Oxford delegates were split at the NUS National Conference last week over a motion to introduce a quota for 50 per cent of all NUS committee members to be female. Motion 701 was defeated by nine votes, with a turnout of 527 delegates.
Helena Dollimore, one of Oxford’s ï¬ve NUS delegates, supported the motion, telling Cherwell, “Women are under-represented due to a deeprooted structural sexism which exists… It is patronising when opponents of this motion deny this by claiming that the current system must be okay because the best candidate wins. That argument only works if society is a level-playing ï¬eld for women, and it clearly isn’t. Gender-balancing is about compensating for that structural inequality while the root causes are tackled.”
Departing NUS president, Liam Burns, also supported the motion in his speech.
Yet OUSU Vice-President for Women, Suzanne Holsomback, said “I believe this motion came from a genuine desire for gender equality, but it addresses the symptoms of a problem – few female NUS delegates – and not the root… We need programmes and initiatives that work with students to encourage women and minority groups to run for leadership positions.”
Unusually, the motion was voted for by secret ballot. Cherwell understands that at least one of Oxford’s delegates voted against the motion. One Oxford delegate, Emily Cousens, arrived too late to be able to vote.
The motion sought to address the gender imbalance among NUS delegates. Despite 56 per cent of students being women, only 36 per cent of delegates are women. The National Executive Committee, the decision making body of the NUS, were elected at the conference. Only four of ï¬fteen are female.
One ï¬rst year classicist criticised the gender-balancing motion, telling Cherwell, “Quotas are demeaning for women and detrimental to a status of equality with men…Thatcher did more for the perception of male-female equality than any of those squawking lefty nutcases at the Guardian ever will … I think the NUS are utterly irrelevant and I reject them utterly.”
Verity Bell, a ï¬rst-year lawyer at New College, opined, “although I support the spirit of the motion, I think a quota would be an artiï¬cial and short-term solution. We should address the wider problem causing the gender imbalance, which is that on average fewer female students run for election to be delegates.”
The National Conference, held in Sheffield between 8th and 11th April, was attended by delegates from every UK university. Oxford sent seven students, including OUSU President David J Townsend, although one NUS delegate was too ill to attend. Students caused controversy when “about forty” delegates applauded Margaret Thatcher’s death on the ï¬rst day of conference. The conference also debated ‘lad culture’, which an NUS report last month deemed “sexist, misogynistic and homophobic”.
Some students expressed apathy towards the NUS by voting for “an inanimate carbon rod as President.” Its manifesto included training 8 million “death cyborgs”. Andrew Tindall, the campaign’s organiser, said candidates “launch bland campaigns that offer nothing but another rehash of the same empty slogans and promises we see every year .”
The rod was defeated by Toni Pearce, elected the ï¬rst NUS president never to have attended university. Pearce’s aims include “properly articulating the public value of education” and “bridging the divide between university and further education students.”
Humour was added by the leaving speech of Vice-President Dannie Grufferty, taking the form of an adapted Les Misérables medley. Grufferty spoke of life as an NUS staff member, singing, “It’s a struggle, it’s a faff/And there’s nothing that anyone’s giving/One more day counting ballots/You’re having a laugh/If you think this is living.”
