I got married two years ago and I am using variations of my maiden name, my married name and a very unwieldy hyphenation of the two, which I suppose will at some point resolve itself in to a lowest common demoninator. But I find I have no issues at all with being called ‘Mrs’.

Wierd.

For me therefore, it’s about other people’s perceptions of my maturity, not about people’s perceptions of me being someone else’s possession. I suspect that this is the same for a lot of people who don’t like to be called ‘Mrs’. Only they have different hang-ups to me :-).

I’d like to ask those feminists who express their feelings of superiority about being childless spinsters if it ever occurred to them that the reason they are so "disappointed" by the generation that followed them is that while they were doing their thing women of their age who didn’t share their convictions were *reproducing and raising* that very generation?

dsquared, are you saying that in the circumstances you describe, where one studied as an undergraduate can matter more than where one got a MA or PhD?

Equally, freelance private sector work in medicine is generally frowned upon unless you’ve already acquired a doctorate. The same is not true in economics, and I’d be surprised were Oxford’s economics M Phil course not to take private sector analytical experience into account.

Cambridge doesn’t seem to arouse the same levels of hostility, but that’s because, by a providential jink that probably causes tutorial staff still to sacrifice a member of the rowing team on the King’s College chapel altar each year, Laura Spence decided she would prefer dreaming spires to freezing fenland

It’s not actually true; it’s because Cambridge does much better than Oxford on all the relevant metrics these days.

I also do think that there’s something irredeemably stinky about including someone’s undergraduate university in and of itself as a decision factor. I know a lot of decent economists running programs at terrible universities, and while the run of the mill of their students are bloody awful, they do actually turn up some outright gems once in a while. One of the cleverest financial analysts I know did a part-time degree at London Guildhall; these days he knows more about his field than almost anyone else and it really does stick in the craw to think that he would get the F-O from Oxford.

And this is the whole problem; the article could have been written in almost exactly the same terms about a university which operated a formal legacy system like what the Americans do. Or even one which reserved some of its places for whites only. It’s not the fact or rigour of the selectivity that’s the problem; it’s the implict or explicit addition of scoring criteria which have nothing to do with the selection problem that’s meant to be solved.

"is absurd to think that universities can unilaterally correct for the effects of a class-divided society. Of course the figures showing how much greater are the chances of children of the professional classes going to university than children of manual workers reveal a scandalous situation. But the scandal is not about university admissions: it is about the effect of social class in determining life-chances; the corresponding figures about, say, mortality are a much worse scandal."