Upon arriving at Trinity College for my interview, I wondered where all the girls were. I was again curious when they failed to manifest at the Offer Holders’ Day or for our Matriculation photograph. Months later, I learned the quantification of the gender imbalance I had observed. Only 37.6% of Trinity’s applicants in 2023 were female, shrinking to an even more meagre 29.4% of acceptances. This dismal statistic is often attributed to Trinity’s affinity for the sciences and the longstanding under-representation of women in STEM. Yet, despite studying history, I feel the unevenness acutely. An unequal distribution of confidence, inflamed by a college whose reputation and culture are embodied by its imposing architecture and promotion of cold, hard meritocracy, disproportionately attracts self-assured men, leaving women and Trinity rejecting one another.

“Being reticent was common among women at Trinity, my first glimpse of Cambridge’s gender attainment gap incarnate”

I frequently ponder why my perpetually insecure seventeen-year-old self applied to what I hear tour guides crown ‘Cambridge’s most prestigious college’ as I walk through the Great Gate to have dinner under the gaze of our founder (and renowned feminist), Henry VIII. The answer to this great paradox of my life is unimpressively simple; coming from a school where Cambridge’s collegiate system was a mystery-shrouded unknown, I was painfully naive. Had I better comprehended Trinity’s reputation, I would have run for the hills, as many girls likely do.

My naïveté was such that as I packed for Cambridge, I felt qualified. After all, I could confidently list an obnoxious number of US Civil War generals and rattle off the chronology of the Russian Revolution! A few weeks later, feebly attempting to explain my absence of a bold conclusion on Martin Luther’s significance to the Protestant Reformations, I felt severely inadequate. My supervisor was an expert, and I had studied the topic for less than a week; how was I qualified to have an opinion? At the end of the supervision, she told me gently that I needed to be more confident, confiding that being reticent was common among women at Trinity, my first glimpse of Cambridge’s gender attainment gap incarnate.

If my male peers shared this anxiety, they masked it exceptionally. In an environment where debating constitutional law and postmodernist philosophy is a relaxed Saturday night, and Thomas More’s Utopia is dubbed ‘light reading’, I often felt like a stupid girl among the Old Boys. As I nodded along, rumours of peers believing that women shouldn’t be at Trinity came to mind. Could they have a point? By the beginning of Lent Term, I felt unworthy of any society involving speaking or writing; skills I had rated among my finest a year prior. My essays improved, but my confidence worsened. My long-suffering friends can attest to the escalation of my pangs of self-doubt from “that essay was not good enough” to “I am not good enough for Trinity”. Returning home for the summer, a bitter realisation sank in: a year into my degree at Trinity, my lack of confidence had become debilitating.

“Small changes can go a long way in encouraging bright girls to apply and thrive upon arrival”

Trinity’s admissions meritocracy is based solely on one’s ability to ‘thrive intellectually’ within the college. With a seeming lack of concern for the circumstances of one’s background, demonstrated by its apparent disregard for the now-defunct state school quota, confidence is a precious commodity. Unsurprisingly, for many high-achieving girls conditioned from infancy to please and instilled with a mortal fear of offending, exhibiting the boldness required to thrive academically, socially and in extracurriculars at Trinity is counterintuitive at best, and downright frightening at worst. Reshaping an institution that has been the training ground of Britain’s male elite for centuries is necessarily difficult. Yet, small changes can go a long way in encouraging bright girls to apply and thrive upon arrival. Trinity’s ethos is certainly not wholly negative, nor is it malicious. However, it should be tempered with sympathy for the systemic realities that make confidence harder to attain for some, to create a meritocracy of a truer form. Acknowledging that there is a problem and resolving to address it would be an excellent start.

If I had to pinpoint the moment when I made my resolution, to be bolder next term, it would be at the Eras Tour. Far removed from the intellectual posturing over port, singing along to Taylor Swift’s mash-up of ‘The Archer’ and ‘You’re on Your Own, Kid’ made me feel profoundly close to my seventeen-year-old self. Those were the lyrical echoes of her girlish anxieties that soundtracked her daydreaming about Trinity on her way to school. In hindsight, confidence was always going to be my Cantabrigian hamartia. But I owe it to my seventeen-year-old self, and to future girls like her, to have the confidence to thrive within Trinity’s meritocracy. Still, I probably won’t explain this to the boys at Trinity. They might laugh. They definitely won’t get it.