It's the price of a couple of decades in which no-one in the public sector was allowed to make any adverse comments regarding certain groups, it was deemed racist and so continued. It was their 'culture' to have certain attitudes to females and we should not intervene in their 'culture'.
I once had a parent, male of course, who objected to his son being in a woman's class, he couldn't be expected to endure a woman in authority over him. The management went out of their way to accommodate his opinions, I was told off for calling them his prejudice.