Awards in which gender identity is a requirement A friend of mine is considered a minority in her research field, for being female.  Recently, her advisor wanted to nominate her paper for an award sponsored by a kind of Women's Engineering Society.  (Not actually the WES; I don't want to give away field-specific information for her sake.)  To qualify for the award, the student must identify as female.  She therefore asked her advisor not to nominate her, saying that she does not want to compete for an award where identifying as female is a prerequisite.

Her rationale is essentially that while she does identify as (mostly) female, she does not think it's fair to restrict award eligibility based on attributes outside of someone's control, such as gender.  (There are also subissues, with the award eligibity requirements treating gender in a binary fashion, and my friend viewing gender as a spectrum.)  She said she would be happy to participate in an award program sponsored by a women's society if the gender prerequisite weren't there.

After much debate, we further boiled down the issue to the following question:

Do awards with gender identity requirements help or hurt the minorities they intend to support?

We are looking for studies and statistics to answer this question; not just anecdotes.

(A side question is whether her individual refusal to participate could hurt the community she is a part of.  For example, a snowball effect: if a large number of people refuse to participate in the very programs designed for them, perhaps the programs lose funding and then cease to exist for other members of the minority group who do wish to participate. Or perhaps the reputation of the award just goes down.  I would be curious to know if there are documented cases of this happening.)

Note: my friend gave permission to post and update this question.
I applaud your friend for refusal to participate on ethical grounds. I think your second question can be answered in the negative. But not making a public statement leaves the (unfortunate) status quo intact. 

The first question however is, at this time, pretty opinion based and some research might actually help settle the question. It isn't my field, so it is possible that something has been researched and reported. 

But we are in a time of change. The past was bad. We hope the future will be better. But there is still observable discrimination against women and many others, especially gender fluid individuals. Hopefully this will sort itself out if enough people get enlightened. But there are observable disparities in treatment even when it is (largely) unintended. And those things won't just dissipate without pushback. Individuals of "good will" need to be part of the pushback even (especially) when they aren't part of people and groups who are discriminated against. 

But (opinion), if such awards tend to highlight the underlying problems, then they might be useful. And I hope that such things can go away in the future. A future in which individuals are judged only for their own accomplishments and not, at least in part, for things over which no one has any control. 

I believe that more than one Nobel Prize has been given to a male whose female student actually did the work and had the breakthrough. 

Fifty years ago, in the US, we thought, through the civil rights movement, that we were approaching a better future. Sadly progress has been slow, at best. Maybe stalled. 

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. (Attributed to several people, including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)