Let’s be clear: the boat race is still profoundly elitist
Today’s Oxford and Cambridge boat race will, for the first time, see women of the two universities permitted to race on the same course as the men and on the same day in front of a live television audience.
This is a step forward for gender equality and another blow to patriarchal assumptions that women are too ‘delicate’ for such sporting endeavours. As recently as 1962 the captain of Selwyn College at Cambridge wrote to the university’s women’s boat club to chastise them for perpetrating something that was “a ghastly sight, an anatomical impossibility and physiologically dangerous”.
But let’s be clear: the boat race is still profoundly elitist. We should all welcome the levelling of the playing field between men and women, but the next step is for Oxford and Cambridge – and by extension the boat race – to open themselves up more fully to those from non-privileged backgrounds.
Just one in 10 children who attend either Oxford or Cambridge are entitled to free school meals – compared with a fifth of children in Britain as a whole. A quick glance at some of the surnames which still dominate at Oxford makes the same point in a slightly different way. According to a 2013 study by the London School of Economics, a disproportionately large number of places at Oxford were taken up by people with Norman Conquest surnames such as Baskerville, Darcy, Mandeville and Montgomery.
This isn’t because a Norman surname is a sign of super intelligence; it’s because we live in a society where class privilege cascades down the generations like a tennis ball bouncing down a flight of stairs. More young people from the London borough of Richmond attend Oxford and Cambridge than from the entire city of Birmingham.
And so as much as today’s boat race may be a victory for gender equality, we should not ignore the class inequalities that persist at our top universities – and in society more generally – in a fit of liberal hubris. As I’ve written a number of times, equality isn’t a state of affairs that is half upper middle class women and half upper middle class men.
James Bloodworth is the editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter
75 Responses to “Hurrah for boat race gender equality. Now what about class?”
damon
I’m not against higher education at all. Lots of young people should be able to go for free. My beef though is with education and our loss of bottle as an adult society to raise our children properly. We’ve become scared of them almost. So they do as they please as far as learning is concerned. I was a little shit at school as well. I remember an English teacher trying to teach us some Shakespeare, and all I and several of my class mates were interested in was disrupting the lessons and ”having a laugh”. I do regret that now a bit, but I was only a kid and the teacher was a bit weak so we took advantage.
If you tried to disrupt lessons like that in Sri Lanka or much of the poorer world, you’d get beaten, and the problems would probably cease.
We’ve been failing children in education in Britain for ever really.
We produce so many poorly ededucated adults.
AlanGiles
Might be worth pointing out that the majority of politicians – INCLUDING LABOUR – came down from Oxford or Cambridge. An inconvenient truth perhaps in class war
AlanGiles
The only person making comments about your religion is you
JAMES MCGIBBON
We have a consumer society and people like consuming sandwiches. Better making sandwiches than not and being skint. I recall a punter saying to a bus driver, ‘I do not know how you can do this Job’, the reply was, ‘ well you would be walking’.
Guest
Lord Blagger, of course you want to silence talk about your bigotry and why you hate me for being Jewish.