Discriminating or Distinguishing?

This morning was my school's entrance ceremony, marking the beginning of the school year. As I stood on the cold gym floor, body warmth slowly escaping through my socks-only feet (as even indoor slippers are prohibited in the gymnasium), only half-listening to lectures about being enthusiastic and setting a good example for the new 1st year students who will have their ceremony later this afternoon, I tried to recall my first impression of Japanese school assemblies. I remember thinking that, overall, they were overly long, formal, and had sexist elements. I remember showering my favorite co-worker with all sorts of questions afterwards: Why must the boys and girls sit separately? Why do the boys get to sit with their legs crossed while the girls are supposed to sit in the more uncomfortable seiza position? Why are the boys seated in front and the girls in back? Why do they reprimand female students for hitching up their skirts much more than they do the male students for having baggy pants that begin below their waists (referring to the routine uniform checks performed just before the official ceremony begins)? She had a lot of difficulty answering these questions, and finally resorted to borrowing my electronic dictionary and showing me a word translated as "discrimination". In retrospect, I believe she was referring to 'discrimination' in the sense of simply distinguishing between males and females. But at the time I assumed she was referring to unfairness between sexes. I was silently outraged.

Nowadays, I'm not quite as outraged about such things. I'm not sure if this is because I don't notice them as much, I believe I interpreted things too harshly in the beginning, or I simply feel there's not much I, a foreigner, can do to change things. I have a feeling it's a mixture of all three. Even so, I still wish I was able to do more for the girls here.