Separating boys and girls into single-gender schools offers no educational advantages and may actually foster stereotyping and sexism.  That's according to a prominent US psychologist who addressed the Australian Psychological Society congress on Wednesday morning.

Professor Diane Halpern of Claremont McKenna College in southern California has specialized in sex, gender and cognition for three decades and says there is no evidence that boys and girls learn differently.  She points to a 2014 analysis of 184 studies that representing the testing of 1.6 million students of all ages from 21 nations.  It not only found no advantages to single-gender education, but also found that many of the claims made by advocates of single-sex schooling were unsubstantiated - calling it "pseudo-science".

And putting kids and teens into single-gender groups caused people to develop strong stereotypes and in-group bias.  And instilling these negative traits in children will harm them when they become adults.

"In fact, children are going to live in a world that’s far more diverse than ever before - they are going to have to interact with females and males, they are going to have to understand that sometimes the girls are going to outscore the boys and that sometimes the boys will outscore the girls," said Professor Halpern.  "After graduation, virtually everyone will work for and with females and males - students need to learn mutual respect and the social skills of interacting."