The Why Behind Single-Gender Small-Groups

With YDisciple, we recommend that groups are divided by gender, with small groups of young men led by an older male mentor and small groups of young women led by an older female mentor. Why do we recommend this strategy?

Learning differences

It is no secret that boys and girls learn differently and, in some cases, learn better when separated. Leonard Sax, psychologist and author of Gender Matters, says, “Merely placing boys in separate classrooms from girls accomplishes little. But single-sex education enhances student success when teachers use techniques geared toward the gender of their students.” Single-gender groups help the group leader to tailor the lesson and conversation to his or her audience effectively.

Vulnerability

While learning Church teaching is incredibly important to a discipleship group, the goal is not dissemination of information, but applying it to one’s own life. To talk about life, struggles, and sin requires trust and vulnerability. A young man is unlikely to discuss his struggles with pornography in a mixed group. When groups grow in this sort of vulnerability, there is an excellent opportunity to build the habit of holding one another accountable.

Apprenticeship

An adult woman can certainly be effective in teaching and witnessing the faith to a young man. She may even have a profound, lifelong impact on him. This truth is not to be minimized. At the same time, she can never fully teach him how to be a man of God. This requires apprenticeship. Apprenticeship requires an adult who can show and experience the way alongside the apprentice.

Brotherhood and Sisterhood

To say that friendships in the teen years are complicated is an understatement. In the peer-dominated paradigm in which teens live, being transparent with one another is a high stakes game. When given the opportunity and the language to live and grow in authentic brotherhood and sisterhood together, they thrive and crave more.

To build this concept of real brotherhood and sisterhood among your group members, YDisciple offers side-by-side studies: True Strength and True Beauty. We recommend doing this series after the introductory Follow Me series.

Single-gender groups cultivate the prime environment for authentic relationships to grow between peers, their mentor, and Christ, but it is also important to bring everyone together occasionally. Periodic large group gatherings (every 4-8 weeks) are a great way to build community and for the young men and women to interact in a ministry setting. After the groups have been together for a while, some parishes have also invited one guys’ group to join a girls’ group for a brief period in which the two groups go through the Called series on vocation together.