Dr Almut Gadow has a personality similar to those I’ve stumbled across a lot whilst talking to people about gender ideology. She’s fiercely intelligent, does not back down and knows this stuff matters. Gadow was sacked, partly for openly expressing her gender-critical views on an Open University staff messageboard between March 2022 and June 2022, and partly for failing to stop when a manager described them as inappropriate.
On 22 Feb this year Gadow posted a long tweet thread announcing her case for unfair dismissal against the OU had been settled. In a separate tweet Gadow invited journalists to get in touch, so I did, despite knowing very little about her case. We spoke six days later over Facetime. Gadow told me she is a qualified lawyer with a Masters in International Law and a PhD in Housing Law. She speaks quickly, with the hesitation of someone who is considering complex topics in her third language (she grew up in Peru with German parents), but nonetheless has the confidence of a person who knows what they’re about.
At the Open University Gadow taught the Bachelor of Laws (LLB) undergraduate degree and the Master of Laws (LLM) course for nine years until her sacking in 2022. She told me she’d “never really been much of a feminist” in the sense it wasn’t an area of activism for her, or one that she’d studied, but she had settled views on civil liberties, free speech and thought of herself as a “vocal advocate for academic freedom”. She was also a union rep at the University and College Union (UCU) and enjoyed discussing difficult subjects openly and freely. When Sex Matters’ Maya Forstater won a seminal victory at an Employment Appeal Tribunal in 2021, Gadow said she read the judgment “and that was about it. I filed it away mentally as something that I now knew about and would probably never use”.
Extreme Ideology
During lockdown, Gadow saw two things happen. The first was, in her words, the Open University taking an “extreme ideological turn” in the way it proposed to teach its students, and secondly, the “gender wars really broke out”, with a huge internal backlash against academics setting up the Gender Critical Research Network (GCRN).
Shamefully, the UCU sided with OU management in the hounding of OU lecturer and GCRN founder Jo Phoenix, who was bullied and abused for her views on biological sex.
Gadow watched her union colleagues with horror. “I heard a number individuals essentially proudly coming back from their latest EDI meeting bragging about the latest act of harassment they were in the throes of arranging against gender critical academics. My response in those kinds of situations was ‘we can’t do that, it’s illegal’. If you’ve read Forstater you will know that this isn’t legal. You can’t ask the university to treat one research network differently from another just because of the particular perspective they’re taking.”
Phoenix won her case in January last year with a stinging judgment which concluded she had been a victim of a “targeted campaign of harassment”, by her fellow academics and assorted gender woosters within the OU. Gadow attended a few days of the Phoenix tribunal hearings in 2023 and was astounded to see a senior member of the UCU sitting in court on the OU side of the room.
“When the proceedings break at a tribunal” she said, “and people go into different rooms, there’s a room for the employer and a room for the employee. The UCU rep always went into the OU room with their team.”
The OU is for Them
Regarding the issue of extreme ideology within the University itself, I asked Gadow exactly what she meant. She told me that from around 2021 onwards, the OU’s Faculty of Business and Law (FBL) department had a been embracing various ideas about social justice and critical theory with a stated desire to “liberate the curriculum”. Part of this involved teaching first year undergraduates to “critique the gendered nature of criminal law”. Gadow was concerned about the effect it would have on students.
“It is no longer we are going to teach you criminal law on what is after all an LLB, as in, a law degree that qualifies you to go on to be a legal practitioner, which should be largely black-letter law in content. We’re no longer teaching you criminal law. Our focus here is on getting you to have a particular critical perspective on the subject of criminal law, rather than getting you to understand the thing and then form and articulate your own views on it.”
Gadow took exception to a case study within the mandatory course materials which described a scenario involving a fictional “gender neutral” person called Kit who used “they/them” pronouns. Gadow posted on a law school staff message board called W111, which was named after the criminal law course module code:
“While I personally always use preferred pronouns,” she wrote, “I feel a little uncomfortable about my colleagues and me expressly being told to so by managers against this background. Why build this into a made-up scenario (to which the made-up character’s sex and gender have absolutely no relevance) making it required reading for students, required speech of tutors.”
