Reform candidate supports view that universities are full of ‘childless women’

The Reform candidate in the Gordon and Denton byelection, Matt Goodwin, has been called into question for politically extreme views regarding women’s education.

In a video filmed on the sixth of February 2025, Jordan Peterson, a conservative psychologist and ex-academic, invited Goodwin onto his podcast.

In the podcast, the men shared a displeasure at the increase in opportunities for women in academic pursuits – or as Goodwin puts it, “the feminisation of higher education”.

At the crux of Goodwin’s argument is the conservative desire to reduce the education of women, replacing the university years of young women with years of childbearing

Inflamed by the ‘awokening’ of universities, Goodwin and Peterson agreed that “young female PhD students are the most likely to endorse cancel culture, to sacrifice free speech in order to protect minorities from harm”.

Peterson argued that there were several “predictors” of “politically correct authoritarianism”, including a lower IQ, (although a Yale study and many others like it have debunked IQ as an appropriate measure of intelligence). Peterson claimed that only someone with a lower cognitive ability could be “daft enough to believe those things”.

The second two predictors he cited were being female (Goodwin laughs: “I was gonna say that!”) and having a “female temperament”.

Peterson went on complain that universities were becoming “dominated by not only women … but childless women”, an opinion Goodwin appeared to share.

At the crux of Goodwin’s argument is the conservative desire to reduce the education of women, replacing the university years of young women with years of childbearing, producing the image of what The Guardian calls a “Handmaid’s Tale future”.

Women’s education in the UK has been historically heavily exclusionary: from being allowed admission to university lectures in 1867, women could still not be awarded degrees from Oxford until 1920, or from Cambridge until 1948, despite passing exams.

Hannah Spencer, the Green Party candidate in Gordon and Denton, said: “I wish the Reform candidate put more time into addressing problems and less into looking for divisive, easy answers.”