Undergraduates writing exams were given 105 minutes to complete their papers rather than 90 in summer 2017. Faculty members said female candidates were given 15 extra minutes because they “might be more likely to be adversely affected by time pressure”.
The Telegraph reported that the board of examiners recommended the department take action to improve women’s scores in 2016, after only seven female students had received top marks compared to 45 men.
The faculty said no changes were made to the length or difficulty to questions on the test, and a spokesman defended the move by the university as “academically demanding and fair”.
Critics say Oxford is lowering standards for men and women, in order to accommodate the supposed greater need for time by women to complete the tests. Antonia Siu, Undergraduate Representative of Oxford Women in Computer Science, defended the time allocation saying: “I am uneasy about schemes to favour one gender over another.
“But I am happy when people see gaps between groups of people who should not reasonably have such gaps – such as between genders, races or class – and take that as a starting point to think about the kinds of people they unintentionally are leaving behind.”
Oxford is defending its decision, but British daily, The Telegraph, reported that the added time only helped scores to go up, but not by very much. First-class degrees were still predominantly male: 47 percent of male students received firsts, compared to only 39 percent of female students.
Two-thirds of undergraduates are female, and women are currently ahead in the fields of medicine, law, and biology
While women are gaining ground, the latest figures show that white people in Britain are however far less likely than their peers to attend universities bcause of an anti-white racial bias in Britain.
Breitbart London reported that Labour’s Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner admitted that white men were being disadvantaged in Britain by a focus on ethnic minorities and women.
“I think it’s because as we’ve tried to deal with some of the issues around race and women’s agendas, around tackling some of the discrimination that’s there, it has actually had a negative impact on the food chain [for] white working boys,” she told The Spectator.