Cherwell’s coverage of Mike Nicholson’s recent comments about gender has rightly called him out – his words were unfair and sexist. He suggested that men do better at exams because they take more risks than women. However, the focus on gender inequality in admissions tests obscures a frustrating reality of sexism in the academic world once students get to Oxford.

Whilst, even with problematic tests like the TSA being used, there are no differences in intelligence level at admissions, Oxford ends up having a massive gender gap at finals. 32% of men get firsts in their undergraduate degrees, but only 25% of women do, a discrepancy replicated for students on one-year masters courses. OUSU’s work with the university has shown (unsurprisingly) that this does not reflect any difference in academic ability. Men and women are not any more able than each other, but something about the Oxford system results in women underperforming in their exams.

Some try to explain this by ‘common sense’ approaches to gender, for example:

Myth 1: women tend to be more restrained in their opinions and try to show the benefit of each side of the argument whereas men write stronger conclusions. This is false. Studies of Oxford undergraduates show that this is simply an expectation that women are more passive and balanced which is not reflected in real life.

Myth 2: women, by virtue of menstruation, are more likely to be uncomfortable in exams and thus will underperform at finals. This is bullshit. Beyond being a mindset that erases the experiences of trans* people, whose biological ability to menstruate has no relation at all to their gender identity, PMS is totally disproven as something that affects a significant number of women, and totally has no indication of finals results. (Do email me at [email protected] for a full list of disproven myths or any other information.)

What is interesting about the finals gap is that it is a problem specific to Oxford and Cambridge. Other universities in the UK do not have this problem. So what is it about these traditional, prestigious institutions that prevents women from reaching the highest levels of success?

What does merit further investigation is the fact that women’s academic self-confidence drops markedly in their first year, and that this lack of academic confidence correlates with lower exam scores. So what causes this? The finals gap is a phenomenon that started in the 80s, after the mixing of the colleges. There is something about the traditional environment of Oxford which causes women to feel less comfortable than men. The performances necessary to fit in here are not ones which include the ways that women have been socialised to act.

The finals gap is more pronounced in humanities, but other divisions have their own problems. Largely, this is very high levels of academic attrition. At each level, within academia, there are fewer and fewer women. This is a difference aspect of academic inequality, but once again, women are losing out.

Sexism, both within and beyond Oxford, makes being a graduate woman in the sciences really difficult. For example, there are particularly high levels of harassment, which becomes more problematic because of the really high amounts of lab hours people require for academic research. This is why it disproportionately affects graduate women in sciences. The structure is hierarchical, so problems with Principal Investigators (the head of each lab) are rarely brought up, because upsetting seniors in this structure can ruin a graduate’s career options. Graduates also work at a level of specialism where there is no-one else that could supervise their thesis, so harassment levels can get really intense. Lack of government support for graduates means that they are also really tied to their sources of funding. Most won’t let students take a more than a year out of academia or move university. This can really limit the options for women being harassed – they aren’t in a position to go elsewhere, so they either have to put up with the situation of just leave.

The underrepresentation of women in sciences results in an absence of role models for young women in science. Locally and globally, we celebrate very few women scientists. Part of this is caused by women’s complete lack of access to science in the past, but it is also partially caused by conscious choices on the part of teachers, tutors and the media to ignore and erase women’s contributions to science now. This lack of role models means that it is more difficult for women to see themselves as successful scientists at Oxford, and will have fewer examples of women who have navigated a sexist system (for example, where women are still criticised for having both children and a career in ways where men are not) and yet still been able to rise to the top.

Whilst this is a depressing situation, I believe that there are ways forward. We need more female role models, symbolic inclusion in places like the exam schools, awareness of implicit bias of tutors, and initiatives like Athena SWAN that promote women in science. More than that, staff and academics at Oxford, including Mike Nicholson, need to take women’s exclusion seriously, or risk falling behind the rest of the academic world for one half of their students.

Today the Transparency of Lobbying, Non Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill goes to Parliament, as of course you already know.

The lengthy title and the highlighting of the word ‘transparency’ probably mean you are fairly bored but on the whole positive about this piece of prospective legislation at the moment: maybe you hope that it might represent Nick Clegg finally coming good on a promise to the electorate and cleaning up politics. If you’re a member of the Labour party, or a sympathiser, you might expect it to curb some of what you see as the egregious power, exercised through backroom lobbying, of Unite and the other big trade unions.

In reality, this law is a disaster. The statutory body that will be empowered to administer it, the Electoral Commission, has called it ‘impossible to enforce’, and Parliament’s own Political & Constitutional Reform Committee is seething because it is scheduled to host the consultation on this issue on the very same day the government introduces its bill. Our local MP, Andrew Smith, has called it ‘profoundly undemocratic’.

Why does one more piece of poorly written and rushed legislation matter, in a news cycle dominated by the unimaginable suffering of the people of Syria? This new law deserves your attention, Oxford student, because, believe it or not, it has the potential seriously to undermine the work of your student union. Under the new law, any expenditure by OUSU that could potentially be seen as relating to politics will have to be approved through a cumbersome process that will be administratively cripping for such a small organisation.

Of course OUSU shouldn’t be party political, and despite what some mutter in the back room of the KA, it isn’t. It must, though, engage with current political issues: as OUSU’s sabbatical offers go into bat for an increase in student support and bursary money from the University in Michaelmas, they must take into account, and use in their arguments, major events that have disproportionately affected students: the economic crisis means more people’s parents are less able to offer any financial support, and that vacation work is harder to get hold of; the increase in tuition fees could continue to have long term affects on access work; and the reduction in government financial support for higher education is, as you would expect, tightening budgets across the University. 

