University of Cincinnati tries to help females in physics, gets sued by feminist

LINK

A pre-med student is suing the University of Cincinnati over a practice of prohibiting male and female students from working in the same group in a physics lab.

Casey Helmicki, a rising junior, says a teaching assistant instructed her to work in groups with solely female students on the first day of a physics lab. The teaching assistant told her, “Women shouldn’t be working with men in science,” according to the lawsuit.

The university maintains that the policy was intended to help female students and was never mandatory, and that Helmicki misunderstood what she was told.

“Physicists are predominantly male,” Bortner wrote in a Sept. 9 email to Jyl Shaffer, the university's Title IX coordinator at the time. “To change this, we try to make the educational environment open to females. Studies have shown that females do better in small lab groups (three or four) that contain more females than males than more males than females. I train instructors who teach the labs and have told them to rearrange groups if there is one female with three males; if at all possible have all-female groups.”