Ban on word ‘flair’ in exam marking due to its male bias

CAMBRIDGE University examiners are told to avoid using words like “flair”, “brilliance” and “genius” when assessing students’ work because they are associated with men, an academic revealed.

Lucy Delap, a lecturer in British history at the university, said history tutors were discouraged from using the terms because they “carry assumptions of gender inequality”.

“Some of those words, in particular genius, have a very long intellectual history where it has long been associated with qualities culturally assumed to be male,” she said. “Some women are fine with that, but others might find it hard to see themselves in those categories.”

Ms Delap, who specialises in gender history, said one of the reasons men achieved more first-class degrees at Oxford and Cambridge than women was because female students struggled with the “male-dominated environment”.

Examples included reading lists dominated by male academics and portraits hanging on college walls that were either of men or by men, she said.

Academics were told to stick closely to the mark scheme when marking history essays, which assesses the ability to answer the questions, analytic skills and breadth of knowledge.

“We want to use language that is transparent,” she said. “We’re rewriting our first two years of our history degree to create a wider set of paper choices, to make assessment criteria clearer, and to really try and root out the unhelpful and very vague talk of ‘genius’, of ‘brilliance’, of ‘flair’, which carries assumptions of gender inequality and also of class and ethnicity.”

Cambridge University’s history faculty runs confidence-building workshops in the run-up to exams, as it is thought that one reason why male and privately-educated students are more likely to get first-class degree is due to increased self-assurance.

This week it emerged that Oxford University’s history faculty is to allow students to sit exams at home in an attempt to close the gender gap.

♦ Oxford University academics have lost a fresh attempt to challenge rules that would force them to retire at 67. The university’s congregation, made up of academics and related staff, rejected a call to axe the university’s “employer-justified retirement age”.