Nowadays the male to female undergraduate ratio is about equal. In the academic year 2004-5, for example, Cambridge University’s student gender ratio, including postgraduates, was 52% male to 48% female. Women still tend not to hold many of the senior academic positions at either institution, although the current vice-chancellor of Cambridge, Professor Alison Richard, is a notable exception, and King's College received its female provost, Dame Judith Mayhew, in 2003.

From the late 19th century onwards, women were allowed to study courses, sit examinations, and have their results recorded. Women were only finally granted degrees at Oxford from 1920, while attempts to make women undergraduates full members of Cambridge University did not succeed until 1947.

Before this, women were awarded what was known as a “titular degree”. Although these were recognised as formal qualifications, without the full degree that male students were eligible for, women were excluded from the governing of the university. In 1939, Dorothy Garrod (1892-1968) became the first female professor at either university when she was appointed to the Chair of Archaeology at Cambridge.

Since the established colleges remained closed to women, admissions were restricted at first to colleges founded only for women - so both universities existed for much of the 20th century in a state of educational apartheid. It was only in the 1960s that this began to break down.

Cambridge

The first colleges for women were Girton College (1869) and Newnham College (1871), Girton starting life simply as the College for Women, the first-ever such institution in England. New Hall joined them in 1954, and Lucy Cavendish College was established in 1965 to attract older women students.

All the previously all-male colleges opened their doors to women between 1960 and 1988, while Cambridge's youngest college, Robinson, which admitted its first students in 1977, was the first undergraduate college in the university's history to be co-educational from its inception. (The postgraduate Darwin College, founded in 1964, was the first constituent college of either Oxford or Cambridge to start life as a mixed establishment.) Girton has admitted men since 1979, but the other women’s colleges have not so far followed suit.


In March 2005, another precedent was set when Helen Stephens, a former sports masseuse, was appointed the first woman porter in the history of Jesus College, which took in its first students in the last decade of the 15th century.

Oxford

The first academic halls for women at Oxford were established in 1878. Since 1974, all of Oxford's 39 colleges have changed their statutes to admit both men and women. In 2006, St Hilda's, the last remaining women's college, voted to go co-educational, following in the footsteps of its two immediate predecessors, Somerville and St Hugh's. The last men's college, Oriel, voted to admit women in 1985.