My Winning Letter

In my student days (in the 1970s), the students' union ran the campaign to recruit the members of the university team for University Challenge. If this is still the case, then it shows that women students are perhaps undervalued even more than in those embryonic liberal times.

For the last two weeks (22nd and 29th August) all the teams from co-educational institutions were male-only. In fact, the number of women on the programme this year has been abysmally small. I was not a supporter of all-female colleges at Oxford, Cambridge and the one or two other places that had them, but now I see that the undermining of women's education when these colleges were mixed seems to have been exactly as it was predicted by opponents of mixing them. Women have been sidelined and excluded. I don't know how the young men on these teams have the nerve to sit there and pretend to be representative of their student body.

Perhaps it is time to change either the recruitment process, or the conditions for the inclusion of a team in the competition, by the BBC's insisting on proportionate representation of women in the teams put forward for the competition.

Then perhaps it can address its own resistance to females in high positions such as Director General...