Gender parity in higher education enrolments: trends and paradoxes

Abstract

Higher education systems globally have seen major increases in women’s participation and the overall trend in OECD countries has been a transition from the traditional male majority in enrolments to a substantial female majority. Prompted by a recent reversal of this trend, this paper explores gender differences in participation in higher education in 27 OECD countries between 1971 and 2015. While increased participation by women was thought to be part of the solution to persistent gender inequalities we argue that this is not an inevitable outcome. Our argument is based on an analysis of changes in the gender composition of the student population, using available secondary data. We explore how changing gender differentials are linked to the concurrent massification of HE, changing distribution of enrolments by field of study, changes in sex segregation by field, features of national education systems and wider social structural differences related to gender. Our analysis examines the complex interaction between discipline-specific levels of sex segregation and overall levels of gender parity. We argue that that sex segregation needs to be considered alongside women’s long-standing higher participation rates to understand why the latter has not triggered a transformation in the gendered division of labour.

Keywords:

• gender parity
• higher education
• OECD
• participation

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Monika da Silva Pedroso for her invaluable help with the statistical analysis of ISSP, EVS and WVS data. We are also grateful for the insightful comments offered by the anonymous peer reviewers.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study were derived from the following resources available in the public domain:

http://data.uis.unesco.org

https://data.oecd.org/

https://www.ilo.org/ilostat

https://stats.oecd.org

http://w.issp.org/data-download/by-topic/

http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp

https://europeanvaluesstudy.eu/

Notes on contributors

Patrick Clancy is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at University College Dublin. His publications on higher education includes four national studies on participation published by the Higher Education Authority and a comparative book, Irish Higher Education: A Comparative Perspective (Clancy 2015). He was a founding member and subsequently served as a member and as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Consortium of Higher Education Researchers and in 2005 was selected as a Fulbright New Century Scholar.

Sara O’Sullivan is an Associate Professor in Sociology at University College Dublin. She is currently serving as Associate Dean of Social Sciences in the UCD College of Social Sciences and Law and as co-editor of the Irish Journal of Sociology, published by Sage http://journals.sagepub.com/home/irj. In 2015 she led an interdisciplinary project ‘Existing Research Output focused on Higher Education Teaching and Learning in Ireland’ (funded by National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching & Learning in Higher Education). The National Forum used the research identified in this systematic review to create an online searchable digital resource of Irish teaching and learning research. Her main areas of research are gender, the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL), sociology of higher education and sociology of the media.

Notes

1 The absence of comprehensive data for the remaining OECD member countries is principally accounted for changing national boundaries and the emergence of newly independent countries in Eastern Europe during this period.

2 The Gross Enrolment Ratio for higher education is based on the number of students enrolled, regardless of age, expressed as ‘a percentage of the population … in the five year age group following on from the secondary school leaving age’ (UNESCO 2005, 149).

3 This includes the three countries where the decline started between 2000 and 2010 and fourteen others where the decline occurred between 2010 and 2015.

4 In all countries females have higher completion rates at upper secondary level by the theoretical duration of the programme with the exception of the Czech Republic in 2000.

5 The large amount of missing data, especially for 2000, limits the generalisability of the latter finding.

6 With changes in the classification system used by UNESCO, Medical Sciences was replaced by Health & Welfare.

7 This calculates, for all fields of study, the average percentage of male or females who would need to change their field of study to achieve parity in gender representation.

8 At the time of writing 2014 was the latest year for which these data were available.

9 Defined by the ILO as the proportion of a country's working-age population that engages actively in the labour market, either by working or looking for work.

10 Defined by the OECD as the difference between median earnings of men and women, relative to median earnings of men.

11 With the exception of respondents from EPC countries in 2012.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by University College Dublin [grant number R15690].