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Famke Veenstra-Ashmore was an intern at HEPI in the summer of 2024. She previously completed a BA and an MPhil in English at the University of Cambridge and now works as a parliamentary researcher.

My report about the gender awarding gap at Oxbridge has generated a lot of discussion on social media. Though I was astutely warned by HEPI’s Director to expect flak from certain right-wing publications, I was surprised that the only explicit and personal attack came from a female Times columnist.

Melaine McDonagh’s column objected to the report’s suggestion that historic institutions like Oxford and Cambridge ought to consider re-thinking the style and presentation of examinations for certain subjects where large gender awarding gaps exist. McDonagh argued that this suggestion was patronising and underestimated the ability of female students to stand their intellectual ground.

The Times column seemed to pick up on the argumentative threads of much of the discussion about my report online. I noticed a lot of the criticism of the report came from Oxbridge graduates from my parents’ generation, though this view was also held by younger Twitter users, such as Policy Exchange’s Lara Brown.

While debates around the supervision system and examinations are certainly legitimate and acknowledged in the report, the criticism was steeped in a kind of political and institutional nostalgia. A sense that Oxbridge disentangling itself too much from its traditions for the sake of progressive politics.

As a recent graduate of Cambridge, where I spent four years, I understand the urge to herald its unique history and methods of teaching. Personally, I thrived, earned two degrees, and enjoyed both examinations and supervisions. But my report wasn’t about personal experience – it was about systemic flaws which were patently disadvantaging entire groups of students.

Why is it that so many people yearn for the days where women where ‘chewed and spat out’ (to borrow Melanie McDonagh’s phrase) at Oxbridge? David Butterfield’s recent take-down of Cambridge and its ‘infantilising’ approach to teaching also comes to mind when thinking about this surge of ex-Oxbridge students or academics criticising the evolution of institutions in reaction to social change.

From my perspective, this trend of thinking isn’t sincere. It is not rooted in a genuine concern over the way universities operate and how students think and learn and organise. Rather, it stems from a grievance towards the diversification of student cohorts which has caused the uncomfortable recognition, for Oxbridge traditionalists, that as the student body evolves, the manner of teaching and assessing may have to shift accordingly.

Many of these commentators miss this crucial point and their thinking is limited by the belief that all of Oxbridge’s academic traditions should be preserved. Butterfield, for example, claims that the ‘freewheeling process’ of allowing a larger proportion of state school students into Cambridge has ‘placed politics ahead of talent’. With similar logic, McDonagh reasons that adjusting examinations and supervisions to address institutional inequalities would unfairly benefit women, who have done nothing to deserve better outcomes, and should therefore receive no extra consideration when it comes to systemic methods of assessing their academic performance.

Though the comparison between state-school versus private school students and male and female students is limited, I suggest that the arguments offered by Butterfield and McDonagh are motivated by the same emotional basis.

Research by Cambridge Assessment has shown that state school pupils tend to outperform independent school pupils with similar A Level results at university. The study offered two potential explanations for this: that there are simply less incentives for them to perform highly, or they have been ‘coached’ at school to do well in exams but then struggle when left to their own devices.

Are progressive politics, then, getting in the way of talent? Or are they enabling students who have not had the resources in their secondary education to thrive and contribute to an academic community which takes their contributions seriously?

We know that students from academic private schools aren’t entitled to higher marks, nor enjoy higher thresholds of talent, just because of their schooling. In a similar way, we know that Oxbridge was constructed around the education of a very specific, public-school educated, white and able-bodied man. When data suggests there is a problem worthy of addressing, why do ex-students and academics recoil from recognising and addressing this issue?

Many of the detractors of Oxford and Cambridge’s cultural and social modernisation are pushing against the demands of our rapidly shifting present. The desire to keep things the same is not without merit – the supervision system will rightly continue to be lauded by many. Equally, women at Oxbridge, through the criteria by which they are selected, will do well in exams. Change is so incremental at these institutions that I doubt fundamental changes will ever be on the negotiating table.

However, small evidence-based changes, such as the scaffolding of exam questions in specific subjects, can make a huge difference to the experience of female students at Oxbridge. Enabling more women to match their male counter parts will encourage more of them to progress into postgraduate study and strengthen academic departments – not weaken them.

Oxford and Cambridge pride themselves on their reputation for advancing research, technology, and educative practices. In their combined age of around two millennia, why would they stop now?