In education, business, law, and other fields, gender blindness or sex blindness is the practice of disregarding

gender Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to femininity and masculinity and differentiating between them. Depending on the context, this may include sex-based social structures (i.e. gender roles) and gender identity. Most cultures u ...

as a significant factor in interactions between people.

In education

Krista Ratcliffe writes that gender blindness functions in the classroom to downplay the existence of gender differences, which tends to reinforce existing gender inequality. The National Student Genderblind Campaign, founded in the United States in 2006, has argued in favor of

gender-neutral Gender neutrality (adjective form: gender-neutral), also known as gender-neutralism or the gender neutrality movement, is the idea that policies, language, and other social institutions (social structures or gender roles) should avoid distinguish ...

campus housing at colleges and universities to better serve gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and intersex students.

In health care

The use of mixed-gender hospital rooms has proved controversial in both the United Kingdom and Canada. Manitoba's Health Minister,

Theresa Oswald Theresa Oswald is a politician in Manitoba, Canada. She was a New Democratic Party member of the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba from 2003 to 2016 and a cabinet minister from 2004 until she stepped down in 2014 to unsuccessfully challenge P ...

, has campaigned actively against such rooms, saying that if humanity can "put somebody on the moon", it can find a way to honor gender requests without leading to delays for patients.Bruce Owen, Oswald vows action to stop coed rooms in hospitals, Winnipeg Free Press, 14 May 2010 Great Britain has agreed to phase out such rooms by 2010. Some medical ethicists have been critical of efforts to return to single-sex rooms. Jacob M. Appel, an advocate for mixed rooms in the United States, has written that opposition to gender-mixed rooms stems from "old-fashioned prejudice", arguing: "Because some people have been brought up to fear or dislike sharing a room with a person of the opposite sex, or blush at the prospect of catching a glimpse of an unwelcome body part when a robe slips open, we enshrine and perpetuate this prejudice in social policy."

In law

The legal test of the "reasonable person" has been criticised for being genderblind to be applied in some areas of the law, particularly sexual harassment. Women are subjected to more normalised and endemic sexual harassment than men. On the grounds of this, the American case of ''Ellison v. Brady'' 924 F.2d 872 (1991), the court held that "a sex-blind reasonable person standard tends to be male-based and tends to systematically ignore the experiences of women".

Research

Gendered treatment prevails all over the world. Of a study of organisations which offered women-only services, 23% said that their reason was based on women's inequality and the desire to address that imbalance; 20% that women-only spaces promote female development and empowerment; 18% that they were providing a service not being met by unisex services and which focused on the specific needs of women. Studies indicate a broad support for single-sex service options to remain available. Of 1000 women polled by the Women's Resource Centre, 97% stated that women should have the option of accessing female-only services if they were victims of sexual assault. 57% indicated that they would choose a women-only gym over a mixed gym. Single-sex services can provide greater comfort and engagement for participants who would otherwise not get involved.

References

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