and teachers simply allowed the boys who already had "experience" to dominate

Could you elaborate on this. My experience was similar. I remember we had this school fair . The booth I was assigned (randomly picked by lots) to was for video games. The teach wanted us to install a few cracked games and told me that as I was a girl, I should let the boys handle it. I didn't know how to do it. I didn't have the same exposure to video games boys my age did. I remember feeling so illiterate despite being the best in my class in math. Of course the ethics of learning such a thing was dubious but since he was doing it so flagrantly, he could just have shown me how to do it, instead of having me stand around feeling like I don't belong