In the hallways of Coronado High School, a place where so many students spend hours of their days, are we all equal? Do girls get the same treatment as boys in every situation? Are we all living in an ignorant bliss where we believe that we all as students are seen as equals, and the scenarios that make us unequal are normal?

Even though many people will disagree with the statements made above, an obvious area where sexism thrives would be sports. In track, a certain tall athlete yelled at a girl because she was running with a sports bra on. Meanwhile, the boys run with their shirts tied up or off completely.

Another female student at Coronado shared her experience with sexism and sexual harassment. She described feeling harassed constantly for three days until she talked to her counselor. The harasser was only suspended for one day, but the typical amount of suspension time for sexual harassment is five days. When a male student came to the counselor with the exact same claim for sexual harassment, their harasser was suspended for five days.

The inequality does not stop there. At Coronado High School, many girls seem stuck in the mold of toxic femininity where the only way to be liked is if you play sports that aren’t physically demanding, such as golf, or go into the arts. Even though there is nothing wrong with the arts, girls should not feel like they have to go in the arts because it is the only extracurricular available to them.

A few weeks ago in physical education, I found myself playing basketball with everyone in my class. The teacher said that any girl who made a basket doubled the team’s points, but there were only four times the girls were given the opportunity to make a basket. Most of the boys only passed to the boys.

In almost all classes, the sexes keep to themselves, each on a different side of the room for the most part unless there is assigned seating. In Digital Photography, the class is almost divided right in the middle with girls to the left and boys to the right. No one tried to solve that.

The same thing happened with the gym, where the individual groups were almost always made up of the same sexes. Another eye opener is that the vast majority of students who sit out in gym class are girls.

There is a divide in Coronado High School’s gym classes. Coach Lizarraga even attested to this, explaining that his classes “definitely had more guys,” and with options that were not as physically demanding such as yoga, “[there are] more girls.”

So even though we pride ourselves on being more open to others, have we really earned that right? How do we as a school solve this problem? The best way would be to just be open to each other and not to dismiss suspicious activity. With these steps, we’re working to achieve the future we want for our society.