Women in higher education: progress, power and the work still to do

Below is the text of a speech delivered by HEPI’s Director of Policy and Strategy Rose Stephenson, to the Women’s Higher Education Network conference.

It is a huge honour to join the Women’s Higher Education Network conference today. The Network has had a significant impact on my career, and I am so grateful to Alice Chilver for hosting us and to all the WHEN colleagues for inspiring and driving us.

I’ve been asked to speak a little about the history of women in higher education. Where we have come from and where we are now.

Unfortunately, I’m going to start with a very low bar.

In 1561, Queen Elizabeth signed a royal charter sanctioning the imprisonment of any woman ‘suspected’ of corrupting the morals of male undergraduates at Cambridge University. This gave the university the right to imprison any unchaperoned women walking the town’s streets after dark.

Cambridge University’s private prison was known as The Spinning Room. The committal books show that between 1823 and 1894, thousands of women were imprisoned at the behest of the Vice Chancellors. Under the common law of the land, none of these women had committed a crime. In the Vice Chancellor’s court, no proof of wrongdoing was required, and the women were denied legal assistance. The conditions of the prison were so poor that they led to the deaths of some of the women incarcerated there, including a 19-year-old named Elizabeth (Betsy) Howe.

Following significant public pressure from the townspeople of Cambridge, it was decided that the public could witness future Spinning House trials. The first public trial was for 17-year-old Daisy Hopkins, charged with ‘walking with an undergraduate’. When asked why the male undergraduate was not named or present, the Vice-Chancellor replied: ‘The man is not on trial’.

The furore of the case of Daisy Hopkins and her brave but unsuccessful attempt to sue for wrongful arrest eventually led to an Act of Parliament that stripped the University of its powers to imprison women. The prison and the workhouse it sat within were demolished. There is a Blue Plaque on the wall of the building that now stands on the site of the Spinning House. It is dedicated to Thomas Hobson, the man who built the workhouse, not Daisy Hopkins, the 17-year-old prostitute who tore it down. How history refuses to acknowledge women’s power. Historian Caroline Biggs has painstakingly researched and recorded the stories of the women sent to the prison in her brilliant book, The Spinning House (which has provided a record of the information included in this speech).

Within the same time period, the University of London became the first UK institution to award degrees to women, in 1869. Despite the first steps of these pioneering students, this practice was not widespread.

The University of Cambridge did not award degrees to its female students until 1948. Previous attempts to change the status quo at Cambridge had been met with violent protests by men who believed that their degrees would be worth less if women could receive them.

A hundred years after the first degrees were awarded to women, female students made up 30% of the undergraduate population. The Sex Discrimination Act of 1975, which legislated that universities could no longer ‘refuse or deliberately omit to accept an application’  from a woman, based on her sex, increased female enrolment rates further, reaching 40% of the undergraduate population by 1980.

In the 1980s, female students were less likely to be awarded first-class honours degrees. Dr Ernest Rudd, a researcher in higher education, argued in 1984 that, on examination, the ‘only explanation that fits all the facts’ was that women were just not as clever as men.

Despite the steadily increasing number of female undergraduates, the pipeline to an academic career remained heavily unequal. While women made up 40% of undergraduate enrolments, they accounted for only 13% of staff in higher education and 2% of professors.

The pipeline from student to professor can take decades, but female students undoubtedly lacked a pathway of role models into a higher education career. Recent figures show that women are now more likely to enter higher education than men. Women make up 57% of undergraduate students.

We should continue to be concerned about and address male underrepresentation in higher education, something which HEPI has written about extensively.

Female students are now more likely to gain a ‘good’ honours degree. Perhaps if Ernest Rudd could repeat his examinations, he might conclude that women are, in fact, just as clever as (or possibly, by this narrow measure, cleverer than) men.

Despite this, the HEPI report 135 Mind the (Graduate Gender Pay) Gap published in 2020 showed that within a year of graduation, male graduates earn 7% more than their female counterparts, and by 10 years after graduation, this gap stretches to 24%.

Women now make up half of the full-time workforce in higher education, and 60% of the part-time workforce. Yet across all roles in higher education, women are paid, on average, about 12% less than men.

Only 28% of UK professors are female, and in 2018 there were only 25 Black women professors in the UK, compared to 12,500 white men. We have now reached the milestone of over 100 Black Women Professors in UK higher education. This has been hard fought and ably supported by the Women’s Higher Education Network.

I’m going to conclude with some examples of why diversity in power is so important. Yes, representation is important in itself. But representation can change reality.

Professor Amanda Broderick is the Vice-Chancellor and President of the University of East London. One in three women in the UK are iron-deficient, yet there is no national screening programme. UEL has launched a world-first pop-up screening programme for iron deficiency for its students.

Komol Iqbal is the Women’s Officer at Bradford Students’ Union and hosts a podcast called Her Side of Campus, discussing women’s issues that are often considered taboo.

Professor Jenny Douglas, a Senior Lecturer in Health Promotion at the Open University, has been awarded a prestigious Accelerator Award from the Wellcome Trust. This work will include a feasibility study for establishing a Black Women’s Health and Wellbeing Research Centre in the UK.

If you are a researcher, a vice chancellor, or a student activist, you can improve education and health outcomes for women. This is real, life-changing change.

If a 17-year-old working-class prostitute from the nineteenth century can literally tear down the walls of the patriarchy that imprisoned her, we can all be a little bit brave, we can all be a little bit bold, and we can all break down the structural inequities that exist to take the next step towards gender equality.