2 Freshers 2017 The Cheese Grater
Welcome to UCL! So yeah... the league tables lied to you ONLY 22% OF UCL’S TOP EARNERS ARE WOMEN UCL was the first university in the UK to admit women - surely this has been forced down every fresher’s throat by now? What they don’t put in the brochure, and what The Cheese Grater can exclusively reveal is the massive gender pay gap in salaries for UCL’s highest earners. 196 staff members at UCL earn over £140,000 a year, which is over double the number of people who earn the equivalent amount at King’s College London. Of these UCL fat cats (pictured below), only 44 are women. We thought it was just the BBC who had this problem! Let’s hope the similarities in scandals end there.
This issue at UCL is unsurprisingly not isolated to its highest earners. Last year The Cheese Grater revealed that female post graduate teaching assistants earned on average 22 percent less than their male counterparts. Justine Canady, the Union’s Women’s Officer makes a similar point saying “I’m more interested in closing the gender pay gap by raising the wages of the hyper-exploited teaching assistants, cleaners and caterers who are disproportionately women, than I am in adding more women to the ranks of our overpaid bosses.” UCL acknowledged the problem and emphasised the number of female career progression programmes they have in place, and noted that this issue was endemic in all of higher education. They also highlighted that the “proportion of women in UCL’s sen-
ior grades 9 and 10 (which equates to roughly earning £55,000 or more) has risen steadily for the past four years, from 31 percent in 2012 to 35.7 percent in October 2016.” Not long left gals xx
BREAKING NEWS: NO BAD NEWS ABOUT BLOOMSBURY THEATRE! The Cheese Grater is thrilled to reveal that we don’t need to write an article about Bloomsbury Theatre’s renovation as it is surprisingly running right on time. The university’s biggest asset to student arts was closed in the autumn of 2015 when asbestos was found to be literally everywhere. Student performances have since been farmed out to theatres like the Shaw - a perfect equivalent, being of a similar size, capacity, and having similar amounts of asbestos - and the Bloomsbury Studio, which has none of these things, but is quite nice. Given UCL’s track record with student theatres (turning the old Garage theatre into a cafe without replacing it), nobody was optimistic, especially when plans were revealed to convert much of the Bloomsbury into lecture - and cafe - space during renovations. Happily, after much consultation with the student Arts societies over the last two years, these plans were scrapped, and the new theatre is to be bigger and better than ever before (apparently), with an operating model that actually allows for more student productions. The enabling works (stripping the theatre down of asbestos, seats, vents, asbestos, etc.) have been handled over the summer, with major building to commence this autumn. The theatre is intended to open in October 2018, coinciding with its 50th anniversary, with the first student shows performed in November.
News & Investigations
Society Bitch We all know Fencing Club have had it too good for far too long now. Thankfully, the brave men and women in the Union and “Clubs and Societies” have FINALLY stood up against the tyrants at Fencing and divied up Fencing’s prime-time Wednesday afternoon, three hour spot in Bloomsbury Fitness, between some of the more disadvantaged societies, such as Boat Club and Water Polo. Readers rejoice! Just to make sure Fencing knew how much they were truly loathed, they were only told about the loss of their training session ten days ago. The Union even got Fencing to bear the indignity of having to cut the hours of their hired coach only a few days before training begins. It’s just so wonderfully cruel! But it doesn’t end there: Just to further rub salt into wounds, as a consolation Fencing now have a mammoth five hour training session on Saturday morning in the Gym. As what every casual fresher fencer (of which there were a 100 or so last year) wants to do is fence for five hours after a messy night out at ULU. The plan is so diabolical and clever, we can’t believe the Union came up with it! Though Ilyas Morrison, the Activites and Events Officer continues to play the naif, saying he did not “want to take space from anyone”. He really is a Puss in Boots.
HOW MUCH DID NEW CAFE REALLY COST? UCL is proudly harping on about its lush new lower refectory in the WIlkins Building which through FOIs sent by The Cheese Grater, we know had an initial budget of £5.6 million. Strangely enough however, the FOI team could not us what the overall spend had been as “a final cost has not yet been agreed”. Don’t worry though - it’s unlike UCL to overspend on anything.
