After 50 years of Women at Wadham, are women still taken less seriously than men at Oxford?

Mary Ann Sieghart studied PPE at Wadham from 1979-1982, and she is now an award-winning journalist, radio presenter, and author of The Authority Gap. I recently had the opportunity to speak to Sieghart about her time at Wadham, the challenges women face today at Oxbridge, and what we can do about it. Here’s what I found out.

When Sieghart arrived at Wadham, she was in just the fifth cohort of women to attend the college and drove herself from London with nothing but a school trunk in the boot and a bike on the roof rack. Sieghart tells me, “I remember parking outside the Porter's Lodge and thinking, What the hell do I do now? I can't carry a trunk on my own.”

Despite only going co-ed five years earlier, Sieghart loved her time at Wadham and never felt like a minority; she describes that “we weren't an oddity or a novelty by then, because it had worked its way right through and out the other side.” But this wasn’t the case at all Oxford colleges, especially ones where women were more recently admitted in 1979. “I can remember girlfriends of mine, you know, walking into hall in the evening and the boys just shouting out their marks out of 10, and it was pretty horrible.”

While there is rarely such blatant sexism at Oxford today, women still face disadvantages. Women outperform men at every other academic level and institution, except at Oxford and Cambridge. So, the obvious question is, why? One answer is that what constitutes merit at Oxford can be very gendered; they want you to have ‘flare’ in your essays. But ‘flare’ is often a gendered term. As Sieghart describes, “Women are much more often praised for being, they're called grindstone adjectives, you know, hard-working, diligent, conscientious, but it's the men who are outstanding and brilliant. And there's no evidence to suggest that men are more outstanding or brilliant than women, but that is what gets encouraged in boys, and I think looked for certainly when examiners are looking for firsts.”

So why do men seem to exhibit more flare? As Sieghart explains, “boys grow up subliminally absorbing this incorrect notion that they're cleverer than girls, and girls grow up subliminally absorbing the opposite. So, take them to an Oxford or Cambridge tutorial, and the boys are more likely, and everything is always on average, but more likely to feel intellectually confident.”

What can be done to close this gap? Well, it's a lot of things. "If you look at my book, I've got 140 suggestions in the last chapter.” Sieghart tells me, but the key is changing the way children are socialised. She explains, “Don't praise your daughter for being pretty and your son for achieving things. I mean, this happens so much; as I say in the book, we praise girls for being ornamental and boys for being instrumental. And that really stays with them.”

Thank you to Mary Ann for joining us and giving this inspiring talk, and to Kayla for leading the discussion and sharing its conclusions with us.

Mary Ann spoke also at the University's Meeting Minds event this year. She was part of an alumni panel from the first five traditionally male colleges to admit female students. The panelists, with Vice Chancellor, Professor Irene Tracey, came together to celebrate what has been achieved over the last 50 years, and consider the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. The recording of Five @ Fifty: the first co-ed colleges looking to the future is available to listen to.