Shauna Pomerantz and Rebecca Raby, professors in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada, heard plenty of those sandwich-type anecdotes in a six-year study aimed at dissecting the media’s coverage of the so-called alpha girl. Earlier this year, the researchers published a book—Smart Girls: Success, School And The Myth of Post-Feminism—that documented their interviews with a group of 57 girls between the ages of 12 and 18 in schools all over Southern Ontario.

These narratives weren’t isolated to one school or one group of friends. A number of girls from different middle and high schools reported similar experiences. One girl, Rory, 13, told them, “I was trying out for basketball and I got up to sign the sheet and everyone was like, ‘Oh get back in the kitchen!’” Rory’s initial response was anger—but then it turned to acceptance. “Guys are like that, and you get over it. It doesn’t bother me, it’s stereotypical. We read these books all the time where women are in the kitchen,” she said. (Pomerantz and Raby used pseudonyms to protect the girls’ identities.)

Pomerantz and Raby have both written various books on girl culture and knew that girls’ lives didn’t just amount to the beautiful, perfectly crafted sound bites portrayed in the media. While the authors heard plenty of alpha-girl stories—a girl who was the only female player on a boys’ hockey team, a girl who worried about balancing her popularity and her academics, a girl who stayed up until 1 a.m. checking her schoolwork—the articles made it sound as if society had transitioned into a post-feminism climate. But while they expected to hear about uncomfortable dynamics between boys and girls, they weren’t necessarily anticipating overly sexist commands reminiscent of the 1950s. Both Pomerantz and Raby gasped when they heard the “Go make me a sandwich” comment.

A few girls surveyed pushed back against the sexist statements and were able to clearly delineate what is and isn’t a joke. But more of the girls were reluctant to call out boys for their sexist behavior. They didn’t want to appear bitchy or outspoken or unsexy. It would make them look like a feminist, and feminism was a potentially damaging label. It had too many implications: that you were a prude, that you couldn’t take a joke, that you were a “man-hater” or a “bitch.” It was much cooler to say nothing. To laugh it off.

Another twist: The girls didn’t always see it as sexism, Raby told me. “They thought it was just something they shouldn’t take too seriously.” But in middle and high school, a joke is rarely just a joke. It’s often layered with all sorts of implications about race or popularity or grades or other ways that teenagers use strategic pecking orders to keep each other in their place.

This is where the problem swells. Despite cultural messages and alpha girl reports indicating that females are advanced or the smarter gender, sexism still persists in politics, in Hollywood, and in the general workforce. It also rears its head at the most rudimentary, primal levels—in schools, among children.