A manager replied that Kit was here to stay, responding in her own W111 post: “The materials will… remain as published and the Law School will not be commenting further on this.” Gadow was incensed by the refusal to engage or explain.
Over the next two months Gadow posted a series of threads on the W111 message board related to gender, challenging management to set out their thinking on the issue and drawing attention to what she considered relevant news stories. On one occasion she flagged a number of reports which referenced male sex offenders being described as “she” and “her”, and a Metro article which described a criminal exposing “her penis”. Gadow wrote:
“If I have understood W111 managers correctly, we should teach our students to use offenders’ preferred pronouns, and discourage both critical thinking and academic debate in relation to that practice, in order to meet FBL management’s wider objectives.”
Inept Witch Hunt
In response, an OU manager stated this type of message board post was neither relevant nor appropriate. Gadow insists she was never formally told to stop raising the issue until she found herself subject to disciplinary proceedings.
Having decided to take action against Gadow, OU management seemed to have embarked on an inept witch hunt. Gadow says they first tried to find a student who would complain about her but couldn’t. Then they encouraged a tutor on the W111 message board who had disagreed with Gadow to file a complaint, but the tutor wasn’t interested. Eventually the OU set up a “Management Complaint” by a named complainant and colluded to produce seven “witness impact statements” which were used in the decision to dismiss her. Gadow says every single “witness impact statement” was provided by a direct or indirect report of the complainant. The OU argued that because they were “witness impact statements” rather than “witness statements”, they could be accepted at face value and Gadow could not challenge or even see them. She was summarily dismissed on 23 November 2022 for gross misconduct. Gadow calls the whole disciplinary process “a crass violation of every procedural rule in the book”.
Gadow went to her union. She wants to stress that the help she had from individual caseworkers at the UCU was “amazing”, but she was left disappointed when it came to getting legal assistance. “UCU – like pretty much any trade union in this country – use Thompsons solicitors,” she told me. Gadow was pretty sure Thompsons were Stonewall champions*, “and I had been sacked for questioning the fact that I’m having to teach Stonewall law.”
The UCU suggested that if she didn’t like Thompsons, they could approach Slater and Gordon, who the UCU use for personal injury cases. “I said, ‘well they’re also Stonewall champions**’, and UCU said, ‘well tough, you’ll just have to use them or none’.”
Gadow chose instead to crowdfund via the Free Speech Union on the CrowdJustice website, raising more than £100,000 to fight her case. In the run-up to the tribunal hearing the OU refused to respond to specific questions about her sacking. They told the Times Higher Education Supplement:
“Almut Gadow has made a series of offensive and spurious allegations… which we reject in the strongest of terms. We welcome the opportunity the tribunal hearing provides to present our evidence about the facts of this case.”
Basic Questions
In the event, the OU folded on 29 November last year, offering Gadow a settlement. She is scathing about the people who went after her:
“I think our managers actually had a very limited grasp of all these critical social justice ideologies that they were trying to infuse our teaching with. They actually haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about. One of the things I was doing on the W111 forum quite frankly is make them look very silly. They didn’t have answers to even the most basic questions.”
I wondered how so many bright people in journalism, academe, medicine and politics have fallen for gender ideology. Gadow thinks institutions are susceptible, because people who run them are administrators rather than intellectuals.
“The senior people in the law school are not the most academic of academics. You do get them in the research intensive universities and those kinds of law schools – people who have been legal scholars, essentially, ever since doing their PhD – whereas your typical senior academic at the OU law school would probably be somebody who went into legal practice, couldn’t quite hack it, decided to go and teach at a university and then climbed the ladder there. So when it’s being handed to them on a plate… you know, here are the things that you just shoehorn into your teaching, to be all clever and academic, progressive and inclusive – it sort of helps them tick all kinds of boxes that they really would like to tick.”
