Girls-only schools outperformed as pathways to STEM
21 August 2026
Students from girls-only schools were overrepresented among female students studying Engineering and Computer Science at university.
A New Zealand study explores links between single-sex education for girls and pathways into the male-dominated fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
Female students from single-sex schools were overrepresented among female Engineering and Computer Science students at the University of Auckland, according to research published in the journal Educational Studies in Mathematics.
No similar effect occurred for male students who had attended boys’ schools.
"There's something in the water at girls-only schools in New Zealand,” says Tanya Evans, an associate professor of mathematics education at the University. “If we could bottle it, we could help girls thrive in maths and STEM across all of our schools.”
Around the world, single-sex schools are dominant in places such as Iran, in decline in the likes of the UK, Australia and South Korea, and vanishingly rare in the Nordic nations.
In New Zealand, about 11 percent of students attend single-sex schools, and most of these are state or state-integrated institutions, according to the Ministry of Education.
“This makes New Zealand relatively unusual internationally and provides an opportunity to investigate single-sex schooling in a context where it is not confined primarily to elite private or religious education as in the US and Australia,” says Evans.
At the University of Auckland, 42 percent of female Engineering students had attended single-sex secondary schools. For Computer Science, the figure was 40 percent.
The Auckland study, which drew on data from 2016 to 2020, was consistent with a University of Canterbury study from 2005 to 2017 showing that girls from single-sex schools were overrepresented among Engineering students.
Single-sex schools are dominant in Iran, in decline in the UK, Australia and South Korea, and rare in the Nordic nations.
The researchers say the findings raise questions about what might be happening in girls’ schools.
Evans says maths remains widely perceived as a masculine domain, and girls in co-educational classrooms may encounter subtle gendered cues that affect their sense of belonging or engagement.
These might include differences in classroom interactions, expectations, peer cultures, opportunities for leadership, confidence, or students’ sense that mathematics and STEM are fields in which they belong.
“Single-sex environments may alter some of these dynamics,” she says. However, the findings shouldn’t be interpreted as advocacy for single-sex education, according to Evans and her co-authors.
“Rather, we view girls’ schools as useful research contexts for identifying factors supporting greater female representation in STEM,” write the researchers, who were led by University of Auckland PhD student Huayu Gao.
Future research should focus on identifying and unpacking the “enabling features” of school environments that support girls’ engagement and success in maths-intensive fields, the researchers say.
Northern Ireland and Flanders in Belgium may provide useful settings for comparative research because, as in New Zealand, single-sex schools are relatively widespread and not confined to elite private institutions.
Scientists can find it hard to disentangle the effects of single-sex education from the characteristics of those who attend these schools.
In many developed countries, the challenge is compounded because single-sex schools are predominantly private and/or religious institutions, making it difficult to separate the effects of school type from differences in socioeconomic background, school resources, ethos and student selection.