For years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has been sending grant proposals out for peer review. In addition to writing an evaluation, reviewers rate the proposals “Excellent”, “Very Good”, “Good”, “Fair”, or “Poor”. Proposals need very high ratings to get funded.
X was usually a great guy, and I had a high opinion of him. So I was surprised when he told me that when he reviews proposals written by women, he gives them lower ratings than if the same proposals had been written by men. He told me that he assumed that NSF gave preference to proposals from women. By downgrading them, he believed he was leveling the playing field.
I don't know whether NSF was really giving preference to women in the 1980s or 1990s when we had that conversation, or whether it does now. But no one ever told me that they downgraded proposals by men to level the playing field in the 1960s or 1970s or earlier, when discrimination against women in reviews and elsewhere was blatant.