Stop infantilising female students

In the mid-2010s, heterodox feminist Christina Hoff Sommers coined a phrase to describe a phenomenon she was continually seeing among upper-middle-class young women: fainting-couch feminism. That is, they were being encouraged to think of themselves as perpetual, fragile victims.

Since then, fainting-couch feminism has unfortunately not gone away. Last week, the Higher Education Policy Institute published a report claiming that female students at Oxford and Cambridge universities are being unfairly disadvantaged. According to the report, gender inequality is still ‘baked into the system’, as evidenced by the gap in first-class degrees awarded to male and female students.

In the interest of good faith, I should say that the study does make one fair observation. It points out that, because Oxbridge grades many students solely on examinations, rather than longer-term assignments and projects, female students could be at a disadvantage if suffering from premenstrual syndrome (PMS) during exams. Having myself sat in an exam hall trying to write an essay about Chaucer with an aching abdomen and thumping head back in my student days at St Andrews, I have some sympathy with this claim. Then again, there are all sorts of medical afflictions that could affect any student’s exam performance.

Where things properly get into fainting-couch territory is the paper’s claim that ‘representation issues’ may also be a factor, as tutors and supervisors are more likely to be male. The idea that female students are less able to cope or engage with a lecturer who happens to be a man is completely spurious, as well as infantilising. Whether you’re studying economics or philosophy, what bearing does the sex of the instructor have on his or her ability to teach statistics or Sartre?

Perhaps most egregiously, the paper also takes aim at the ‘combative and confrontational’ teaching style of Oxford and Cambridge. The horror! It’s now taken for granted at most universities that the faculty will protect students from challenging ideas or disagreement at all costs. If this isn’t the case at Oxbridge, we should be thankful. After all, Oxbridge aims to produce, among other things, the UK’s next generation of top lawyers, politicians, doctors and academics. It makes sense that students are put through their paces in pressure-cooker tutorials, to hone their critical-thinking and arguing skills. That any student should be aggrieved that his or her unbelievably privileged learning environment demands high standards evokes the sound of sarcastic violins.

Reading between the lines, the idea that female students might struggle in this intellectual environment is another way of saying that the Oxbridge style of teaching is just a bit too robust for their delicate sensibilities. The irony being that a similar argument was used by anti-suffragist men back in the early 20th century, in an attempt to prevent women from accessing higher education.

It’s worth pointing out that, in terms of an academic-attainment gender gap, Oxford and Cambridge are certainly outliers. Across the UK’s top universities, women consistently outperform men. In fact, at every stage of education, women are beating men.

In that case, there is a perfectly valid conversation to be had about why Oxbridge is different. The report even offers a more sensible explanation, that this could be due to the fact that many Oxbridge degrees are awarded based only on work done in the final year of the course, rather than a combination of the three years; men are more likely to put off seriously studying until the end of their degree, whereas women tend to work more consistently over the years. But there are surely ways to address these grade discrepancies without framing it as a fainting-couch feminist grievance.

This coddling dressed up as female empowerment only infantilises young women. As Sommers told spiked in 2017: ‘My concern is that instead of telling young women that they’re strong and resilient and the equals of men, we’re instructing them to fear men. The language of trauma and vulnerability is not liberating, it’s incapacitating.’

With so many Western universities steeped in identity politics, safetyism and DEI, academic standards are constantly being lowered. More educational establishments should be emulating Oxbridge’s ‘combative and confrontational’ style, not shying away from it. Certainly, the feminists who fought so hard for women’s access to Oxbridge hungered for this opportunity. It’s time for feminism to promote resilience as a virtue once again, rather than play into sexist stereotypes.

Nina Welsch is a writer. visit her Substack here