There were ten full time sabbatical officer roles available at the 2013 Executive Elections. Of those ten, seven are due to be occupied by women.
Indeed none of the positions which involved both sexes did a male manage to come out on top.
For a campus which is so male-dominated, an executive (without Development Officers) which is 70% female may come as a slight surprise. However, the candidates with the better campaigns inevitably came out on top. I don’t think gender came into it.
Jennie Cooper became the first female AU president in nearly a decade. However, based on her campaign this year, I suspect she could have won comfortably last year as well and even given Adam Rae a run for his money two years ago.
Clearly the student body are not quite as single-minded as many people would have you believe. I wouldn’t go as far as saying appearance never comes into it, but a good campaign, social media presences and speaking to students are clearly much bigger factors in who comes out on top.
This is a very refreshing state of play for Loughborough. Many other Student Unions around the country have women officers, sabbatical team members whose sole purpose is to represent women in their union. Clearly, in Loughborough there is no need for such an officer.
However, we should not get carried away.
Those with the strength and confidence to succeed on a male-dominated campus are clearly flourishing, however I suspect for every success story there are those who will be struggling. The Loughborough Bubble does not suit everyone and more can always be done to support all students, a major contributing factor to the re-introduction of a VP Welfare and Diversity.
More female sabbatical role models, following in the footsteps of excellent Executive members like Lucy Hopkins and Sarah Musgrave, is at the very least, another step in the right direction.
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