@WarriorN
It is sexist as women have a different body shape due to their sex and need the uniform to keep safe. Not fitting it properly is not taking that into account.
It's not deliberately done, but ignorance can be as harmful.
I suppose another word is exclusionary, based on sex.
Can be scaled to medicine and car design, where they just haven't bothered and it endangers lives.
Compare with access for wheel chair users - just not thought about and it excludes them. It's ableist as the default is able bodied.
Women make more than half the population so it's not like excluding a minority group. Yes they're right that not many women are fire fighters and so in that context women are the minority. But it's shoddy and potentially actively endangering them.
What's key about the book is that it's bliddy everywhere, for everything and added up together, as a whole, it's sexism. Especially given women are the slight majority.
I think what they are getting at though is that disparities, or in some cases even exclusion, does not necessarily come out of sexism per se. It can represent something quite different, it can be a correlation where there is some other element that's the real issue, etc.
JB seemd to be suggesting at one point that the lack of female firefighters was down to sexism, for example, but that's only partly true - it also relates to the fact that it requires a lot of upper body strength and that women are less likely to have that, even just fact that they are on average smaller is a factor. So looking at that, it's a disparity, many people would not call it sexism.
In terms of the wider way of talking about disparities, you do get people like Kendi who when discussing race issues maintains pretty absolutely that any disparity is in fact racism. Which is opposed by others.
So it seemed to me that what they were asking JB was to say something about that - whether all disparities are sexism.
It was a good interview though. I enjoy listening to her in person more than reading her.