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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.

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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.

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The expectations we set ourselves and have set for us.

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And most of all, it's about confidence. Because I'm interested not just in the last hundred years of education at Oxford,

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but I'm interested in how women are going to embrace education and gain that confidence in the future to.

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It's a story of how far we have already come. And it's a story about Pamela Brailsford.

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She was. She's my mother. She was bright.

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She was curious. And she was encouraged at home. Her mother had been a pupil teacher.

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So she had qualified as a teacher through through partly teaching and partly learning in a village school in in Cheshire.

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My mother studied as a reasonable school in London and she wanted to go to university.

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She really wants to go to university. She wanted to read history. The school thought differently.

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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.

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She thought about it. She ignored it, and she applied to read history at Bedford College, London, which is indeed what she ultimately did.

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She loved it. She was perfect for a university life.

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She lived at home as many young women in those days would.

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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.

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I think she may have been discouraged by my grandparents as well as by any careers adviser,

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because you had to pay in those days to get her to get her to pay a premium to be trained.

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And so it wouldn't have involved outlay by her parents.

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That wouldn't have been possible.

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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.

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She became an Inland Revenue tax inspector trainee.

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It was quite an elite thing to be chosen to do.

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It was a superb training, she tells. She told stories of meeting sex workers in Soho and trying to persuade them to pay tax.

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I'm not quite sure how that went.

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Other than the fact that she made friends with several of them and we revisited them ourselves when we were young children.

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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

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service and indeed could have moved on from being a tax inspector had she wanted to.

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But in 1955, she got engaged. She got engaged to my father, who she'd met at university and.

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She wasn't sacked, but she was required to resign.

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She got married. She became a wife.

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She became a mother. I turned up. What happened to me?

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I also went to a reasonable school and had lots of encouragement at home, like my mother, I was curious.

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I was bright. I wanted to go to university. This time round, it was different.

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Very different. In fact, I was actively encouraged to apply to Oxford and indeed came to Oxford.

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Studied philosophy and theology at cinches. I loved it.

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I had a sense as a students at Oxford that I could do next whatever I chose.

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There was no question that I shouldn't think about my own choices.

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I shouldn't go for the things that I thought would make me thrive.

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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.

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I was told I would only succeed if I were better than the men.

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I was never told what better than the men meant. It was never defined in any way.

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I had no idea whether it was about being a brilliant lawyer or about being a very helpful person,

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to being able to make my clients achieve that their goals other than through law.

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I had absolutely no idea. I sort of ignored it.

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I had a great early career as a pharmaceutical lawyer in the city and then moved to the civil service.

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One thing, the buzz of politics, the being close to policymaking as a lawyer, designing legal policy.

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A few decades later, I found myself at board level in the civil service.

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Indeed, I found myself as a director general and the head of law in, you've guessed it, the Inland Revenue.

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Now called HMRC. Sixty years after that forced resignation,

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she could see her daughter at board level in the organisation that had first of all, she remembered it well.

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Given her a superb training, but it also required her to resign.

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What can we learn from stories like this? What can we learn from our mothers experience when we compare it to our own?

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First, I think primarily of how my mother and I how similar we are.

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We both were curious. We had a love of learning. Education meant a great deal to us.

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We were both determined. We were both people who wanted a career, were prepared to put a great deal into that career.

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How were we different? What made her trajectory so different from mine?

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I think it was that there was a lack of aspiration and belief in women in the mid 20th century.

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I think that's affected the people around them. The people who dreamt up that rule want to ask some questions about that rule.

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Later. But it also affected their own aspiration.

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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,

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everybody coming up now through university and who has come through university in the last 50 years.

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Let's say that she didn't expect it for herself.

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She thought it was okay, that she should be primarily a wife and a mother.

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She did a degree in her 50s, a master's degree in history.

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She took on all sorts of roles that required education, that required intelligence.

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She did all sorts of things to stretch herself. But she kept that identity as being primarily a wife and a mother.

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Why was there that resignation, Rue? As it happened, it still existed less than 10 years before I came to Oxford.

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It still existed in the Foreign Office, for example, in the mid 1970s.

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If you were a fly on the wall in the committee room that discuss that rule,

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perhaps invented it or maybe reviewed it to see whether it should continue.

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What would you have heard? Well, it would only have been men.

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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,

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the fact that women might be distracted by that other parts of their lives if they were allowed to get to senior positions.

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Was it fear? Is that what underlay it? Was it fear that the women might be better?

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Was it a concern that the culture of the workplace somehow might be feminised and that wouldn't be such fun?

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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.

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Now we have fabulous role models. Women achieve things in every sphere of life.

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We get excellent results in universities. But I ask.

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As we think of 100 years of degrees at Oxford, I'm thinking beyond that, what does the future hold?

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Are our expectations now still held back? Are our expectations as demanding as our intelligence?

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Are they as demanding as our curiosity and our determination warns?

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What do you think? What's your story? Thank you.