Coeducation and gender identity formation: a comparative analysis of secondary schools in Belgium

Present analysis focuses on the way girls and boys perceive their gender identify in mixed or single-sex schools. Use war made of data concerning 6427 third-year pupils from 25 coeducational and 43 single-sex (21 girls and 22 boys schools) academically oriented secondary schools in Belgium. A multilevel analysis (Hierarchical Linear Modeling) war performed controlling for parental socio-economic status (SES), academic performance, curriculum enrolment, parental support and school mean SES. It was mainly found that coeducational school girls not only tend to identify themselves more strongly in terms of feminine traits than single-sex school girls, but also in terms of masculine traits, even though their classroom behaviour appears to be much more Inhibited.