My Submission to the EHRC’s Consultation on its Strategic Plan
By William Collins [aka mra-uk]: I responded to the EHRC by email because their tick-box menu of choices did not cut it for me. I prefer to start further back, with the EHRC report Is Britain Fairer (2015) itself.
What am I to say when the arbiters of fairness are themselves unfair? Is this an unfair assessment? Let’s see.
In Section 4.7 of the report (Access to Higher Education) we are told that,
In 2008, men were more likely to have a degree than women (22.3% of men compared with 20.5% of women). By 2013, women had overtaken men, with 27.7% of men holding a degree compared with 28.4% of women.
So, a gender gap in HE attainment in favour of females then, but of negligible magnitude and of only recent occurrence.
Really?
I presume this unexpected perspective must relate to degrees held by the whole population – including people whose degrees were awarded more than forty years ago and whose educational qualifications ceased to have any significance decades ago. Is this a fair reflection of the current relative status of the genders in HE attainment? The truth is that women have been awarded more degrees than men every year since 1993.