The University of Cincinnati’s idea of helping its female students in the physics department didn’t do much good, as it led to a lawsuit for violating Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause by engaging in gender-based discrimination, Inside Higher Ed reported.
Rising junior Casey Helmicki says she was told by a teaching assistant that she could only work in groups with other women for her physics lab.
“Women shouldn’t be working with men in science,” Teaching Assistant Mustafa El-Demery told her, according to the lawsuit. The university says that the policy was not mandatory and Helmicki misunderstood what she was told, but university emails defended the policy.
A lawsuit wasn’t Helmicki’s first resort. She spoke to several employees at the university who failed to take action, as her lawyer, Chris Finney, emphasized. Professor Larry Bortner allegedly defended El-Demery and said it was department policy to separate the sexes.
“Physicists are predominantly male,” Bortner wrote in a September email to Jyl Shaffer, then the university’s Title IX coordinator. “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.”
Shaffer’s follow-up emails encouraged Bortner and said “there is nothing inherently inequitable about the method you’re using to improve learning experiences.”
While Helmicki was told by Associate Professor Kathleen Koenig that the policy was not supported by the university, Koenig did not take any action. Helmicki says that Shaffer did not address her complaint either. Instead, Shaffer filed an official Title IX report in her name without her knowledge or consent, which she worried could affect her chances of getting into medical school.
The lawsuit names the university, Bortner, Shaffer, El-Demery, and Koenig as defendants.
Finney said Shaffer and Bortner believed the policy was legal because Shaffer suggested giving students the option of opting out. “Title IX prohibits any sex-based discrimination,” he said. “There are exceptions at the elementary and secondary level, but none of those exceptions apply at the university level. There’s not a shred of an exception that you could hang your hat on to defend this.”
The school may have had the intention of “mak[ing] the educational environment open to females,” but it backfired.
Helmicki “seeks to ensure that she and all students at UC have the equal opportunity to participate in the school’s academic offerings without regard to their sex, and to receive instruction based on their individual strengths and needs,” as well as legal fees, according to the lawsuit.
