypes. The study also looked at women, who tend to be risk-averse, and asked why they might enter a high-risk career like stock trading. If we have learned anything from Semenya, it is that gender is complicated. As Anna previously pointed out, "It's true that if gender testing is something that athletes only have to undergo if other people raise suspicions - and if those suspicions are only raised when an athlete is 'too good' to be female - then the process is hardly fair."

Recent news shows that Semenya's coach has a sordid past. Dr. Ekkart Arbeit, has been accused of feeding testosterone hormones to at least one athlete on a team he coached in East Germany during the 1970s and '80s. One of his former proteges, Heidi Krieger, accused Arbeit of giving her so many steroids that she underwent surgery to live out her life as Andreas Kreiger. Still, Arbeit claims he hasn't been involved with such drugs since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The story of gender testing in athletics puts the study of high-testosterone women in high-risk careers in new light. We will hardly begin to see "gender testing" implemented for highly successful (or risky) female stock traders or investment bankers. But if we don't want to make sure our investment bankers fall into neat gender categories, maybe we shouldn't make successful runners do the same.

New Twist In Semenya Gender Saga [BBC]
Women with high levels of testosterone 'take riskier jobs' [Telegraph]

Earlier: Coach: Gender Concerns Reasonable Because Runner "Looks Like A Man"
Semenya Takes Gold, But Gender Issue Is Ongoing

In this no-shit study, they found that while men have historically been the superior chess players, this can be explained by the simple fact that more men play chess. According to Scientific American, although “those who wish to argue that women are just not as smart as men often point to chess as their proof” (they do?), the only reason a woman has never been the chess world champion is that not enough women are currently competing. If a greater number of women start playing, then there is a very good possibility that the winner of the 2009 World Chess Championship could be female. [Scientific American]

For instance: Do you prefer a bath or a shower? Do you tend to have chapped lips or use Chapstick? Do you drink lager or gin and tonic? But! Does being a man who likes to bathe really mean he's in touch with his feminine side? Does being a woman who likes to shop and spend a day at the spa really mean she's a "typical" female?

According to the scoring of this questionnaire, (put together by Phillip Hodson, of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy), even if you're a woman who watches football and hates to shop, you're not necessarily a tomboy, "just a girl who dares to be different." Dares? And! If you're a man who moisturizes and can't find his keys, you're "in touch with your femininity," which could help you "empathize with the opposite sex."

The question is: If we're living in an age when women box and race cars and men wax their hair and shop, is there such a thing as "typical" behavior for your gender anymore? (And! What kind of score did you get? I'm a 9, which is in the "middle ground" but closer to the manly side, heh.)

Questionnaire: Are you gender typical?, Scoring [The Independent]

"With all due respect," the mom replied, "Fuck yourself."

Okay, not really; she said something maybe slightly more polite, but it was that sort of typical male-female exchange that prompted Sax to do that thing where a dude throws all his assumptions into the air, replaces them with a bold new age-old assumption and dives headfirst into a brand new worldview with the help of a few supporting theories, promising studies and convincing anecdotes. The story focuses on his conversion and ideas in a cover story on the rise of the single-sex education movement, which has over the past ten years yielded 45 single-sex public schools and hundreds of schools offering single-sex classes.

Sax thinks there are vast differences in the ways that boys and girls learn. Baby boys look at mobiles; girls look at stationary pictures. Boys draw pictures depicting action, girls draw pictures depicting nuance and detail and color. Girls' brains develop earlier, with with their cerebral volume peaking at 10.5 while boys peak four years later. Girls hear and smell slightly better than boys, who don't like school because it's taught "by soft-spoken women who bore," according to Sax.

Sax: gets accused of sexism and molding the facts that support his thesis; relishes that. Sax has never been a teacher.

The ACLU and such people believe single-sex education is undemocratic. "Even if one could prove that sending a kid off to his or her own school based on religion or race or ethnicity or gender did a little better job of raising the academic skills for workers in the economy, there's also the issue of trying to create tolerant citizens in a democracy," says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation.

Richard Kahlenberg has also never been a teacher. This is the last sentence of the story. Has Richard Kahlenberg ever been inside a public school?

