From Failing at Fairness: How America's School Cheat Girls : Girls are most often praised in brief exchanges with their teachers, while boys are engaged in conversation. In addition, the Sadkers found that smart boys get the most attention, and the smart girls get the least. This translates into a lack of confidence that follows young women into high school and college.
These are real issues. For every girl. Especially our smart girls, who tend to be so well adjusted that they just take it.
I haven't read the book, but I was a smart girl at an all-girls school...
The trouble is, while what you say about how teachers tend to interact with girls compared with boys rings true to me, it certainly doesn't follow that the problem goes away if the school is all-girls. Quite the contrary: you can end up with teachers who simply know no other way to interact with pupils and pupils who don't know there's an alternative. My experience was that, even though I was very strong indeed academically, I got almost no extension work in anything. Instead, I was encouraged to become more and more perfectionist. (Literally, I was told to practise writing neater integral signs.)
Although I'm sure my experience isn't universal and that there are wonderful all-girls schools, I do wonder, speculating wildly, whether such an approach might be a much bigger temptation for the staff in an all-girls school where the girls will accept it, than for staff in a mixed or all-boys' school where it would probably cause mass disobedience!
Personally I found the all-girls environment fine socially (and yet had no real difficulty with a mixed university environment), and I do appreciate that I never had to contend with a "girls don't like science" tradition. I would urge looking closely at what very academic girls actually do at the school, though.
