The Gender Gap in STEM Tripos Performance
Suchir Salhan investigates the gender gap in STEM Triposes, which Murray Edwards President, Dorothy Byrne, has condemned.
Image by Kim Fyson via Wikimedia Commons
Academics at Murray Edwards have found female students studying STEM subjects are far less likely to get a first-class degree than their male counterparts– statistics which the college’s President, Dorothy Byrne, has condemned as “shocking”. In an opinion article for The Times, Byrne claims ‘girls divert themselves into the “caring” sciences’. “It won’t be the vets who come up with solutions to climate change,” Byrne argues.
Statistics compiled by Murray Edwards academics show approximately 8% of women studying Computer Science receive a first class degree in Cambridge, compared to 32% of men who receive the top grade and similar trends across other STEM disciplines, including in the Mathematical Tripos– where 79% of men were awarded ‘good degrees’, the combined figure for students gaining Firsts and Upper Second Class Degrees, but only 45% of women.
While the structure and curriculum of STEM Triposes may not be changing, the demographics of its students are. Byrne said “in some subjects, the percentage of women is entering below 20%” of the cohort, noting that this is less than the quota of places reserved for women when Murray Edwards was founded 70 years ago. Byrne spoke to Cambridge astrophysicist Hiranya Peris (a speaker at Murray Edward’s Women in STEM Festival on 26th October), who moved to the UK at the age of 16– an age that “was too late for me to be brainwashed”.
Beyond college and departmental access initiatives, there are endemic problems in STEM Triposes within the University. The Cambridge Student has analysed Gender Gap statistics for STEM Triposes, which reveal a systematic, persistent and long-term divergence in Tripos performance between male and female students across all three years of the course. The table below shows a persistent gender gap (indicated in red) for students who achieved a First Class in the Computer Science Tripos across Part IA, IB and II. Instances where female students in the cohort outperformed male students are indicated in green. Figures from the 2022-23 academic year have not been published due to the Marking and Assessment Boycott.
Guidance on “Supervising Women” published by the Faculty of Mathematics states “there is much debate about whether the underrepresentation of women at the highest levels has cultural or biological origins”, elaborating that “inadequate, insensitive supervision by men is thought to be one of the reasons” why “Cambridge Mathematics loses women faster than men”. Data provided by the University for a prior Freedom of Information request reveal only one female student graduated in 2020 received a First class degree.
The most recent publicly-available meeting minutes from the Faculty of Mathematics highlight the potential role of STEP in mathematics admissions. “There is a lot of evidence that female students prefer the application process of Oxford” than Cambridge, the minutes state. “It appears that many female students, in particular, do not like this uncertainty”. Faculty Board meeting minutes from the Department of Computer Science reveal that the gender balance in Part IA of the Computer Science Tripos is “approximately constant” at 20%.
Beyond Cambridge, Murray Edwards academics, in collaboration with the Higher Education Statistics Agency, revealed that across the higher education sector, 14% of Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry professors in 2021-22 were female, and 9% in Electrical and Computer Engineering. The statistics were even more stark in Medicine: Murray Edwards academics found 70% of graduates are women, however “approximately a third” of Clinical Medicine, Anatomy and Physiology professors are women.
Our Analysis:
Times have changed since women were once barred from Cambridge’s laboratories, however the statistics shared by Murray Edwards suggests that the experience of female STEM students has, in many ways, remained in stasis. Cambridge students are, unfortunately, familiar with gender gaps in Tripos performance.
While Byrne correctly highlights female representation in scientific fields like mathematics and computer science, disparaging fields that are more female-dominated as ‘caring’ sciences imports a gendered judgement of the value of different scientific disciplines. Some, like physics or computer science, are seen as more serious, more male, and thus more valuable. The more female-dominated field of veterinary medicine is viewed as caring and thus less valuable– it can’t productively “help climate change”, she suggests.
Byrne is not alone in claiming that there is a tendency for female STEM students in secondary school to drift away from STEM subjects. Master of Churchill College, Professor Dame Athene Donald, an Experimental Physicist (specialising in soft matter physics) and Cambridge University’s first Gender Equality Champion has condemned the absence of the contributions of female scientists from the national curriculum as “pretty damning”, suggesting in a 2022 interview that “most of the images one sees of scientists, physicists are white males … starts really young. The message society gives is … if you are black or if you are a woman, you don’t see yourself fitting in”. The Master of Churchill College has published a book on the matter– entitled Not just for the Boys: Why We Need More Women in Science. “My work on the physics of starch granules was once decried as mere domestic science and all I was fit for as a woman”, Donald wrote in Nature earlier this year, citing the role of gendered power structures in STEM academia.
However, Byrne’s suggestion that the statistically worse Tripos performance and enrollment in STEM subjects in Cambridge is rooted in an endemic culture of “brainwashing” in our secondary education system that pushes women away from STEM subjects is deliberately divisive. It’s a strategy that’s very on-brand: Byrne– a journalist– was widely decried last year by students for expressing plans to Murray Edwards JCR to organise ‘fertility discussions and was criticised for comments in 2019 about Boris Johnson while Head of News at Channel 4.
Byrne has focussed her efforts to argue that there need to be more systematic reforms to secondary education, suggesting “there may be a case for teaching boys and girls separately” in the Sciences. This may well be the case. But, as new data from the University and Colleges Admissions Services (UCAS) has revealed, UK applicants from minority backgrounds have outnumbered white applicants to ‘highly competitive courses’ at Oxbridge, medicine and dentistry and a record number of applications from students from disadvantaged backgrounds, reflecting the success of University and college access initiatives.
But, the systematic problems in STEM education do not lie in admissions, but are firmly rooted in the Tripos system. Historically, preparing women for Tripos has “held a different set of challenges”. The statistics, where only 8% of women studying Computer Science go onto receive a First, are strikingly similar to the Tripos experiences of eminent female scientists in the early 20th Century. Rosalind Franklin completed the Natural Sciences Tripos at Newnham College in the 1930s– before famously being omitted from the shared discovery of DNA with Watson and Crick. Franklin, who got a second class degree in Finals after receiving a First in Part I, wrote in a letter to her family that “I have made a frightful mess of exams... fairly easy papers which I should have done really well... I don't think I can possibly get more than a Third in physics now”.
The lived experience of female students in STEM Triposes are broadly similar, with Mathematics academics expressing “concern about the non-completion rate for women … including a change in subject” away from STEM Triposes which “is anecdotally high for women” as recently as 2019. “Even accounting for STEP [the mathematics admissions test], women perform less well than men in Parts IA and II”, the report states.
Persistent gender inequality in STEM subjects, revealed in the investigation and the data shared by Murray Edwards, is a historic relic of the Tripos system, which needs to be addressed concurrently– albeit separately– with wider discourse on increasing the number of female students studying STEM subjects in secondary education.