I've been to two mid-tier universities within the last decade, and each one had a professor who would straight up say on the first day of class that they would fail any women, because women shouldn't be in science. One was a Biology professor (they were a young earth creationist to boot), the other was a computer science prof.

I'm sure the laser focused fury of social media makes universities more wary of having people like this on staff, but still most people don't want to get caught up in that sort of fight. They were quite old though, so there's hope for the future.

That's so blatant that I have a hard time believing it.

If that's really true, it's a jackpot discrimination lawsuit waiting to happen, and I hope it happens sooner rather than later. Completely unacceptable.

> That's so blatant that I have a hard time believing it.

That's what I thought about those videos of guys following a woman around as she walked down the streets of New York City minding her own business.[0] I had never witnessed that sort of thing and thought, "There's no way this goes on that often or I'd see it." And yet, dozens of female friends confirmed that it happens all the time. I was like, "Why have you never mentioned this?" They just said it happens too often and there's not a lot you can do about it, plus half the time other people don't believe you.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1XGPvbWn0A

Tenure is a powerful force. It makes professors band together, because they know if the concept is weakened for political reasons, any one of them could be next, especially in this era of universities looking to replace tenured faculty with non-tenured grad students.

Within the last decade, in the United States? And they straight up said they'd fail any woman in the class? That's awful. That's so much worse than I thought things were these days.

I'm the first person in my family to even graduate high school, so I don't have any family stories. But I had a female professor that announced to the whole class that she strives to make sure no men get above a C in her classroom. And that was around 2004. It makes me wonder what kind of articles will be written 30 years from now, based on what I read is happening on campuses.

I feel like the bad experiences probably stand out more than the average. My wife got her masters around 2012, and one of her teachers would discuss political topics then participate in heckling anyone with stances that weren't completely left leaning. Even defending people with these views made you a target.

But all of the other teachers were pretty standard.

This is a point I think needs to made more often. Bad things get way more attention and I think people on both the left and the right, both social justice people and free speech people, have a bias to exaggerate the extent that these things are happening. Sometimes people just need to take a breath and relax.

My mother had almost the same experience getting a math degree in the 50s. "Women don't belong in math" or some such garbage from a professor.

I wonder how your mother's professor reconciled his personal misogyny with the fact that by 1960 Gerti Cory, Marie Curie, and Marie's daughter Irene had all won Nobel Prizes (and Rosalind Franklin would have won one in 1962 had she not died four years earlier).

As an opposite interesting story from another part of the world around same time. When I was just a few years old my father (a highschool chemistry teacher with a research background) was telling me stories about how how himself and his colleague which was a female had the best results preparing students for chemistry olympiads although their highschool, an "industrial" was one of the last choices for students, so it was usually the last in everything. Yet they managed to prepare some of the top students. This was during late communist era and just after it. I grew up with nothing close to racism, sexism or anything close.