Gadow remains unconvinced about what she calls “critical social justice ideologies”. Her philosophy of teaching in academe is straightforward :
“If we’re introducing a school of thought at a university we should introduce it as one school of thought which is out there. We should equip students to reach their own conclusions and to find their own views and to articulate their own views. What we don’t traditionally do in academia is pick one particular ideology in what is clearly a debate of conflicting schools of thought and say this is the right way to believe. This is the virtuous way to believe. It is the only acceptable thing that you can ever think or say, and if you want to get good marks, you will echo the core tenets of this ideology and everything you say about the subject that I’m teaching you.”
Whilst Gadow to some extent does feel vindicated, it has not come without cost.
“You’ve lost your job, you’ve lost your career, you’ve lost your pension… It is an attack on your existence and your livelihood that… certain university managers almost seem to enjoy inflicting on you.”
Free Speech Union Advises Keeping Quiet
Gadow describes her decision to throw her lot in with the Free Speech Union as a “mixed blessing” because of the way they treated her after her case was settled on 29 Nov last year.
“If you look at the crowdfunding page, you will see a comment from their chief legal counsel who says this is a huge academic freedom case – it’s a really important case. But by the end of last year their academic freedom case was suddenly going to be their judicial review of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act not coming in. So I was sort of just in the way. It felt like they didn’t want me to do any more fundraising and wanted me to stop talking about my case publicly because I had become competition to them.”
When Gadow settled with the OU on the 29 November, she wanted to make it public. “For weeks and weeks the Free Speech Union said ‘don’t say anything public because we want to give the story to a journalist exclusively’, and I was saying ‘can you please at least close the crowdfunder?’ I still had people saying ‘I’ve just donated to your case’ and I’m thinking ‘Well, I’ve settled my case. I wish I could tell you but the Free Speech Union have told me not to’.”
Matters came to a head on 22 Feb this year. Mon 24 Feb was in many peoples’ diaries as the first day of Gadow’s four-week employment tribunal hearing. “I just felt I had to publicly say this case isn’t going ahead. But until then, it had been just me even saying, ‘Look, you need to update this.’ In the end they then published a statement that I hadn’t agreed to and sent that statement to all donors which various people have then quoted as a statement from Almut Gadow, but a) it was not a statement I had made b) was not something I wanted to say.”
Gadow remains grateful to everyone who supported her.
“Perfect strangers will just say ‘I’m behind you and I’m supporting your case and I’m putting my money where my mouth is’ and you get the comments of people saying why it’s important, so all that is really nice.”
Critical Friend
I asked what plans Gadow has for the future. She isn’t sure. She may leave the UK. If Dr Gadow does move on, she will be remembered for her pushback against a vindictive employer and her powerful statement of Sat 22 Feb, which reads:
“OU leaders must have known that they could not win this case on its merits. Having dismissed me in violation of my right to academic freedom, for exercising my right to academic freedom and for believing in academic freedom, they remained unwilling or unable to explain their actions throughout. Their response to my case was clearly always geared to evade the difficult questions the case raised, by fair means or foul.
“Irrespective of the conclusions that people may draw from the fact of this settlement, there certainly remains no plausible excuse for the OU’s continued refusal to answer any questions about the systemic institutional issues my case has highlighted.
“Much needs to be corrected in this area, where EDIdeology dictates academic content at the expense of academic freedom. My case has laid bare the extent to which EDI-ified and ‘liberated’ curricula violate not only the university’s obligations to uphold academic freedom but the human rights of its members.
“The OU’s academic freedom problem remains. But this once hidden problem has become far more visible to a much larger audience in recent months and years through my own efforts as well as those of many others. It is heartening to see more and more people stand up to the censors and the cry-bullies at the OU.
“The Open University must be liberated from its curriculum liberators. Its academic freedom problem needs to be addressed, for the benefit of all its members. And addressed it will be. I personally pledge to remain a critical friend to the OU in this regard until it is.”
I asked the Open University about Almut’s criticisms and the resolution of her case against them, they responded without comment, “preferring instead to be mindful of the confidentiality of that settlement”. At the time of publishing neither the University and College Union nor the Free Speech Union have issued a response.
* This Thompsons document carries Stonewall branding and the company features on the Sex Matters’ Stonewall list.
** Slater and Gordon also appear on Sex Matters’ Stonewall list and their website advertises a “Stonewall Ambassador” employee.
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