"Sexism" is a fuzzy concept. I came from a department with rampant problems with sexism (by personal observation as well as legal decisions), and I never heard

"Sexism" is a fuzzy concept. I came from a department with rampant problems with sexism (by personal observation as well as legal decisions), and I never heard anyone express anything about women being inferior. The way the sexism was manifested was far more indirect and subtle. One way this occurred was in discussions about sex-differentiated choices. So, for example, a big problem the department had (has?) was (is?) groups of male faculty deciding that the choice to have children is a choice against a career. The implied assumption was that women stay home, and men have no reason for family leave or any impact on their working. This eventually led to sex discrimination lawsuits by men as well as women surrounding family leave and promotion policies surrounding tenure, but the problems didn't entirely go away. The far biggest problem that I saw though was what I'd call indirect sex biases, where the biases were against sex-differentiated interpersonal styles. So the bias wasn't against gender per se, but against traits that females differed from males in on average. This struck me the most clearly when we were hiring faculty one year; the female faculty candidates tended to be more polite, calm, and deferential in research talks, but no less competent; the male candidates tended to be more aggressive and dominant. The hiring faculty in the audience, though, would see the female interpersonal style as a sign of weakness, and become more aggressive in their questioning, later concluding that the female candidates were less competent, when they were subject to much more stringent questioning the male candidates were never subject to, solely because the male candidates were more aggressive in their responses. This came up in other ways as well, such as in promotions; the department lost a sex discrimination lawsuit after women who were objectively more accomplished were less successful in tenure promotions primarily because they were seen as not socially dominant or attention-seeking enough. I could go on and on. We are seeing a lot of evidence that academics is increasingly a narcissistic pissing contest. I suspect a lot of women just get out while they can because they see it for what it is, and are on the losing end of a game whose rules they disagree with to begin with. Some of it is outright sexism, but some of it is bias that affects women differentially because of average group differences.