Thank you for bringing this up and sharing your thoughts.
This is an issue I was also trying to raise a few days ago here: An old story
I’m interested to hear what @sujato and @Brahmali have to say about this too.
Personally I have always had good friendships with men, without any problems. I feel that it would be better for spiritual development to be able to live together (at least for myself). In the Mahayana traditions, monasteries with both monks and nuns seem to be far more common. In Theravada I don’t actually know if there are monasteries like that. I know that monks and nuns used to live in Santi Forest Monastery in Australia, but now it is just for nuns. Monks and nuns live together in Amaravati, but this is far from an equal relationship.
But I can also see the disadvantage and I think it needs a certain amount of wisdom and spiritual growth from both sides to be able to do this. Feelings might always come up and we need to have the wisdom to deal with these in a constructive way and to learn from them, using the Buddha’s teachings.
The Garudhammas is a whole big topic on it’s own. Bhante Analayo wrote a book about it recently: The Foundation History of the Nuns’ Order. But maybe @sujato can say a bit more about this too.