Thank you for your thoughtful response and kind words about my piece, Steven Cohn. I am more than happy to debate with you about this issue.

First, I don’t assign as much importance to biological differences than you do. Boy Scout troops have physically different kids playing together all the time. 8-year-olds play with 10-year-olds, tall kids play with short kids, kids with allergies and disabilities play with kids who have no health problems, athletic kids play with un-athletic kids. At the age of 10 (and later), all of those differences are much bigger than the difference between boys and girls.

Second, as I said in my article, I am deeply suspicious of what it is that boys allegedly need to learn away from girls. These are not teenagers who need to learn about sex in separate groups to avoid embarrassment, and I don’t think that’s what you are talking about anyway. There is no reason boys can’t build campfires with girls. Kids are not born with inherent views about which activities are for boys and which are for girls, and when to be uncomfortable with the opposite sex. They learn those things from adults, and this — separating kids by gender for certain activities — is how we teach them that discomfort.

Third, I like your analogy to single-sex adult friendships. But I actually like it because I think it supports rather than refutes the need for integrated scouting. Kids, unlike adults, don’t seek out same-sex friendships for the same reasons adults do, because they are not engaged in romantic or sexual relationships. Adults may (and I emphasize may because it’s not true for everyone) need same-sex friends, but kids don’t have the same needs. But more importantly, when you seek out the company of other men, you do so in your free time — it’s not like you work at an all-male company. The majority of your life is lived in a coed world. For kids, school and extra-curricular activities are the equivalent of work — it’s where they see other kids as colleagues, and learn how to work together toward shared goals. This is especially important in scouting. We should not be modeling a world for kids where they expect to do their work without the presence of the opposite sex. If a 10-year-old boy wants to hang out with other boys, let him make a play date for after school and scouting are over.

Fourth, you are right that I take issue with what the Girl Scouts are learning, namely, that they are being taught watered-down versions of what the boys learn, alongside traditional feminine skills. But I also have problems with what the Boy Scouts are learning. If the girls are being taught to be traditional women, with all the problems that entails, the boys are being taught to be traditional men. The girls are missing out on physical activity and self-reliance, but the boys are being deprived of collaborative community engagement and the arts. My point is that neither group is being taught the full range of skills because both are being limited by the single-sex structure of the program. I think it will be impossible to create single-sex groups of kids, led by adult men and women, that do not teach the kids the unequal gendered values they are currently receiving. The act of separating the kids by gender is inextricable from the value statement that boys and girls should learn different things. Otherwise why separate them? And it will be impossible for the men leading the boys and the women leading the girls to overcome their own gender bias in order to teach their groups in perfect parallel.

Which is why I used the phrase “separate but equal.” Putting people into groups based on physical characteristics and then expecting they will not be treated differently is unrealistic. It has never worked, and the result is always to highlight existing inequality.

Finally, I think it is wrong to assume that things should stay as they are unless there is a compelling reason to change them. Given what is at stake — which is whether we pass gender inequality on to the next generation — we should argue from the other direction. Let’s assume that we shouldn’t separate children by gender unless there is a terribly compelling reason we should. Just because this is the way things have been done in the past doesn’t mean there is a good reason for them to stay that way.