All these changes are political. They are covered by the new law-to-be. If OUSU wants, as it surely must, to raise awareness about this campaign among Oxford students; if it wants to involve Oxford students in its campaigning to make sure that the University spends as much as is humanly possible on securing the financial means for any student who is offered a place to take that place up and complete their course, then it will have to spend precious resources, both the time of sabbatical officers and the hard-won extra money granted by the University this year, on the ‘significant new burdens’ (again from the Electoral Commission) of form-filling and box-ticking this law requires.

Many Oxford students, often for very valid reasons, are suspicious of OUSU. In this case, though, if we don’t speak up and try and prevent the passage of this horror-story-bill, we will stymie any chance of really effective campaigning that could deliver more money to help the poorest of our fellow students. Such a failure to act would be negligent in the extreme, and in a University constantly under attack as a citadel of the posh and the privileged, a Student Union equipped to campaign for fair and generous student finance is a key weapon: we must not lose it. Write to your MP. Tweet. Blog. Act. Save OUSU’s ability to campaign for students.

“Never again,” we like to tell ourselves, again and again. Looking back, we know Thomas Hardy was right to anticipate “all nations striving strong to make red war yet redder”; the so-called “war to end all wars”, beginning in 1914 with Gavrilo Princip’s bullet of the century, would not really end until 1991. Outlived as he was by the old men who sent him to die, Wilfred Owen’s glib submission “dulce et decorum est” should represent more than anything else the grim legacy our generation inherited from the 20^th century. Our heroes showcase a grand hatred of war.

Except we see the world beyond through different spectacles. The student voice, which in the 1960s called on Britain to take a moral lead in the world, drops dead with apathy or sinks into “post-colonialist” hysteria whenever faced with foreign conflicts; the Labour Party has been mellowed by a populist sickness that chases after old Tory slogans; and Barack Obama, with his innocuous charm and Nobel Prize to think of, would rather pretend there is no war than bring it to an end.

The Arab world’s Franz Ferdinand moment was the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in 2011. He would cause the downfall of four governments and two civil wars. In Syria, a refugee crisis unparalleled in modern times and a death toll perhaps matching a decade in Iraq shows no sign of abating; and our moral obligation to act has grown with every passing day in which we have excused ourselves from doing so.

Even if Iran, Russia and Syria’s neighbouring Arab governments hadn’t already turned the civil conflict into an international (and imperialist) war then it wouldn’t matter in the slightest. Chamberlain’s grisly dismissal of the “quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing”, with which he would justify his capitulation of the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland to Hitler in 1938, would be as feeble a defence against fascism as the paper on which “Peace for Our Time” was written. The attempt to absolve ourselves of the common allegiances human beings owe to one another is a twin terror, morally and pragmatically.

So if it would be “illegal” to assist our Syrian comrades then the auspices of international law are not worth the hearing. This week, many are remembering King’s prophetic dictum that “one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws”. To charge Putin and the Central Committee of the CPC with legal jurisdiction would be no less a farce than the proud “Anglo-Saxon” George Wallace, governor of Alabama, advising Kennedy on racial segregation. The UN’s failure to stop the wars in former Yugoslavia, its self-absolution of obligation in Rwanda, and the great negotiator Kofi Annan’s sleepwalk into the Darfur extermination can only point to two choices: the Security Council must either be democratised or be dismissed.

Those who agree with the moral imperative to intervene but who nonetheless remain sceptical of which road to take can be roughly summarised into: those awaiting the UN’s report on the attacks, those who know that jihadists are as bad as Assad, and those who believe that, given these variables, involving ourselves can only worsen the situation. All three concerns need to be chewed over – and spat out.

The first is irrelevant. If the rebels are responsible then chemical weapons are loose in a sectarian bloodbath. But if, as expected, Assad is indeed calling our bluff, then it’s worth remembering that the nadir of war criminality occurred quite some time ago as the exposure of torture chambers for “terrorists” – unarmed civilians and their children – by human rights groups has already revealed. Assad is simply becoming more promiscuous of his attraction to savagery. 

So whatever the case, annihilating a few weapons has little worth if the armed murderers remain in play. In the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell’s hatred of the Soviet forces did not choke his support for the Republican government. America is in a better position than he was then – it can fight both the regime and the clerical fascists who fantasise of replacing him. Britain’s resolution at the UN proposes “all necessary measures to protect civilians” which as a principle, though certain to be thrown out by Russia and China, is pretty strong: because it implicitly recognises that support for the opposition must be conditional on humanitarian essentials.

And, as policy-makers well know, a secular victory is not as mad as it seems. American cooperation with Turkey, Jordan and (possibly) Israel could enforce a no-fly zone to snuff out the last bases through which Assad gets his foreign supplies; it can provide better training and much more sophisticated equipment to the Jordanian-backed southern groups pushing against both the regime and al Qaeda affiliates. In the north, videos emerging of incredibly brave Syrian civilians standing up to jihadists are far from anomalous: five cities under the control of the Islamic State in the north have reported protests against their occupiers, their Sharia impositions more likely to horrify than convert.

The rise of the Nusra Front and Islamic State is a result of the collapse of the Syrian economy, upon which they have feasted, together with the total isolation of the FSA secularists when set against their religious rivals. Not only will bolstering the FSA encourage regime defections, but it might also lure back lost regiments. Vermin thrive in the dirt, just as fascists thrive in poverty; and to isolate the masters, you feed their slaves.

For socialists, the absolute midnight of the 20^th century was said to be the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the moment when far left and right totalitarianism collaborated against the free world. It is difficult to be sure of the exact hour in Syria, only that it is not yet too late; but that the moderate opposition is shrinking every day – and that midnight is coming.