Single-sex education resurfaced in the news in March 2021 when the student union Unef admitted to organizing anti-racism meetings reserved for those directly concerned.

In other words, meetings where whites were not particularly invited. The subject is recurrent. We can remember the criticisms made of the feminist commission of Nuit Debout, in 2016, where workshops were exclusively female ; the same year, those against a " decolonial " summer camp in Reims  or the organization of Nyansapo, in 2017 in Paris,  an Afrofeminist festival in which several spaces were forbidden to whites.

Largely inspired by the practices developed in American universities, the proponents of non-mixing are the subject of strong criticism in France, (but sometimes also in the United States) because the concept opposes two visions of the fight against discrimination and clashes with the principle of equality between individuals, the basis of republican universalism. Whether you are for or against, the subject is tense. Without prejudice, let's take a look at the question...

" Reserved for women " or " forbidden to men " ?

" Non-mixity is the fact that activist groups restrict some of their meetings or certain moments of meetings to people who share the same problem, the same discrimination ," explains Julien Talpin, a political science researcher who has studied the emergence of the American Black Lives Matter movement.

In concrete terms, single-sex events are most of the time similar to " discussion groups where participants exchange ideas about their experience and why they are there."  Less " forbidden to " than " reserved for "...

It is a chosen non-mixity, and not a one-off, that can be found in feminist, anti-racist, LGBT or other movements.  But also in the field of care, for group therapies for example, where patients sharing the same syndrome or addiction can exchange and find help from their peers. This is called " peer-emulation ", a term created in 1994. The concept also applies to social issues. Since 2009, the ATD Fourth World association has been organising workshops that bring together people in situations of poverty so that they can discuss freely and " produce knowledge " in order to fight against inequalities.   This is the method of " cross-referencing knowledge ".

The company is no exception to the movement. Many women's networks have emerged in recent years, contributing in particular to the emergence of " female leadership", in the wake of the various laws and initiatives for greater parity in the world of work.

Danone's Eve program is an interesting example. To address a number of issues such as career management, leadership, the glass ceiling, etc., the programme was initially aimed at women, while integrating a few men at the start so that they could better understand the feelings of a minority group. Given the success of the program, more and more men wanted to be part of it. The (almost) non-mixing of the start in the service of a better diversity at the finish...

A movement  that dates back to... eighteenth century!

The French Revolution inscribed the concept of liberty, equality and fraternity in history, but the revolutionaries did not push idealism so far as to include women. At the time, it was understood that they had no role to play in politics and that their place was at home. The many women who nevertheless attended the stormy debates of the political assemblies were pejoratively nicknamed " the knitters ".  

Since they were excluded from revolutionary organizations, they decided to create women-only clubs, not to knit, but to comment on politics, if not to do so. And it worked, since from 1791, women began to take an active part in political life alongside the Jacobins. The euphoria did not last long. In 1793, women's clubs were banned.

But major advances for equality between the two sexes (marriage, divorce, parental authority, etc.) were ratified by the men of the Revolution, who were nevertheless careful not to attribute the credit to their fellow citizens...

Knitters at the MLF

A good century later, on the other side of the Atlantic, American women workers revived the principle with all-female unions, in the face of exclusively male bosses. In the mid-1960s, the African-American civil rights movement also adopted non-mixity.

In the land of "human " rights, it was during another revolution, that of the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970s, that women again demanded dedicated spaces. Still inspired by what is happening in the United States, non-mixing of racial issues is also making its appearance in France.

Reverse racism ?

 " Forbidden to blacks ", " forbidden to women ", " forbidden to Jews "... there is hardly a lack of examples of discrimination in history and opponents of single-sex education rely on these sinister prohibitions to reject a concept that they rightly consider discriminatory. 

 Licra and SOS-Racisme denounced an " identity drift" and a " return of social classes" in relation to the Nyansapo festival, the Afro-feminist festival that had excluded whites from certain workshops. The Minister of National Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, spoke of " practices contrary to the Constitution that undermine national cohesion" and filed a complaint in 2017 against a union, Sud Éducation 93, which had planned to organize training workshops for teachers, including two " single-sex workshops ".

In short, for some, non-mixity would be a factor of inequality and encouragement of communitarianism, in total contradiction with the republican principles of equality and inclusion. In the United States, Protestant culture on the one hand and the specific history of racial discrimination on the other, have paradoxically entrenched the legitimacy of non-mixity, which is hardly the subject of controversy as such.

Like positive discrimination, which has been widely adopted across the Atlantic. But in France, the proponents of a certain republican orthodoxy are not budging: non-mixity is not a tool for emancipation but quite the opposite. Excluding those who are not directly discriminated against would be tantamount to weakening a protest movement when it should be everyone's business. A form of racism or sexism in reverse, incompatible with the values of the Republic or a certain idea of equality.

Against the " boy clubs "

It is a completely different story that we hear from the activists of the chosen non-mixity.  According to them, the problem comes from the fact that the non-mixity suffered is found everywhere in society. They point to the countless " boy clubs ", these groups of generally white and heterosexual men who maintain a domineering self-interest to the detriment, as they choose, of women, non-whites, non-rich, non-heterosexuals or even the disabled (the disabled).

This discrimination is intended to be " natural " and nevertheless implicit since it is rarely officially displayed (at least not in recent years). As a result , the " dominated " must not only organize themselves but also find spaces where they can express themselves without fear, surrounded by people who truly understand them.

Non-mixity, when it is chosen, is experienced a contrario as resolutely emancipatory. Feminist activist Caroline De Haas recounted in 2016, on her blog hosted by Mediapart, that it was during a meeting on sexual violence of the association Osez le féminisme where, that day, only women were present, that she first publicly mentioned the fact that a man had raped her. Gwen Fauchois, former president of Act-up-Paris, also reminds us that: "We must not lose sight of the fact that non-mixing is also a source of pleasure. It is a way of building moments of encounter that escape the need for pedagogy or justification. And which allows people to find themselves in implicit complicity. There is a very joyful dimension."

A tool for affirmation and autonomy

Non-mixity is also a political tool: " Social advances have been built by non-mixed groups that have formulated both the deconstruction of the dominant discourse, its criticism and have put forward solutions to get out of it. They made society evolve in the direction of equality," says Mathilde Larrère, a historian specializing in revolutionary movements.  "Non-mixity is an extremely useful tool for building political and social autonomy. It is a tool for affirmation, for building diagnoses and strategy ," adds Gwen Fauchois. 

An analysis relayed by sociologist  Alban Jacquemart: "Those who oppose non-mixity are generally not used to being limited in their access to public space or speech. We confuse a tool of struggle with a political project: behind this, there is the fear of a world without men, (or a world without whites, Editor's note). But there is no contradiction between non-mixity and the rallying of men to the feminist movement. Because, in general, mixed and non-mixed spaces coexist. The sociologist notes that this choice is not the prerogative of social movements: "In companies, we see the creation of women's networks. They don't shock, because they have a smoother character."

And for women entrepreneurs, is gender diversity a solution to inequality ?

The answer is yes, according to the report published in October 2020 by the Economic, Social and Environmental Council (Cese), which makes a series of recommendations to address gender inequalities in the field of entrepreneurship.

Among them: the strengthening of women's networks and single-sex meetings. " There is a real need for mutual aid and specific support for women and therefore a need for single-sex spaces," explains Eva Escandon, rapporteur for the EESC study and a business manager herself, "it's a way to meet up with peers and exchange more freely."  Women's networks are also, according to her, real springboards to integrate as well as possible into predominantly male environments.

While these solutions are not an end in themselves, they are, according to the EESC, " an essential step" in achieving gender equality.