Cambridge University ignoring the Supreme Court ruling?

[yoursweetpotatoesarebland]

Dd is going to the Cambridge open day coming up, I got an email through about the colleges and was having a read through. There’s a section about “gender identity” and how it impacts on what colleges you can apply to. There are two women’s colleges but both accept anyone who identifies as a woman!

This is from Murray Edwards:
“At the admissions level, we will consider any student who, at the point of application, identifies as a woman“

How can this still be allowed? It’s self ID too so has NEVER been legal for the purposes of the eqA.

Gender may be a category, but how useful a category is it?

Unlike sex, it is not a binary with boundaries based on verifiable physical realities and consequent vulnerabilities and strengths.

As other posters have pointed out, a lot of what counts as masculine, feminine or neutral preferences, behaviours and abilities is culturally and temporally variable. Whether X doing y is being one, the other or neither will depend on whom you ask, and even if you ask X their self- assessment will be culturally dependent to a large extent.

What's more, even people who are enthusiastic about gender can't seem to agree how it works. Is it masculine and feminine? or those two plus non-binary? a spectrum? a rather arbitrary smorgasbord of several dozen genders - but exactly how many? Nobody agrees on that, either- or what?

It falls awkwardly between two stools, lacking both the clarity of sex and the infinite variety of personality. What's it good for, in practical terms, other than providing a (false) excuse for invading the privacy of the opposite sex?

The fallacy in your argument here is to declare Sweden to be "more egalitarian" whilst ignoring how Sweden's full year of paid mat leave entrenches women into the primary carer role for a full year, making it harder to coopt the father into co-parenting his own kids and harder for the mother to stop being the primary carer. The longer you do something for, the harder it is to change to a different way of doing things.

The proper way to differentiate what women naturally want to do versus what women have to because of kids is to compare child-free men and women against each other.

And also, a bloke who likes My Little Ponies and hates footie can rape me just as easily as an Anytown Rovers season ticket holder can. Women's safety isn't about hobbies or consumer tendencies or what job a man has, but about his potential to use his wedding tackle as a weapon against my reproductive system.

Newnham existing as a women's college was, in part, to provide safe accommodation for students who can be forcibly made pregnant by other students who happen to have wedding tackle. Letting wedding tackle owners in defeats that purpose.

Sweden has gender neutral parental leave for 480 days so that's false.

There are substantial differences in employment choices with women dominating health, welfare, and education while men are highly concentrated in STEM and physical trades.

Recently another poster wheeled out an article that they said showed women making more "feminine' choices in Scandinavian countries. I read it.

What it actually revealed was not women freely choosing the more "feminine" option, but women making economic choices according to the constraints of their particular society.

In America (poor welfare, but low tax), the better option was to work full time and pay for childcare, so they tended to do that. In Scandinavia (generous welfare, but high tax) working only part time or being a stay- at- home mother was more favourable, so they tended to do that.

That policy's changed since I last looked at Sweden.

Experience of shared parental leave in the UK is that men don't take it even though it's there. Equal in law doesn't translate into equal in society. Heggettypeg explains the financial drivers behind women's decisions well. The men don't take the paternity and shared leave because they already earn more, so are the primary earner for the kids, and they don't want to damage their promotion prospects or get behind in work-related knowledge (IT and parts of biology are pigs for moving fast, just a year out and you will be struggling to catch up when you return) that will harm their ability to provide for their kids. So they stay at work.

Look, I agree, a partner may choose to stay home because one out earns the other or because of government subsidies so stay at home parenting choices aren't necessarily a reflection of organic gendered choices. But Sweden has gender neutral subsidies & women can choose to be in higher earning professions if they want like stem but aren't despite being more educated.

30% of men in Sweden do. Now that might be a reflection of economic earning power being the deciding factor in families but women still freely choose profession. None of this invalidates that women are choosing different professions to men when there's no obligation for them not to.

I repost: "IT and parts of biology are pigs for moving fast, just a year out and you will be struggling to catch up when you return." I'm talking here about knowing the current technology and techniques to do your work effectively.

Women who want kids will self-select into slower-moving professions compared to men and women who don't want kids, because a mother can't not take at least several months out after giving birth.

As loathe as I am to link Psychology Today as 'evidence' this piece links to relevant studies that indicate gendered differences in STEM are much more than bias or work life balance issues.

www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/rabble-rouser/201707/why-brilliant-girls-tend-favor-non-stem-careers

The points listed as 1 to 4 show (point 4) that where individuals of either sex have high maths and high verbal skills, they are less likely to be in STEM subjects in their 30s. In other words, that's how individuals with a choice of skills behave, regardless of sex.

If there's any sex difference indicated, it's that more women have both skill sets, and a relative lack of verbal skills in men, which limits the choices for those men to STEM.

So maths skills seem to be fairly "unisex". Why fewer men have verbal skills is not explained. Nature or nurture, or both?

Let's not forget there are substantial differences in mathematical ability particularly at the tail end of distributions between males & females skills that could easily be accounted for in part by differing brain structures, verbal skills included that influences interests.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4270278/

Oh how nice, a long, long term plan to explain away how we're collaborating with a deeply misogynistic regime and helping it to continue with the imprisonment of it's women on our soil.

