The Barnyard

To some, Barnard is simply Columbia's stupid younger sister-a pointless institution for Ivy League rejects that should have disappeared two decades ago. Admittedly, the first time I heard this, I flashed my impressive high school GPA, standardized test scores, and college resumé and pompously declared that I had applied early to Barnard. But these past two years have made me realize that to reduce Barnard to a battle of wits is beside the point. I applied early decision not because my college was easier to get into than Columbia or even that I wanted to avoid the Core; it was the only small liberal arts college located in "the city" that was solely for women.

Many Bwoggers have stated that Barnard isn't single-sex to begin with since-with the exception of first-year seminars-classes are open to Columbia and consequently both genders. While true in theory, this point falls flat in practice. Many seminars at Barnard, especially those in the English department, consist mainly and often only of female students. With the exception of popular political science and history lectures, the percentages of males in other courses are also small. As a Barnard student, I have the option of selecting which courses I want to take with female classmates and potentially taking only single-sex classes in my four years here.

My reason for wanting to take some courses solely with women isn't that I think men have cooties or should be castrated. Coming from a coed public high school, I realized in my first semester at college that Barnard's mission statement promoting the advancement of women was not a meaningless mantra. From analyzing female monsters as symbols of unfettered sexuality in "Madness and Literature" to discussing "machismo" in my Spanish composition class, I learned that understanding gender is integral to understanding society. Instead of fighting a male student for floor space in seminar or cringing as he corrected the teacher during lecture, I was finally in an environment where I could have a conversation with the other students in my classes. With the exception of the girl who showed up twice all semester, the students and faculty were highly motivated people who continually encouraged me to succeed. What Columbia student can say she receives congratulatory e-mails from her college president and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author for winning a writing competition?

What bothered me most about "Separate but Equal?," Julia Israel's recent feature in The Eye, was not that the article made Barnard students and administration sound like airheads (why would Dean Dorothy Denburg know why Barnard isn't mentioned on Columbia's tour?), but that it was slanted in its "scientific" section. When Rosalind Barnett, the senior scientist at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University and the author of The Same Difference: How Gender Myths are Hurting Our Relationships, Our Children, and Our Jobs, said that "it's not clear if [single-sex schools] are very good because they're single sex," Israel overlooked an entire body of research stating the opposite. Even the U.K. study that Barnett cited showing that as the number of single-sex schools has dropped, the number of girls taking physics has grown is weak: first, the study is correlational, meaning that there is no causal link between female physics students and coeducational schools, and second, Ellen Gillibrand's 1999 experiment found that increased participation and comfort level in single-sex environments caused girls to score higher in physics and also made them more likely to pursue the subject at an advanced level. And as long as we're on the Larry Summers boat, in 2004, Eva Van de Gaer found that girls made more progress in math in single-sex schools.

By suggesting that females won't feel any more comfortable in society unless we break the gender boundary in classrooms, Israel and Barnett offer an appealing but ultimately overly simplistic solution. The "contact hypothesis" of bringing members of two groups together has been relatively ineffective-decades after the racial integration of public schools, blacks and whites still sit at separate lunch tables and ethnic slurs still mar the bathroom walls. Similarly, unless we work to rid gender stereotypes, women will continue to feel stigmatized in coeducational classrooms. While Columbia males are not misogynists, my own study for learning psychology found that the mere presence of men elicited stereotype threat, causing 60 "strong, beautiful and bold" Barnard students to act in accordance with "appropriate" female behavior by speaking less and paying more attention to their appearance. The single-sex classroom then functions as a safe haven for women, providing them with a place where they can develop confidence and competence when they would otherwise be reluctant to speak out and ask questions for fear of confirming the negative evaluations of others. But Barnard does not exist in a bubble that Barnett suggests characterizes other single-sex schools, as students can elect to take coed classes and also live in New York City.

When the playing field for women remains rocky, it is ignorant to call gender a "myth." As of now, more than half of the embarrassingly low 16.3 percent of women in Congress and a third of Fortune 1000 executives were single-sex educated. Maybe when women hold more high-powered positions, when they make the same salary as men and aren't pushed on the mommy track, we can reexamine female education. But in a world marked by gender differences, single-sex schools are far from obsolete.