AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE SHOULD SINGLE-SEX SCHOOLING BE ELIMINATED? MODERATOR: S. E. CUPP, CNN'S “CROSSFIRE” DEBATERS: LISE ELIOT, CHICAGO MEDICAL SCHOOL OF ROSALIND FRANKLIN UNIVERSITY OF MEDICINE AND SCIENCE CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS, AEI 5:30 PM – 7:00 PM WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, 2013 EVENT PAGE: http://live.aei.org/Event/Should_single- sex_schooling_be_eliminated TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY: DC Transcription – www.dctmr.com KARLYN BOWMAN: Good afternoon. My name is Karlyn Bowman and I’m a senior fellow here at AEI. And I’d like to welcome all of you and our online audience to this debate. We’re very pleased to be co-sponsoring the debate with the Independent Women’s Forum, an organization that I believe is influencing and infusing competition into the Washington ideas factory on many topics, including the topic of today’s debate. AEI is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year and we’ve been in the debate business for a very long time. I look back to our first debates, more than 40 years ago, in 1967, and the first debate series we had, the very first debate – the very first three debates included Milton Friedman, Arthur Schlesinger, and Paul Samuelson. The earlier debates were serious and they were spirited and I’m confident that today’s debaters will carry on that tradition. It’s a special pleasure to start things off by introducing Sabrina Schaeffer, who will introduce our moderator and also the debaters. Sabrina is the executive director of the Independent Women’s Forum. Before that – before coming to the IWF, she was the managing partner of Evolving Strategies. She’s been a speechwriter. She’s been director of the White House Writers Group. And I first met Sabrina many years ago, when she was a young assistant at AEI, working for Jeane Kirkpatrick, who many of you know Jeane Kirkpatrick’s work from her work on foreign policy, but she also wrote the first full-fledged study of women in politics called “Political Women” many years before. So, Sabrina, I’ll turn it over to you. SABRINA SCHAEFFER: Thank you, Karlyn, and to AEI for reaching out to IWF to help host this debate tonight. I’m sorry Dan Rothschild is not here. I think he’s enjoying Hong Kong, but we owe him a big thanks as well. And as Karlyn mentioned, I got my start here in Washington on the 11th floor. And Karlyn actually helped me – helped secure my second job. So, always good to be back here with friends. I’m Sabrina Schaeffer, the executive director of the Independent Women’s Forum. This is our 21st year in operation. We are the leading women’s group on the right that is focused on economic liberty, free markets, personal responsibility. And for two decades, we have been working to broaden women’s understanding of how policy set here in Washington affect women and their families. So forgive me if I take just a quick minute to tell you about some interesting research that I happened upon about a year ago out of the University of Manchester in the UK that found that men and women are so different that they are practically different species. Psychologist Paul Irwing and his colleagues administered a personality test to more than 10,000 people here in the United States, between the ages of 15 and 92, and measured for 15 different personality facets – warmth, emotional stability, liveliness, on and on. And the results found that about 18 percent of women share similar personalities with men and 18 percent of men share similar personalities with women, but that the majority of women have personality traits that are quite distinct from those of men and vice versa. So the bottom line is that we are finding that, yet again, from this research, the differences between the genders has a lot to do with the choices they make, the way they learn, and the professions they choose to go into. And I mention this only because IWF believes very strongly in gender equality, but we also like to talk a lot about the very real and serious differences between men and women. So I am eager to hear the debate tonight. And to help us get started, I would like to introduce our moderator, S.E. Cupp. S.E. recently became the host of CNN’s “Crossfire” – congratulations – which will begin airing in September. She is a conservative columnist, author, and commentator. She’s the author of “Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity.” And she’s the co-author of “Why You’re Wrong about the Rights.” She is a regular columnist at the “New York Daily News,” a contributing editor at “Townhall” Magazine. She’s been published in numerous outlets, from the “Washington Post” to “Human Events,” to Fox News, CNN. You have probably seen S.E. on many, many different programs, from Bill Maher to Larry King. Her face is quite familiar to all of us. And we are thrilled that she is here to help moderate this fascinating debate. (Applause.) S.E. CUPP: Thank you. Thanks to AEI and Karlyn and IWF and Sabrina. Thanks for that introduction. Welcome to the debate “Should Single-Sex Education Be Eliminated?” How’s that for provocative? Full disclosure, I am the product of an all-girls education, at least for four years of high school. That should not tell you where I come down on this issue. And in fact, I am looking forward to hearing from both of our debaters to sharpen my opinion on the issue. Let me introduce our guests here that you’re going to be hearing from. Many of you will be familiar with Christina Hoff Sommers. She is resident scholar here at AEI. Before coming here, she was a professor of philosophy at Clark University, where she specialized in moral theory. She’s the author of several books. I’m sure you’re familiar with some of these titles, including “Who Stole Feminism,” “One Nation Under Therapy,” and “Freedom Feminism.” Her most recent book is entitled “The War Against Boys.” Lise Eliot is an associate professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School of Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science. She is also the author of numerous books. One is called “What’s Going on in There: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life.” And another is called “Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps – and What We Can Do About It.” Now, let me establish some ground rules and tell you about our format. Each of the debaters will give a brief opening statement that highlights the key features of their argument. After those opening statements, both will have a chance to respond to each other. Then, there will be a short two-minute break, during which I will receive questions from the audience. If you have a question, please write it down on your card and complete that question before the opening debates are done. I will also be taking questions from Twitter and our friends online. So if you’d like to tweet in a question, please use the hashtag #AEIDebates. After that two-minute break, we will return and we will have question and answer portion, and then, the debaters will give a final five-minute conclusion and closing statement. The rules. We’d like you to limit your opening remarks to eight minutes each, and then your responses to each other to five minutes each. You’ll be able to see two-minute, one-minute, and 30-second warning cards in the front row. And at the end of your allotted time, a light bell will ring. Can we hear that? There you go. Don’t make me John King you. I will cut you off. (Laughs.) So finish your remark as quickly as possible when you hear that bell. And after the debate is over, of course, the audience is invited to a wine and cheese reception in the registration area. So with that, I’d like to invite our first debater, Lise Eliot, to the floor, and let’s begin. Should single-sex education be eliminated? Thank you. (Applause.) LISE ELIOT: I have to put that up there. And – so thank you very much. I’d like to thank the American Enterprise Institute and the Independent Women’s Forum for hosting this event. And of course, I also want to thank Christina Hoff Sommers for bringing the issue of gender and education into the public eye. I look forward to our discussion. I don’t normally read my remarks, but eight minutes is kind of a challenge, so I’m going to – I’m going to do it that way. And so why is a neuroscientist – excuse me – why is a neuroscientist here debating single-sex education? I was honestly agnostic on the topic when I started researching my book “Pink Brain, Blue Brain” about gender development. But any discussion of gender differences in children inevitably leads to this debate. So I felt compelled to dive into the copious research on single-sex schooling. I read every study I could, weighed the evidence, and ultimately concluded that single-sex education is not the answer to gender gaps and achievement or the best way forward for today’s young people. It may have been in the past, but I don’t think it’s the way forward. After my book was published, I became acquainted to several developmental and cognitive psychologists whose work was addressing gender and education from different angles, and we published a peer-reviewed education forum piece in “Science” with the provocative title “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Education.” So “Science” has very tight space constraints.