sexual apartheid in british universities

Completely agree grannyjay How easily we are moving backwards, it's quite pathetic. Signed your petition, well done.

Signed and shared on fb.

Signed, so worrying.

Signed and shared on fb.

Cameron has piled in criticising this. Which is good. Suspect he is trying to kick up some dust to obscure yesterday's faux pas re being a Nigella fan.

As I understand, it's not timetabled lectures that can be separated but 'guest' lecturers addressing certain societies. A slippery-slope nevertheless.

Of course we have a lot of education segregation as it is e.g. Eton College, a registered charity, denies access to female students ...... it would be an interesting test of the law if a parent were to challenge this and try to place a daughter there!

Signed. This is modern Britain, we are not going back in time.

I think there is an exception in the law riverwalk and another one that covers religious organisations.
Guest lecturers should not be allowed to dictate terms - they are invited to speak not to organise the audience. The woman on the Today programme yesterday certainly did not make a good job of defending this decision - she just kept talking about hypothetical case study i.e. scenario.

Yes, Jess she put up a very weak argument .... although she did say it was on legal advice.

Justin Webb got very irritable with her!

It's often the way when you start talking about "rights" isn't it - my right to sit where I want in the lecture theatre compared to the speaker's right to organise the audience according to "religious beliefs" i.e. cultural proprieties. Does one trump the other?

The universities do seem to be bending over backwards though to accommodate religious beliefs, above and beyond what seems reasonable.

Whoever this speaker was should have just been told, no you can't segregate the audience and see where that led to.

The spokeswoman on Radio 4 said that she'd been advised that it would breach the speaker's human rights ...... this is when it starts to get ridiculous and brings equality legislation into disrepute.

Signed and shared.

I think I might start a new thread...

If someone wants to book a private venue for a talk and asks those attending to divide by gender that is one thing but no-one should expect to be allowed to do this in any public venue. Would we let a white supremacist give talk where different races had to sit in separate blocks?

One of the complaints made about the publicly funded Moslem free school, which was recently in trouble with Ofsted, was that boys and girls were made to sit in separate blocks in class.

The crazy, crazy thing about this whole hoo - ha is that women and men going to talks held in university are attending mixed lectures etc all the time. So what is the point in saying that for one talk there should be separate seating.

The point is that the speakers who demand it just want to impose their 'rules' on other people and think everyone should 'respect' their stupid ideas. Some ideas are not worthy of respect. Neither is the behaviour of some people.

I have signed. What a ridiculous situation to be happening in modern Britain.Shame on them!

If I were asked to give a talk to a school or university (highly unlikely!) and I said I wanted the room to be divided between Catholics and Protestants I would, quite rightly, be told where to go.

You can come up with many other examples, black and white, redheads and blondes, athletes and academics and with each one it shows just how ridiculous the segregation is.

I thought that the Universities had bowed to pressure from Government and rescinded this edict.

Yes, I heard that announced, too, anno

I should think so. This farce reminded me of so much criticism of the HRA, it isn't usually the law that is at fault, it's the gobbins who interpret it wrongly. This situation has been complete tosh hasn't it.

It concerns me that they are so worried about giving offence to a minority that they are prepared to take a measure that must offend a majority.

Indeed- signed and shared.

"EHRC chief executive Mark Hammond....has said that, while segregation by gender in premises being used for religious purposes was legal, it was "not permissible" in an academic meeting or in a lecture open to the public."

It is also clear that Government ministers and in particular the PM are horrified by this foolish decision. It would seem that the University chiefs have climber down.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-25378713