I have felt the difference an increase in the number of women in a group makes in my role as ‘head of house’ (the collective noun for college heads). I think you need at least a third of the minority gender for this effect to cease to be obvious. Whether or not there is any intention to exclude, it can end up happening anyhow simply due to discussion topics that are of interest to the majority not necessarily being of interest to you. Be it a man in a knitting group or a slimmers’ meeting (and I have met men who’ve been in both situations) or a woman in an engineering or physics lecture, feeling ‘other’ is hard to avoid. Nevertheless, it was clear they had been very conscious at the time of the lack of numbers of women around them, and were delighted to hear that the College was of a very different composition now.Īnybody who has found themselves in a tiny minority in a group will be aware there is likely to be a slight associated discomfort. I didn’t get a chance to quiz them in great detail about their experiences, although I certainly hope that some will be recording their oral histories of those times for the record. I met some of these pioneers a month or so back when the 1972 matriculands were back to celebrate their 50 th anniversary. Those women may have felt ‘special’, but they certainly also felt outnumbered (made worse by the fact the two years above them would of course have been purely male). I believe in Churchill the number was around 30, out of an overall entering cohort of around 135. 1972 (the year after my own arrival in Cambridge, at Girton) saw it and two other colleges, Clare and Kings, admit limited numbers. Churchill was the first of the historically all-male colleges (in either Oxford or Cambridge) to vote to admit women. That is as it should be, but this academic year about to start marks a different and significant milestone in our history regarding women: the 50 th anniversary of their first admission to the College.

For the last couple of years and now, as I understand (things aren’t quite finalised yet) once more this year, we have managed a much healthier, near equal balance of numbers. But, to me, the figure of 28% women that the 2015 intake of students comprised, seemed frankly not good enough. As a College whose statutes require 70% of its students and fellows to be in the STEM disciplines (broadly defined), in line with Churchill’s own wishes to found a college resembling MIT, that had perhaps not seemed so surprising to some.

When I arrived in the College, the gender balance was not good. Cambridge colleges, such as my own, will be assessing whether or not we’ve hit our multiple targets – by subject, by the various widening participation metrics and, of course, by gender. A Level results are out, and students are now either celebrating, or sitting in misery having had their worst fears confirmed.

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