Why All-Girls Education Matters in STEM

Part of Dana Hall’s mission statement reads, “Dana Hall provides its students with a unique opportunity to prepare themselves for the challenges and choices they will face as women and citizens of the world.” Teaching, advising, and guiding students in a single-gender environment offers unique benefits that are not available in a coed environment.

As a science teacher, one aspect of my job is to help prepare young women for the historically male-dominated STEM fields. Having worked in education for the last 10 years, I know that every student has opinions, thoughts, and ideas. In school, students are taught how to form those ideas, prove them with evidence, and understand how they connect to the physical world. This happens in almost all educational environments. 

What sets Dana Hall apart is that we prepare students to be leaders who thrive, not just citizens who survive. To do so, students must find their voice while simultaneously building the confidence to express it. Dana Hall provides them with the skills to be a leader in any room, not just in their academic career, but also beyond that. The all-girls setting of Dana Hall plays an important role in making that true for every student who goes here. 

Last year, a visiting teacher from a local co-ed school observed one of my Physics and Engineering classes. During the class, he noted how noticeable it was that the female students in class asked questions, voiced their opinions, and shared their ideas. He shared that in his coed engineering classes, the female students rarely spoke up. To which one of my students joked, “I mean, if we didn’t speak, the class would be silent.” (Audaciously herself!) While a funny anecdote, I think it speaks volumes to what Dana Hall’s environment does for our students.

In a single-gender environment, we can often forget the power and impact that it has on students until someone from outside our world points it out. Each year, I teach roughly 50% of the 9th-grade Physics students, and three years later, I see a subset of that same group of students in my 11th- and 12th-grade Physics and Engineering elective. The growth I see in those students is immense. This is not just a reflection of the outstanding education they receive at Dana Hall, but the environment they have been in throughout their four years here. Our students have the confidence to both succeed and fail in front of their peers. They learn that ideas are just that — ideas. They can be wrong, but we have given them the skills and confidence to express them without fear of being wrong. This is an incredibly powerful skill, and I feel honored to be able to witness that growth daily.

These are the students in college who ask questions on the first day. These are the people in their jobs who wow their bosses in their first year. Dana Hall doesn’t just prepare young women to succeed in the world; we prepare young women to be the voices of the next generation. We prepare them to be audaciously themselves throughout their entire lives, no matter what field they pursue.