I was recently writing up a paper for my psychology degree which involves a lot of statistical tests in which everything must be coded into numbers. The male and female participants must be coded into numbers. So usually 1 for male and 2 for female, or 0 and 1 etc.
Without a second thought I coded women as 1 and men as 2, just because it didn’t cross my mind. When speaking to my tutor she informed me that I would have to go back and do the entire statistical section again as in the science world it is vital that men are coded and mentioned first.
This seems astonishingly old fashioned. And it felt wrong when writing my participants section to put male first as there were far more women in my study, and I have always used a loose rule of most first.
In addition to this, there have been numerous occasions where my professors have mistakenly called influential researchers “he” when they are women.
Last year I had a developmental module where most of the content was about childcare. Not once did the lecturer say “primary caregiver” but relentlessly labelled this role as “mother” – the worst part being that I was the only one to put my hand up and mention it. He was swift to brush my comment aside and continue drumming sexist ideology into the lecture hall (which was over 90% female).