In Cambridge, the imminent arrival of spring is heralded not by conventional images of exuberant daffodils and stumbling baby animals. Instead, many of us must content ourselves with the festival of nervous sweat, stammering speeches and disconcertingly adept use of Photoshop that signifies the annual election of our JCR committees.

Successful candidates emerge blinking in the bright light of their own optimism; the rest of college delights in having new people to drunkenly berate.

Aside from discussions on rent negotiations, kitchen fixed charges and bops threatened by miscellaneous bodily fluids, elections provide a rare insight into what your college thinks. So it was disappointing after a constitutional referendum just before Corpus’s elections that literally the only amendment out of seven voted down was the proposed change of Gender Equalities officer to Women and Non-Binary officer. This would essentially have meant only female or non-binary students could run and vote for the role, whereas currently students of any gender can do so.

Before I go on, I think it’s important to mention that I fully support our outgoing and incoming Gender Equalities officers. Since its introduction, great things have been done with the role and I’m sure this will continue. However, this constitutional arrangement not only creates unnecessary practical difficulties for anyone occupying the position, but perpetuates unhelpful and frankly mistaken attitudes to female and non-binary rights among the student population. Even if you reject feminism completely, logically, it just doesn’t make sense.

At Corpus, as at many other colleges, our officers for BME, LGBT+ and international students must constitutionally belong to the group they represent, and only students of each respective group may vote for them. So why the difference with Gender Equalities? One argument is that feminism helps men too (!), a fully accurate but nonetheless tiring refrain from your local neighbourhood male ‘feminist’, who can’t help feeling like nothing in this world will ever be valuable unless some man somewhere is gaining some sort of tangible benefit from it. Society as a whole will also, as it happens, benefit from the eradication of homophobia and structural racial inequality. But you don’t see me, a thoroughly and comprehensively white woman, running for Ethnic Minorities officer because I picked up Malcolm X’s autobiography one time.

Yes, it’s true, the candidates for and occupants of this relatively new position have so far only been female. Surely it’s highly unlikely that a man would run for the position, so it’s just a pragmatic way of avoiding controversy in a cultural climate which often seems to hysterically equate feminism with the tyranny of a Stalinist regime? Perhaps – but this isn’t just a question of abstract, ideological justice. This constitutional set-up has the potential to cause real, practical difficulties.

Election makes you accountable to all those who voted for you. So being accountable to the whole student body is inconsistent with the role of representing and defending a distinct group of students within that body. By no means am I suggesting that we live in some anarchic world where the interests of male, female and non-binary students are always separate, but the reality is that female and non-binary students continue to face comparative disadvantage in many areas of Cambridge life on the basis of their gender. This group needs specific representation.

Yet in this set-up Gender Equalities officers are accountable to men too. Call me a radical militant, but I don’t think you can ever truly and fully represent a group of which you are not a part. Unless you lack the maturity to not take everything personally, it should be obvious that this is not an attack or an act of exclusion. People always accuse feminists of being too sensitive, but I’ve never seen anything nearly as fragile as a white man’s ego upon being told that feminism isn’t actually all about him.

Don’t get me wrong. Some of my best friends are white men for goodness’ sake. I’m writing this column not with the intention of stirring up intra-college politics – as I say, those involved have managed to handle the role very well. Why do we have this particular compulsion to constantly reassure men that the simple act of protecting women’s rights and wellbeing is not intended as a threat to them? A BME officer is not an anti-white position. The existence of an LGBT+ officer is not the covert sign of an all-out war against the heterosexuals.

Men do have a lot to gain from feminism – this is a result of the way that we always conceptualise genders against one another. Yet we must not forget that difficulties for men come about because the worse thing in the world is for them to be seen as remotely akin to femaled. Being female is the ultimate source of denigration, and from this conception springs a violence that manifests itself in the biggest and smallest ways, from one in two female students at Cambridge feeling that their mental health has had a negative impact on their work (compared with one in three men), to the degree courses like my own which see women achieve only 8.7 per cent of Firsts in Part I despite comprising 49.5 per cent of the year. If we agree that gender equality is an issue to tackle, we accept that there is universal and systematic gender inequality.

Ultimately, this means that women and non-binary students experience unique disadvantages. Let’s also not forget that Corpus was one of the last colleges to accept female undergraduates, in 1983, well within the scope of many academics’ careers. It’s time we stop ferociously back-peddling and allowed female and non-binary students the representation they deserve across the board.