University admits failure in bid for gender balanced Challenge team

Wadham feared fielding ‘sub-standard’ female team members would be unfair on others and tokenistic

AN OXFORD University college has abandoned attempts to strike a gender balance on its University Challenge team over fears it would under-perform.

In a bid to improve female representation on the BBC quiz show, Wadham College established female-only trials in the hope that women would feel more confident in applying.

But the policy now appears to have been sidelined amid fears that it might mean Wadham, which is considered one of Oxford’s most liberal colleges, having to field a sub-standard team.

The about-turn comes a month after St Hugh’s faced criticism for fielding four male students on the programme, despite the fact it had originally been founded as a women’s college in 1886.

After the show aired, student committee members at Wadham decided they would introduce single-sex trials in order to guarantee that at least one woman was accepted on to the team.

However, after three weeks of trials, Wadham has backtracked amid fears that selecting a woman with lower scores than their male counterparts would be seen as “tokenistic” and unfair to other team members.

In minutes seen by The Daily Telegraph, members of its student committee said that while they were “very keen” to field a balanced team, they were not prepared to risk embarrassment on national television.

“It would not be good for the welfare of the woman entrant to be there knowing she was let in to fill a quota,” one student said.

Another added that while “we’d like to have a representative team... it would be embarrassing and maybe tokenistic that the team was not selected on a meritocratic basis”.

Put to a vote, the majority of college’s committee members supported a motion stating that Wadham would put forward an all-male team for the show if a female applicant failed to make it into the top six entrants.

Greg Ritchie, a Wadham social secretary, said that the committee stood by its decision, adding that it maintained that “putting a woman forward who was not of the necessary standard would be unfair on other contestants”.

However, Mr Ritchie added that the final decision on whether to field an allmale team had now been referred to the Students’ Union, which would cast a women-only vote during its next sitting.

Additional reporting by Emily Lawford