It’s been over a year since Cambridge students were last in the national news for campaigning to ‘no-platform’ a speaker at the Union. For a while, particularly after Germaine Greer and Julian Assange were scheduled to speak, it was a trendy topic; but then journalists got bored and went back to mocking safe spaces and trigger warnings, as further evidence that ‘snowflake’ students are too sensitive to handle ‘free speech’.

The Cambridge Union have just released their Lent 2017 term card, and I am disappointed. Not because I’m a member (I can think of better ways to spend £200), but because they’re affiliated with my university and have once again failed at maintaining a gender balance. After noticing a major disparity in Varsity’s coverage of the term card, I went through the entire line-up and found that it was 68 per cent male, and – worse – that only two of the fifteen individual speakers were women. In a university which is in many respects working hard to dispel its reputation for lack of diversity, this makes the Union painfully regressive.

In the ‘no-platforming’ debate, this matters. Because while I agree that refusing to listen to a viewpoint doesn’t make it go away, when there is this level of disparity in the figures we need to think carefully about which viewpoints are being privileged over others. The debate has never been about free speech: that would involve government censorship. The student body has a right to feel angry when the views with which they are presented come overwhelmingly from the same, privileged groups.

Sherlock, Twitter and CIA top Union term card

Based on the term cards for the last two years, the overall proportion of male speakers is 61 per cent, with this term’s line-up the least balanced of the six. But this figure is more disappointing when you consider that the percentage of women is boosted by female-dominated debates on ‘women’s issues’ such as feminism, love and sexualisation in the media: on non-gendered topics the gap is much greater. Particularly concerning is the upcoming debate on liberalising prostitution, in which five of the eight speakers are men.

It would be a mistake to pin the blame exclusively on the Union: after all, a greater proportion of people in most high-powered jobs are male. But that’s a situation that will self-perpetuate if organisations like the Union don’t make an effort at equal representation.

This term, the President, Vice President and Speakers Officer are all female, while in Lent 2016 – where the balance was almost equal at 52/48 – all three were male. Privilege is complex and intersectional, and maybe the women at the Union don’t feel that sexism affects them personally. But living in a comparatively progressive environment doesn’t mean that we should stop noticing inequality, and, importantly, trying to change it.