40 percent fewer women society presidents

There are almost 40 percent fewer female society presidents at the University of Warwick Students’ Union (SU) than male presidents, the Boar has revealed.

There are 144 (62.33 percent) male presidents of societies and 87 female presidents (37.67 percent).

Ant Scott, societies officer at Warwick SU, told the Boar: “I’m saddened to see that there are almost 40 percent fewer female presidents than male.

“It’s hard to explain exactly why this is the case without making large assumptions as we lack a lot of the data that would be useful.

“It will, however, be the case for one of two reasons: either female students are not choosing to run for presidential executive posts, or they do choose to run but fail to be elected.

“If it is the former, our student development manager and other staff have already been addressing this by providing access to training to empower female student leaders, and we will continue to do this.

“I would hope, also, that the fantastic example our current female presidents set would inspire others to follow.”

Although the data set presents 231 presidents, there are more than 240 societies at Warwick SU.

For some societies, the president position is listed as ‘co-ordinator’, ‘editor’ or ‘station manager’, or there may be two co-presidents. These positions are not included in the data.

In addition to this there are more males on executive teams of societies than females: 686 (52.41 percent) in comparison with 619 (47.29 percent).

Despite this disparity, as the male to female ratio at Warwick is 51 percent to 49 percent, the gender balance on executive teams is fairly equal.

A ‘data not current’ figure was also given for the total members of executive teams at 0.15 percent.

This is an error term occasionally generated when data is transferred from the University to the SU, however it is unlikely to greatly affect results because it was only generated for two people.

The data does not include information on how individuals self-define.

The Boar asked students involved with societies at Warwick to comment on the statistics.

Andrew King, second-year Philosophy and Literature undergraduate, volunteering officer at Warwick RAG, and coaching officer and Varsity president of Latin and Ballroom Society commented: “The difference in the split between proportions on executive teams in general (fairly even) and proportions  in presidency is a bit shocking, really.

“That said, I do think the way forward is simply getting more females to run for presidency. There are plenty of females in societies that I think would do better jobs than the current male presidents.

“But, for example, in the Latin and Ballroom elections there was only one candidate (a male), and in the RAG elections there were two male and one female.”

On the other hand, some students were not as shocked.

Harrison Gould, second-year Philosophy, Politics and Economics undergraduate and president of Warwick Jailbreak said: “Although you’ve always got to be careful how you interpret data, the statistics aren’t as bad as I expected.

“Women in leadership elsewhere are far more outnumbered: only 20 percent of MPs are female, and only four percent of FTSE 100 chief executive officers are female.

“But given the disparity in the numbers, I would like to see the SU monitoring this more closely. They could ask societies to collect information on the gender breakdown in elections, and publish this alongside membership demographics.”

This news comes after last year’s SU officer elections resulted in a female majority of four female sabbatical officers to three males.

However, Mr Gould added: “But let’s not just restrict this debate to gender. I’d imagine there is a similar picture for different classes and races.”