The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) has issued a report detailing gender attainment gaps at the most prestigious institutions in the country. At most universities, women are now outperforming men, yet Oxbridge remains a testosterone stronghold — here men are outperforming women, in some courses by impressive margins. This could be a non-story, an interesting fact for discussion at a dinner party: women tend to perform better in some systems, men tend to do better in others. But as with any such disparity, it cannot remain a curiosity. Oxford has pledged to eliminate the gap by 2030: and the HEPI report has supplied a laundry list of recommendations.

With constant instruction that “stereotyping should be avoided,” the recommendations sound like something you would get from an early Jordan Peterson lecture. Women are charged on anecdotal evidence with unsuitability for the “cross-examination style” of Oxbridge’s much-vaunted tutorial system. Women are more agreeable, and therefore ill-suited to this “combative environment.” The author of the report seems to have interviewed one punchy professor for some balance, who pointed out that women “should be able to deal with the cut and thrust” without having to enforce women-only pairings or getting rid of the system that attracts people to these institutions in the first place. But this stands in stark contrast to the bulk of the report. With its view of female nature, it seems one step short of concluding that women would be better suited to home-schooling. 

It’s not just Oxbridge’s tutorial system that the report takes issue with; exams are also in the firing line. They are unfair on women, supposedly, because women might suffer from PMS and menstruation. This is a clever move if you don’t want the recommendations to be questioned: “women’s problems” allowed us to wriggle out of PE when we were lucky enough to have a male teacher. But there was a reason that this never worked on women; undeniably some have it worse than others, but it simply isn’t an excuse to reform any demanding system, unless we want to get back to arguing that all those pesky hormones make us ill-suited to public life. 

The implication here is that the growing trend of treating students like children disproportionately benefits women, not something I would advertise while arguing for equality

Other points in the report are just embarrassing, like the claim that women do better on the “scaffolded questions” provided in A-level exams “compared to the university questions.” The implication here is that the growing trend of treating students like children disproportionately benefits women, not something I would advertise while arguing for equality. Women’s fragile constitution, which on corners of the right would be chalked up to innate differences, is here weakly ascribed to the catch-all affliction “low self-esteem” – something supervisors should be made aware of through even more EDI training. One comical contradiction arises with the suggestion that universities need more women’s officers, even though Cambridge — according to the report one of only two universities that suffer from this vendetta against the frail female constitution — is the only university in the country that has one. If anything, wouldn’t that suggest that they should be gotten rid of?

Predictably, the report is nostalgic about Covid, which apparently showed us that experimentation “is not only possible but can have positive results” — in this case, the fact that women in some subjects did better on online open-book exams. But where these practices still exist, they have only been retained as a cost-cutting exercise, not because anyone really believes they provide superior measurement of academic achievement. We already live in the time of glorified cutbacks — subjects are closed with the flashy but always elusive promise of “interdisciplinarity” and assessment standards are eased with nods to our mental health. 

The report presents it as a truism that in institutions that promise world-class education, “equal outcomes should be structurally assured” — as if these were related or even mutually compatible considerations. And clearly little attention has been paid to any other measures of quality: online exams and returning to A-level handholding may well produce better results for female students, but it wouldn’t improve education. I for one don’t see Covid as proof that “universities should empower themselves to experiment with methods of assessing academic progress”. With this direction, university will quickly become even more of a standardised box-ticking exercise than it already is. 

The report does have some useful musings on the causes of this disparity. After all, it is interesting that the rings we run around our male counterparts elsewhere don’t translate to the Oxbridge environment. It is common wisdom that women are less likely to take risks, which explains why men at Oxbridge get the most thirds as well as the most firsts. Perhaps this ought to encourage women to take more risks in exams and essays; instead, the report presents womanly meekness as something enduring and inevitable. But I refuse to believe that women naturally aren’t able to “deal with the cut and thrust.” What holds the keys to academic achievement in the competitive Oxbridge environment is learning the rules of the game, not selectively viewing any remaining standards as barriers to women’s superficial credentialism. 

Not everyone is suited for the cut-throat environment of Oxbridge; unsurprisingly many students, male and female, flourish without weekly essays and unforgiving deadlines. But those women who do thrive should not be penalised with reference to this patronising portrait of their sex. Of course, Oxbridge will not be abandoning their main selling points — but thanks to this report, if they ever did cave in to the financial pressure by, say, abolishing tutorials, we meek, agreeable females would get the blame.