I recently got an interview for a funded creative writing PhD. There are not many opportunities like that in the UK and the competition is fierce. I know this very well as I have spent the past year researching it, and applying for places. I was talking about the interview with a man I’d just met, a friend’s boyfriend. I commented that it’s hard to get a funded PhD in arts and humanities. He then explained for five minutes that ‘he’d heard from a friend’ that there are lots more funding opportunities in recent years in the UK, and it was easier to get funding than before etc etc. I said ‘Maybe that’s true for science’. He said, ‘No, for all subjects.’ Thank god for the term mansplaining and the light it has cast on these bizarre conversations. I repeated myself firmly and clearly the facts that I know first hand to be true – it is very hard and competitive to get PhD funding for arts and humanities, more so now than five or ten years ago. I gave him a brief example of this. He looked vague and mildly affronted and we drifted out of conversation.
