Lawsuit alleges sex discrimination in university physics lab

Science : An undergraduate student at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio recently filed a lawsuit over alleged sex-based segregation in the school’s science courses. Casey Helmicki says that in the physics course she took in the fall of 2015, she was told that lab groups are deliberately arranged to group women students together because “women shouldn’t be working with men in science.” The professor for the course, Larry Bortner, declined to comment on the suit. But he has stated in emails that he does instruct his lab assistants to try to arrange the women students in predominantly female groups, because studies have shown that “females do better in small lab groups (three or four) that contain more females than males.” Helmicki counters, however, that such gender discrimination violates Title IX of the US Education Amendments of 1972.