Do Single-Sex Schools Make Girls More Competitive?

Soohyung Lee, Muriel Niederle, and Namwook Kang, Economics Letters 124(3), 474-477, September .

Abstract:

We examine the effect of single-sex schooling on students’ competitiveness by studying middle school students in Seoul who were randomly assigned to either single-sex or coeducational schools within their school districts. Contrary to popular belief and existing studies, our results suggest that single-sex schooling does not reduce the gender gap in competitiveness conditional on student and parental characteristics.