Reddit reviews Failing At Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls

You might as well ask 'Which religion is the one true religion'.

Some people strongly believe that the only way to end sexism is to stop treating people differently based on their sex, to the degree that is permitted by our physical/biological differences. That means you'd just have opportunities and people would apply. Male, female, trans, other, etc....would be irrelevant. You should treat everyone equally and choose candidates based on their merits.

Other people strongly believe that the only way to end sexism is to ensure 'equality'. That usually means something like, 'If a less dominate group is under-represented in a beneficial field, it's sexist for us to not work at achieving equal representation'.

I think there are strong arguments to be made on both sides. When I was in college, I was firmly in the first camp. "Just treat everyone the same" but there is a reasonable amount of evidence that suggests everyone isn't the same (for a lot of different reasons that people will largely debate).

Without getting into it too deeply, it seems that most people (even those who say they'd treat everyone equally) don't. It's not an intentional thing, but it seems to be a real thing.

In one example, they gave scientists a bunch of job applications to review, containing equally qualified male and female students. The female students were evaluated less favorably than the male students. But these were fictional students with identical qualifications.

>...which Yale researchers found to be prevalent when scientists were asked to review job applications for identically qualified male and female students

There are also students that seem to show that, despite people generally being polite and friendly, we still treat women worse than we do men.

> Indeed, several studies have shown that when women do speak, they’re more likely to be interrupted, they’re likely to speak for shorter periods of time than their male classmates, and it’s less likely that instructors will listen to what they have to say

Now you might say, 'Hey - it's not my fault women speak for shorter periods of time than men!' but if I were interrupted often and felt like the Prof wasn't really listening, I'd be a lot less verbose too.

I actually tried to get one of my past employers to anonymous resumes before sending them to the devs to evaluate. It was a small company and we didn't have like a dedicated HR team. So, HR did a very initial, just friendly level phone chat, and if they seemed alright, our dev team would look at the resume.

I wanted to remove the name and anything that would state or imply gender. Again, I had good intentions, but if we know that people evaluate men and women differently, let's just remove that from the equation. The problem was that too many other people objected on the grounds that, basically, we wanted to promote diversity and that if we didn't know a candidate was a woman, we'd pass on them....but if we knew it was.....we might bring them in for an interview.

So yeah, I got nothing. Except, no matter what you do, someone will think you are sexist.

There have been a lot of studies that find that school teachers give more attention to boys: they call on boys more frequently, they wait longer for boys to articulate their thoughts, they use more eye contact with boys, they reward boys more often for speaking out while punishing girls for the same behavior. Here's a book about it. The authors, Sadker and Sadker, wrote another article in 2004 about the same stuff, but I can't find a copy of it online.

There was a study that came out of Israel a couple of years ago where they found that teachers gave girls lower grades on a math test when they knew the kids were girls.

MtF trans people benefit from these sorts of teachers' biases as long as MtF trans people are in the closet. What I mean is: until a trans person comes out as trans--at 15, at 26, at 50--everyone around them will treat them as their birth sex, and so even if a MtF trans person doesn't feel like a boy inside while they're in school, the teachers around them will still treat them like boys, not like girls.