St Hilda’s to go mixed?
Can’t find it online, but the paper version of the Oxford Mail says that the JCR (= undergraduate student union) at St Hilda’s, the last all-women’s college at Oxford, have voted by 55% to go for a mixed JCR and 77% to go for a mixed fellowship. The Guardian article is here. I know all the arguments, and I know I’m one to talk, not having chosen Hilda’s myself, but I still feel a bit sad. Advocates of it staying all-women have been hanging on by a thread for years, but now the undergrads have resigned themselves to going mixed, I guess it can’t be long until the college votes to do it - as I recall last time going mixed won a simple majority of the fellowship, but not the required two-thirds.
There’s also a bigger worry: on 2003-4 figures, Oxford is currently 52.7 men to 47.4 women at undergrad level. If Hilda’s does go mixed, and we assume that within three years the college is 50-50 at undergrad level, then we’re looking at 54.4 men to 45.6 women. Of course, the experience at Oxford is that formerly-women’s colleges that go mixed tend to stabilise at a level where they take more men than women, not equal numbers, despite their history.
And of course, at the moment only 8.6% of professors and 23% of lecturers at Oxford are female. That number is artificially high because of St Hilda’s; what are the university going to do to change that?
I can see your point, and this is one of the times when I wish I was a woman, simply because it’s ‘easy’ of me to say this, but in order to have gender equality risks do need to be made, otherwise the feminist movement will be accused (not for the first time) of wanting ‘equality’ but with added benefits denied to men.
Put basically, whilst I see your point, arguing for St Hilda’s to remain all women is giving ammo for those will will then argue ‘Okay, how about an all-male college!’
Having an all-woman college is vastly different from having an all-male college: it’s not as if men have traditionally been denied access to higher education, is it?
It would be a silly anti-feminist who would take that line, anyway: much easier is the line that “well, women don’t really want to go there anyway”, which is, unfortunately, true.
Hilda’s is my college. I applied to Hildas because it was single-sex. I didn’t come from a girls school (I went to an FE college in Stoke before Oxford). I think it will be a terrible shame when it finally goes mixed. Oriel still had the last year of all-male students when I started at Hildas and I thought it was sad that there was no longer an all-male college too (for almost entirely non-frivolous reasons). For what it’s worth, I think equality was better served with one or two single-sex colleges for BOTH sexes.
The big difficulty, of course, for anyone who would like to keep Hilda’s all-women, is that they have to win the argument every few years probably for eternity, whereas the pro-mixed crowd only have to win once. It’s rather like the approach that some of our European friends would like to take with the risible behemoth they describe as a “Constitution”
It’s interesting that the JCR has voted for a mixed JCR - I don’t remember them having done that before. Were I forced to make a guess, I might suspect that in times gone by, altough Hilda’s had the reputation of being the place where women that were rejected by their first choice colleges ended up, a significant fraction of the student body were there because they had explicitly chosen a women’s college. I might guess that the balance has now shifted, fewer undergraduates are chosing a women-only college and more undergraduates who would prefer to be at a mixed college are ending up at Hilda’s, either because they make an open application or because they are rejected by their first choice colleges.
Hilda’s must know what fraction of its students listed it as a preferred choice, and how that has changed over the years. If my guess is right, and Hilda’s now unique position is being abandoned by students who never really wanted to be at a women’s college in the first place, I think it’s a real shame (and I might have some stronger words for it…)
The last time I remember this debate coming around, the big argument in the JCR was over a mixed fellowship. As I recall, when Hilda’s offers a tutorial fellowship in conjunction with a University post, it is required to do so with an alternative college that accepts male fellows (as Hilda’s exemption from the Sex Discrimination Acts doesn’t apply to the University as a whole), and that the result was that often even when the best candidate for the University job was a woman, she chose to take up the fellowship offer from the mixed, possibly more prestigious, college rather than from Hilda’s.
Do you happen to know how often that happened?
Paul, Antonia:
I’m sure it won’t surprise you that I tend to favour the rights of both all-male and all-female colleges to exist, on grounds of liberty.
Having all-male colleges dominating the University, either by numbers or by being the most prestigious or richest is obviously a bad thing. Having a couple of all-male colleges to cater for a minority of men who prefer to live in an all-male environment I don’t see as a big problem. I’m not sure there would be all that much demand for them, though - if you gave the average 17-year-old boy the choice between a college full of men and a college full of women who all desire his skinny pimply body, I think we know what he’ll want
Religious establishments are the obvious exception. There are unlikely to be many men who are deterred from applying to Oxford because they’re afraid that they might encounter women there.
By contrast, there is an obvious utility, as Antonia mentions, in having some women-only provision, particularly given that Oxford gives more of an impression than modern Universities of being a stuffy male-dominated old boys’ club. Each time St. Hilda’s receives an application from a smart young woman who would not otherwise have chosen to apply to Oxford, that’s a success, for the University, for anyone interested in equality of opportunity in Education, and for the nation as a whole.
I wonder if an additional question on the application form might allow the seperation of the group of women who didn’t chose Hilda’s as a first choice, but would be well-disposed towards ending up there, and the group of women who didn’t list Hilda’s as a choice because they really don’t want to be at a women-only college. That might, in principle, allow a better optimisation of the distribution of students amongst colleges.
Yes, this is another example of people being more interested in fixing the thing that isn’t broken than the thing that is. We were always going to lose eventually, which is unfortunate. All we can say is that we did what we could - if the people it’s there for don’t want it any more, there’s not much left. Of course I still say the 55% who want to be at a mixed college should get a place at one or go elsewhere, but never mind.
“It would be a silly anti-feminist who would take that line, anyway: much easier is the line that “well, women don’t really want to go there anyway”, which is, unfortunately, true.”
——————-
Point taken, but that is the kind of sexism, however silly, that I hear first hand sometimes.
My personal view is that, theoretically, I quite like the idea of a mixture of mixed sex, all male, and all female colleges within a University such as Oxford. However my gut feeling on this is that it is in some ways far easier, in terms of equal oppurtunities etc.. to have mixed across the board.
That said, I found Sam’s point worth considering:
“I wonder if an additional question on the application form might allow the seperation of the group of women who didn’t chose Hilda’s as a first choice, but would be well-disposed towards ending up there, and the group of women who didn’t list Hilda’s as a choice because they really don’t want to be at a women-only college. That might, in principle, allow a better optimisation of the distribution of students amongst colleges”
———————
I am also aware that in, never having been to Oxford, I am not really qualified to give a proper opinion about the internal politics of Oxford University. But they are my thoughts for what it’s worth
A couple of additonal points:
1. I discovered this morning that, in the words of the principal of St. Hilda’s, “well over half” of the undergraduate intake are either applicants who were rejected by their preferred colleges or those who made an open application and were assigned to St. Hilda’s. It would not be surprising of most of these women would prefer to be at a mixed college.
2. It is, I think, clear that St. Hilda’s can’t survive as a women-only establishment without support from the University - the present arrangements, both as regards undergraduate admissions and as regards the shared employment of college Fellows between the college and a University department, are not sustainable. To save Hilda’s, the University would have to decide that a women-only college was a valuable thing to have, and at a minimum subsidise it to the level that it loses out on through not being to advertise women-only jobs in conjunction with the University. As I mentioned earlier, admissions would need a little work, too. You’d also want to address the perception, particularly in the sciences, that Hilda’s is the easy option for borderline women to get in. That certainly isn’t true - I wouldn’t describe Hilda’s as a top-flight college for the sciences, but its standards are no lower than many middle-of-the-road colleges.