Women-only colleges at Cambridge, why?

The most bizarre part is that no one wants to go to them anyway. They're vastly under subscribed and more than half of the girls there are there via the pool, not by choice.

As were the last mens' full colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. In days when the numbers applying was not as great as today, it was market forces that drove the colleges to go mixed. What has happened in recent years is that the sheer Cambridge demand for undergradaute places has allowed Newnham and New Hall to remain single sex.

Are you mother****ing kidding me? Women in the west are more likely to finish high school, attend college, finish college, they have countless female only scholarships and programs, lower standards for being admitted into colleges and jobs, it never ****ing ends!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Men are doing worse and worse across the board, young women are more educated and are making more money than young men in both US and UK. Yet all we ever heard about is how bad women have it.

What is your degree choice? Because, as I've said 500 times before, every single ****ing time a feminist complains there aren't enough women in well paid STEM degrees/careers it's always someone who did psychology/sociology/medieval studies/english or some other worthless ''female'' Mickey Mouse degree. Well , why didn't you go into petroleum engineering or compsci?

In my experience at Oxford, it does seem like the college works hard to maintain student satisfaction; puts a not insignificant amount of money into the JCR, the hall, accommodation, open days. Is this just not the case at these colleges then or something? '**** the students we're going to remain single sex anyway'? Is it to do with donors' preferences?

Because it's blatantly obvious that if any colleges were still all-male, there'd be cries of sexism, the CUSU Women's Campaign would be using them as evidence of the elitist patriarchy still alive in Cambridge etc etc etc. But when it's women-only colleges, nobody bats an eyelid.

i think an all male golfing club had to allow women in because they were called sexist.
now condaleeza rice is in it

Augusta National (which is the American golf club in question) was a golf club without any women members but was not an all male club. It was put under pressure by sponsors of the US Masters.

There are many other golf clubs that are expressly all male including the Royal & Ancient

Both Oxford and Cambridge had mostly single sex colleges at the date the Sex Discrimination Act came into force. Part of the bargain for that act, was that educational institutions could retain their single sex status. Frankly, the legislation would not have passed without it.

Educational market forces sent most Oxbridge colleges mixed. I know the story at Oxford (if you have access to The Times online the story is told briefly in the obituary of John Albery) but I am not so familiar with Cambridge.

When a piece of social reforming legislation is the product of a careful compromise, it is unfair that the rights preserved by that compromise should be abrogated simply because the social reform happened.

If someone had said to Cambridge in 1975 "we will let your single sex colleges remain, but when there are only a few of them left, we will put pressure on the remainder to go mixed", it is perfectly obvious that Cambridge would have told the government to stick their compromise where the sun doesn't shine.

Government ought to keep faith with commitments made.

I was just on wikipedia and stumbled across a fact that Cambridge has women-only colleges such as Newnham College.
Isn't that unfair on men? If a woman applies to Cambridge, then doesn't she have a marginally greater chance of being offered a place (through pooling or not) simply because she not only has access to the mixed-sex colleges but the single-sex colleges too?

Can someone please explain to me how it's fair to have women only colleges at Cambridge?

Sorry if I come across as ignorant but I always thought universities tried to champion equality.

Was that applicable to government-funded institutions (i.e. state schools and unis) as well as private educational institutions? Genuine question.

There are single sex comprehensives to this day. Trevelyan at Durham didn't go mixed until 1992. The was a London medical school for women until 1998. There are still a few single sex halls of residence around.

The 'western world' isn't just the US and the UK. Across many parts of Europe, S. America and developed Asia, access to educational opportunities for women and particularly those that lead to high paying careers is still limited compared to men.

I specifically mentioned non-university based education, yet all of your comments above appear to be about access to the upper universities, where, yes, in recent years women have obtained equal access.

Women putting themselves forwards for STEM or computer science, etc, is a different issue - the ways in which boys and girls are encouraged into learning differently at school at a very young age and the messages from the media and society at large all play a part. The obvious proof that this is the case is that girls who go to girls-only schools tend to be much more likely to access those subjects at university than those who don't. They haven't been put off.

Sexism and discrimination are not only accepted but encouraged as long as they don't apply to women. Welcome to the western world, enjoy your stay!

Except that many women dislike the all women's colleges both in principle and in practise. If you look at the Cambridge statistics you'll see that Newnham and Murray Edwards get most of their students from the pool because the Cambridge standard girls aren't applying there.

Also, they were created because when women were FINALLY allowed to go to university (you know, WAY after men were) men didn't think it was appropriate for women to mix with them because they were "separate" and "other" and didn't belong there.

But I'm sure men had a tough time too.