Flicking through the Varsity archives, you come across a diverse range of material. From Michael Winner’s column in the ’50s to reviews of Sandi Toksvig and Emma Thompson’s first sketch show in 1980, famous names leap out from the pages. Yet when you look down the list, something less thrilling strikes you. While Varsity was established only a year before female undergraduates were admitted as full members of the university, only a gradual trickle of women appear in the pages in anything other than a charming feature of the ’50s: ‘Girl of the Week’. Even in the ’80s and ’90s, as women begin to occupy more space in Cambridge’s culture, the ADC and Varsity’s team of writers, the line-up is far from diverse. In fact, the list is almost exclusively white.

It’s tempting to look back to Varsity’s beginnings and reflect cosily on “how far we’ve come”. In 1957, a reporter sets out to interview students at Newnham and Girton, but asks them not about their experiences as a pioneering generation of women’s education, but their bust and waist measurements. Sports coverage featured explicitly racist cartoons. Tracing histories of progress, through stories of the first women admitted to the Footlights to a regular feminist column in the ’90s, titled ‘All About Eve’, makes us feel warm and fuzzy. But it can make us complacent. Reflecting too much on how far we’ve come with equality and diversity can make us forget how far we have left to go.

You could trot out names like Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie and Richard Ayoade, and claim that representation of BME students in Cambridge has 'improved'. Certainly the achievements of these figures should be celebrated. Richard Ayoade was President of the Footlights from 1997-1998 and won the Martin Steele Prize for play production from St Catherine's college. Zadie Smith is the greatest success story of the Mays anthology, a yearly compendium of Oxbridge student writing. Salman Rushdie, another King's alumnus, has, among numerous awards, won the Booker Prize and the Whitbread award (twice). But the fact that these names can be singled out so clearly as 'successful BME students at Cambridge' is an indication that they are the exceptions which prove the rule of representation in Cambridge history. Can you imagine a similar, compact list of names of white British students being trotted out to prove that white students had a part to play in the Cambridge cultural scene? Cambridge, alongside Oxford, continues to be subject to allegations of discrimination against BME applicants in the press. The CUSU BME campaign, the FLY project, and the recent controversy over the 'Dear World...Yours, Cambridge' campaign video featuring David Starkey all demonstrate that the ongoing marginalisation of people of BME ethnicities and structural racism are things that Cambridge needs to take very seriously.

I am white. I can speak with no authority about the effect on BME students of continuing low levels of representation in Cambridge. The only reason I write this is because, due to a whirlwind of week 7 busy-ness, no one else accepted the commission. Yet I think in our 800th issue, an issue which could so easily become purely self-congratulatory, this is an important piece to include. I can only speak from my experiences as a young woman, and I can only say that the effect of representation, the places in which you see people who look like you, influences on a fundamental level your aspirations and the places in which you see yourself, your career and your relationships. We do not form our identities in vacuum – we look to the world around us to gauge our place in it.

I am also writing this because of my responsibility this term as one of the Culture Editors. In the last edition we put together a spread on spoken word poetry in Cambridge that we were very proud of. The art form has been on the rise in Cambridge and we wanted to give it as big a platform as possible. We interviewed Cambridge students who write and perform spoken word poetry, assessed the status of slam in popular culture, and provided a potted history of spoken word as a movement. Yet as we went to print, I was hit by a realisation: spoken word has a long history in the US as a form of protest, with roots in the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement, a way for marginalised ethnicities to register their opinions, their anger, their feelings in a world which does not offer widespread recognition of BME experiences. We succeeded on one front in our feature: two out of the three poets we interviewed were female. But all of them were white. This was not at all through conscious design, and I am by no means arguing for any kind of simple tokenistic checklist of genders and identities, but this serves to illustrate that these issues are something we must strive to be conscious of, and good intentions alone are not enough.

Feminism is by no means a battle won, either. Understandings of spectrums of gender and sexuality are by no means full and comprehensive. The ‘All About Eve’ Varsity column from the 90s is particularly striking because it deals with the exact same issues of sexual assault and consent that we assume in student discourse today to be at the forefront of the struggle for gender equality. Last week's Trinity breakfast debacle shows that discussions about the place of women in the university are far from easy and uncontroversial. Again, complacency is far from advisable.

So what's the answer? I am far from qualified to propose a comprehensive programme of action. Developments in Cambridge culture are showing promising signs. Last term's production of Othello, starring Varsity columnist Lola Olufemi in the title role, received rave reviews for its ambitious handling of the dynamics of gender and race. And perhaps the representation of different genders and ethnicities in Cambridge culture will be limited as long as the balance of actual students in Cambridge remains out of kilter. But ultimately, the most important thing is to keep these issues at the front of our minds, to keep talking about them and to take seriously the promotion of voices so often marginalised.