The Long-Term Causal Effect of Single-Sex Schools on Family and Gender Attitudes in South Korea

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 30. Gender, Schooling, and Society pt. 2

Abstract

Schools are key environments where students develop attitudes toward many dimensions of life, including gender roles. We examine the potential long-term impacts of single-sex schools on family and gender attitudes. A fundamental challenge in assessing the impacts of single-sex schooling in contexts where students and families select single-sex schools over coeducational schools is selection bias. Another limitation of existing literature is its focus on short-term effects, hardly assessing whether single-sex schooling experience influences attitudes that persist into adulthood. Using newly collected online survey data, we investigate whether having attended single-sex rather than coeducational high schools 15-35 years earlier had enduring impacts on adult men’s and women’s family and gender attitudes in South Korea. An important advantage of our data is that students in Seoul were randomly assigned to high schools after middle school, which supports causal interpretation by balancing observed and unobserved characteristics across school types. The analytic sample consists of 4,106 respondents who graduated from single-sex (N = 2,096) or coeducational (N = 2,010) high schools in Seoul under this random-assignment system. Respondents reported their agreement with four statements tapping traditional family values and six statements regarding the traditional gender division of labor. We averaged responses across items to create an index of traditional family attitudes and the index of traditional gender attitudes. We also use a single item capturing respondents’ views on male job priority. OLS regression models predict each of these three outcomes by school type. The results show that men who graduated from all-boys schools hold significantly less traditional attitudes on all three measures than those who graduated from coeducational schools. Compared to liberalizing effects of all-boys schools, single-sex schooling does not make a difference in shaping women’s family and gender attitudes. We discuss the implications of these findings in contexts of Korea’s highly gender-unequal setting.

Authors

• Jere R. Behrman, University of Pennsylvania

• Eugen Dimunt

• Emily Carroll Hannum, University of Pennsylvania

• HJ Katelyn Kim, University of Pennsylvania

• Hyunjoon Park, University of Pennsylvania