In the United States, gender segregation in schools was initially a product of an era when traditional gender roles categorically determined scholastic, professional, and social opportunities based on sex. For instance, leading experts supported gender segregation in higher education because they considered it "to be dangerous and inappropriate for women. Experts claimed that scientific evidence established that women were physically and temperamentally not suited to the rigors of the academy . ... Separate education for men and women paralleled the separate spheres that each was expected to occupy." Furthermore, colleges and universities did not consider female applicants until the second half of the nineteenth century when the women's rights movement began advocating for gender equality. In response to social progression "at the turn of the twentieth century, educators, particularly those in the South, fiercely resisted coeducation in elite all-male colleges, and most of the Ivy League institutions would drag their feet well into the twentieth century before becoming coeducational."