Don't price women out of higher education! More on UK teaching funding cuts

NUS Women's Campaign Against the FE/ HE Funding Cuts and proposed tuition fee rises The NUS Women’s Campaign is calling all women who care about education to action outside the office of Lynne Featherstone MP. Lynne Featherstone is Minister for Women and Equalities in the ConDem government, and is the Liberal Democrat MP for Hornsey and Wood Green. If we are to block the attempt to raise fees on Thursday, then Lynne Featherstone must be persuaded to vote against the government’s proposals. Find out about more about this action proposed for December 8.

The Fawcett Society's legal case against the gender discrimination of the UK Coalition Government's budget will be heard at the High Court on Monday

DEFEND the ARTS and HUMANITIES is happy to flag up the above two campaigns/events in the UK, this week, in the run up to the House of Commons vote on proposed tuition fee rises, and the accompanying 80-100% cuts in public funding of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences university teaching.

We urge you to read the following article by Cardiff University PhD student Naomi Holford, which discusses the discriminatory effects of the proposed teaching funding cuts. The article is published by the Gender and Education Association. As Holford writes.

The subjects which have been deemed irrelevant and unnecessary, their teaching support withdrawn, are those which are disproportionately studied by women: arts, humanities and social sciences.

As RG writes at the DEFEND the ARTS and HUMANITIES Facebook group page:

Obviously we should all support efforts to get more women into STEM fields, but it seems important to remember just how gendered the rhetoric of arts subjects as "unimportant" is.

If these issues, and related ones, concern you, please take action NOW. Read yesterday's D.A.H. entry -- Write, March, Lobby! Say NO to academic vandalism in the UK --  for some suggestions.

With thanks to RG, TS, and ML for the above links