A recent report by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) has found that female Oxbridge students are statistically less likely to achieve a first in almost all subjects except just two at Oxford and four at Cambridge. Oxford’s English faculty is taking steps to address the report’s findings.
This sits in stark contrast with the UK higher education sector as a whole, in which there was a significant 4.5% overall percentage gap favouring women in the 2022/2023 cycle. The national trend is a consistent trend across all four parts of the UK and applicable to upper second-class honours too.
In the 2021/2022 cycle, all four schools of Oxford finalists – Humanities, Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences, Medical Sciences and Social Sciences – had a first-class gap favouring men.
At Oxford, the subject with the largest percentage gap points favouring men was Classics at 29 percentage points. One Classics student told Cherwell that they believe private school teaching has a large influence on this as private schools for boys are more likely to teach and encourage students to pursue Classics than all-girls schools.
The English faculty at Oxford discussed the report at a meeting, specifically on how it is addressing the issues through Athena Swan, an assessment system operating across the UK Universities which seeks to enable equality in gender with due attention to intersectionality.
Professor Diane Purkiss, an English Tutor and spokesperson for Athena Swan, told Cherwell: “It’s worth noting that in all of the past three years, women have achieved a higher percentage of the top firsts given, the top 50. I am therefore pushing back at what I thought was the rather unhelpful stereotyping language in the report.
“The last thing I would like to see is a lot of demotivating reportage about how women students are a failure. We are not perfect, but we are working towards improvement all the time.”
The report identifies that one of the largest percentage gaps favouring men at Oxford is in English (13.8) despite the large population of women on the course.
PPE also has a reputation for being heavily male dominated, with a first-class gender gap of 19 percentage points in favour of men. A 2020 Cherwell article found that “fewer women than men named Greg are speaking at Oxford PPE Society events this term”.
A first-year PPEist at Pembroke College, Oxford, said: “It’s already the end of week six and I’ve only had one female lecturer. All of my lecturers are male, and so are all my tutors.”
But the lack of female representation within faculties is not unique to PPE. The percentage of women making up the overall body of academic staff in 2023 for both Oxford and Cambridge was more than 10% below the national average of 48%.
Theology at Cambridge was the degree with the most significant percentage point gap in favour of men in the last academic year at 43%. Specifically, 83.3% of male students received first-class honours compared to just 40.0% of women.