This is not respect this is compliance, this is the Uni's chasing the petrodollar, and if they have to act as jailers to get the money, why not, it's all about the bucks, principles won't pay the wage bill after all.
If were not willing to apply our 'values' on our own soil then our 'values' are worthless.
Silly me for thinking Human Rights are for all Humans, Women's rights are for all Women, and not collaborating in our own country with a system that denies them to half of it's population would be a good way of us living up to our much vaunted 'values'.

I understand your view that identity is ultimately a matter of personal self definition, and that biological and behavioural traits are too variable to determine who someone is. I just don't agree with it.

Where I particularly disagree is in the conclusion that this makes sex irrelevant as a social category. Even if we accept (which I don't) that people should be free to define their own identities, it does not follow that sex ceases to matter.

Women are a sex based class. We may differ enormously in personality, interests, beliefs and life experiences, but there are still inescapable realities that arise from being female rather than male. Those realities are the reason sex based categories exist in the first place.

So even if your framework became universally accepted, the practical question would remain. We would still need to ask whether there are circumstances in which sex, rather than identity, is the relevant distinction. For me, women's privacy, dignity and safety are examples of contexts where that question cannot simply be dismissed.

That's really the point I'm making. Recognising identity does not automatically remove the need to recognise sex where sex itself is the reason the category exists. If sex remains relevant in many contexts, then the debate is not really about whether identity exists, but about when sex matters and when it doesn't.

Recognising identity does not automatically remove the need to recognise sex where sex itself is the reason the category exists.

Agreed. I'm not suggesting consequences don't matter & conflicting rights shouldn't be addressed.

Bailey and his AI word salads still getting off on the attention then

I'm glad we agree that consequences matter and that conflicting rights have to be addressed.

What I'm still unclear on is how your framework works in practice, particularly in relation to the subject of this thread.

If a women's college is permitted to admit anyone who self identifies as a woman, what distinguishes it from a mixed sex college in any meaningful sense?

If sex remains relevant in some contexts, as you've agreed it can, then surely the question is whether a college established for women is one of those contexts.

More broadly, where do you think sex should remain the determining criterion rather than identity, and how would that work in practice? Hospital wards, refuges, changing rooms, prisons and women's colleges all exist because sex has been considered relevant to their purpose. If trans women are categorised as women for those purposes, how are genuinely single-sex spaces or institutions preserved?

I'm not trying to be argumentative; I'm trying to understand how your position translates from a philosophical principle into a workable policy. Because that seems to be the real issue raised by the example in the original post.

I'm totally baffled now as to what you are trying to prove.

You denied in an earlier post that there was a lot of overlap between male and female interests and life choices:

Even if there are some average differences in how men and women tend to behave, there is still a lot of overlap,
Not when it comes to consumerist, employment, special interest & life choices where vast differences are measured in what is fundamentally the biggest parts of peoples lives.

What that article says is that there is, on the contrary, quite a big overlap. Figure 3 shows that females make up approximately 25% of engineering students, along with about 1/3 of maths and IT students and about 40% of physics and earth science students. Arts and humanities are nearly 50/50, with a slight bias towards females.

Image should appear shortly.

Just realised that we have spent a long time responding to Bailey twitching the rope, and have somehow ended up in Sweden.

Meanwhile, back in Cambridge, Newnham are still betraying history, fairness and women.

If a women's college is permitted to admit anyone who self identifies as a woman, what distinguishes it from a mixed sex college in any meaningful sense?

My own view is that because its such a minuscule number it wouldn't really have a significant impact on the overall 'mission' of a woman's college. And its another opportunity to promote & cater for intersectional feminism that in my view is a more relevant effective manifestation of feminism. Given the college's historical commitment to feminism it makes sense they build on that.

Are you seriously trying to argue that making it harder for women to study here is a feminist act? You do realise that the same argument, that women should just put up with the male gaze or else stay at home, has been made by TRAs to undermine women's right to single-sex spaces like changing rooms and loos.

These women aren't confined to their offices. They can veil up and leave the office at any time. This arrangement simply lets them unveil at their desks. They still have meetings with men and go to seminars with men.

Part of the mission for a women's college with global intake is supporting women to study here whose home cultures and families would inhibit them living in mixed accommodation and would hence lose out on a study opportunity.

Also @Baileyonice

My brother is a short guy at 5ft 4 but identifies as 6ft 2

Some of the reasons he identifies as tall is due to the traits and stereotypes associate with tall men. Tall men are often perceived as more dominant and authoritative, which can lead to advantages in social and professional settings. They may also experience higher self-esteem due to societal biases that favour height, impacting their confidence and success. Also statistically taller men earn more than shorter men.

My brother is a high earner, he is quite a dominant guy and has high self esteem. He therefore identifies as tall and will ask that people recognise his height identity as a human right.

He claims that height can mean two things, 1) actual measured height 2) Identity height.

He also claims that there is a vast mosaic of heights people can identity in to which have nothing to do with measured height.

If the overall mission of a women's college is to have a female-only space for women to study, then a single man in that has a significant impact by turning it into a mixed-sex space.

Most colleges are mixed sex. Why can't these men just go to one of them instead? Why do they feel the need to invade a rare single-sex space for women? It's just for validation, isn't it?