I'm Gill Aitken and I'm Oxford University's registrar, and it's 100 years since degrees were first awarded to women at Oxford.
I'm here to tell you a story. It's not explicitly about women's degrees at Oxford, but it is a story about education.
The expectations we set ourselves and have set for us.
And most of all, it's about confidence. Because I'm interested not just in the last hundred years of education at Oxford,
but I'm interested in how women are going to embrace education and gain that confidence in the future to.
It's a story of how far we have already come. And it's a story about Pamela Brailsford.
She was. She's my mother. She was bright.
She was curious. And she was encouraged at home. Her mother had been a pupil teacher.
So she had qualified as a teacher through through partly teaching and partly learning in a village school in in Cheshire.
My mother studied as a reasonable school in London and she wanted to go to university.
She really wants to go to university. She wanted to read history. The school thought differently.
They thought she was sporty and therefore it would be much more appropriate if she took a teacher training course and became a sports teacher.
She thought about it. She ignored it, and she applied to read history at Bedford College, London, which is indeed what she ultimately did.
She loved it. She was perfect for a university life.
She lived at home as many young women in those days would.
We're talking about the very early 1950s. She thought she would like to go on from history to law, that she was again discouraged.
I think she may have been discouraged by my grandparents as well as by any careers adviser,
because you had to pay in those days to get her to get her to pay a premium to be trained.
And so it wouldn't have involved outlay by her parents.
That wouldn't have been possible.
Instead of going on to law, she joined what was a social prototype of what is now called the far stream for the civil service.
She became an Inland Revenue tax inspector trainee.
It was quite an elite thing to be chosen to do.
It was a superb training, she tells. She told stories of meeting sex workers in Soho and trying to persuade them to pay tax.
I'm not quite sure how that went.
Other than the fact that she made friends with several of them and we revisited them ourselves when we were young children.
She had a superb training, as I said. She really thought that she had a career there and she was very happy in the civil
service and indeed could have moved on from being a tax inspector had she wanted to.
But in 1955, she got engaged. She got engaged to my father, who she'd met at university and.
She wasn't sacked, but she was required to resign.
She got married. She became a wife.
She became a mother. I turned up. What happened to me?
I also went to a reasonable school and had lots of encouragement at home, like my mother, I was curious.
I was bright. I wanted to go to university. This time round, it was different.
Very different. In fact, I was actively encouraged to apply to Oxford and indeed came to Oxford.
Studied philosophy and theology at cinches. I loved it.
I had a sense as a students at Oxford that I could do next whatever I chose.
There was no question that I shouldn't think about my own choices.
I shouldn't go for the things that I thought would make me thrive.
I chose law. That subject. But my mother wished she chosen perhaps I partly chose it because she hadn't had that opportunity early in my career.
I was told I would only succeed if I were better than the men.
I was never told what better than the men meant. It was never defined in any way.
I had no idea whether it was about being a brilliant lawyer or about being a very helpful person,
to being able to make my clients achieve that their goals other than through law.
I had absolutely no idea. I sort of ignored it.
I had a great early career as a pharmaceutical lawyer in the city and then moved to the civil service.
One thing, the buzz of politics, the being close to policymaking as a lawyer, designing legal policy.
A few decades later, I found myself at board level in the civil service.
Indeed, I found myself as a director general and the head of law in, you've guessed it, the Inland Revenue.
Now called HMRC. Sixty years after that forced resignation,
she could see her daughter at board level in the organisation that had first of all, she remembered it well.
Given her a superb training, but it also required her to resign.
What can we learn from stories like this? What can we learn from our mothers experience when we compare it to our own?
First, I think primarily of how my mother and I how similar we are.
We both were curious. We had a love of learning. Education meant a great deal to us.
We were both determined. We were both people who wanted a career, were prepared to put a great deal into that career.
How were we different? What made her trajectory so different from mine?
I think it was that there was a lack of aspiration and belief in women in the mid 20th century.
I think that's affected the people around them. The people who dreamt up that rule want to ask some questions about that rule.
Later. But it also affected their own aspiration.
My mother accepted that she had to resign. And later she accepted that she wasn't going to have the type of career that I hope everybody,
everybody coming up now through university and who has come through university in the last 50 years.
Let's say that she didn't expect it for herself.
She thought it was okay, that she should be primarily a wife and a mother.
She did a degree in her 50s, a master's degree in history.
She took on all sorts of roles that required education, that required intelligence.
She did all sorts of things to stretch herself. But she kept that identity as being primarily a wife and a mother.
Why was there that resignation, Rue? As it happened, it still existed less than 10 years before I came to Oxford.
It still existed in the Foreign Office, for example, in the mid 1970s.
If you were a fly on the wall in the committee room that discuss that rule,
perhaps invented it or maybe reviewed it to see whether it should continue.
What would you have heard? Well, it would only have been men.
I think in that room and I assume that they would have talked about the importance of of of the culture, the importance of the hard work ethic,
the fact that women might be distracted by that other parts of their lives if they were allowed to get to senior positions.
Was it fear? Is that what underlay it? Was it fear that the women might be better?
Was it a concern that the culture of the workplace somehow might be feminised and that wouldn't be such fun?
Who knows? But what I do know is that the expectations on women in the mid 20th century are so much less than they are now.
Now we have fabulous role models. Women achieve things in every sphere of life.
We get excellent results in universities. But I ask.
As we think of 100 years of degrees at Oxford, I'm thinking beyond that, what does the future hold?
Are our expectations now still held back? Are our expectations as demanding as our intelligence?
Are they as demanding as our curiosity and our determination warns?
What do you think? What's your story? Thank you.