And then there is Emily Wylie. Emily teaches at an all-girl's school in East Harlem. She is an advocate for same-sex education as well, in large part because she appreciates the desexualized environment: "Sure, when they take pictures, they often present their backsides first. But I think I'm giving girls a better education than I could have if there were guys in the room. " "It's my subversive mission to create all these strong girls who will then go out into the world and be astonished when people try to oppress them."

So one day they can go self-confidently out into the world and spar with the likes of men like Sax, who will in turn be so bowled over by the elegant simplicty of their logic as to take up their causes with messianic zeal for themselves, fighting wars to defend their pragmatic notions, for which they can then take all the credit in the New York Times Magazine because that is the way the world works. But at least they will probably stop bothering to check their mascara first.

Teaching Boys And Girls Separately [NY Times]

With the help of a therapist, she conquered her eating disorder. But now I was totally confused on what messages to send my kids about food. Of course I wanted Marcy healthy — but damn, she sure had looked good when she was thin. Except for the hair.

ake got big like a beanstalk, like a fairy-tale mushroom, big like Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox. Jake got big overnight, went from boy to man in a twinkling, so quickly that I really thought if I sat by his bed, I could see him grow. His feet and hands turned massive. His forearms became immense.

Last summer, a few months before my dad died, Marcy and I went to visit him. As she settled in beside him on his sofa, he observed, with cruel accuracy, "You look like you're putting on some weight." Marcy burst into tears and ran out of the room. I wanted to run as well, from a rush of old memories: Dad tucking a slim sister on either side of me before snapping the picture for our Christmas card. Dad frowning at me at Thanksgiving dinner, scolding "Not so much pie!" in front of everyone. Dad offering to pay me a hundred bucks if I'd just lose 25 pounds ... He was a kind man, a good man, but he didn't understand about girls and size and shame. Though he did realize something was amiss, at least: On our next visit, he confided to me that he'd told a number of female friends about his remark to Marcy, and that every last one of them upbraided him for being a heartless pig. Jake happened to be along on this visit, and Dad took the opportunity to ask him: "So, what do you weigh these days?"

"Three hundred 20," Jake said.

My dad smiled indulgently. Then he turned and asked me, "How can two kids be so different?"

I hope she has sons someday. I hope they're big, too. I hope she gets the chance to revel in what otherwise has been a curse for her. It doesn't make up for society's scorn, not completely. But it's oddly, beautifully empowering, just the same.

Living Large [Philadelphia Magazine]

One theory states that cursing is a substitute for a physical act of aggression. So it would make sense that as women become more aggressive in life, their speech patterns would match.

The most interesting thing thing in the article is the news that, after people have strokes and lose the ability to converse, they still retain the ability to swear. This has led neurologists to believe that swear words are stored in the brain's right hemisphere, where as propositional language is stored in the left, the part that gets affected by having a stroke. Here are some other tidbits:

• Cursing in groups promotes social bonding.
• "Fuck" and "shit" make up half of all swear words used.
• The seemingly benign "damn" was the "undisputed king" of swear words before "fuck" began being used
• Almost all swear words are based on sex or excretion.

Some psychologists believe that our dirty mouths are a product of evolution. It's safer for us to scream "Fuck you" from across the street at a person, without worrying about getting beaten up. But for as long as that piece was, and all the theories and facts it contained, it didn't state what seems to be the most obvious thing: People curse because it's fucking fun.

The Science Of Swearing [New Scientist]

Though Melanie Ayres, a co-author of the study, asserts that the findings "compellingly debunk simplistic stereotypes about gender differences in language use," it seems more like the study is reinforcing gender stereotypes instead of breaking them down. Ayres does conclude, however, that use of language is more of a social than a biological construct, so perhaps if women were encouraged to use language to influence others rather than emotionally connect with them, we wouldn't always be portrayed as frivolous gossips. Regardless, I can't tell you how many times men have told me that I'm being "loud" when I vehemently express an opinion. Have you ever heard anyone tell a man that he needs to quiet down?

Men Talk More Than Women Overall, But Not In All Circumstances [Science Daily]