FIVE THINGS ABOUT THE COLLEGE GENDER GAP.
1 WHAT IS THE COLLEGE GENDER GAP?
There is evidence of a gender
imbalance taking hold on college campuses throughout the world. In the United States, the number of women in higher education has surpassed the number of men. Fifty years ago, 58 per cent of U.S. college students were men. Today, 56 per cent are women. But nowhere is the divide as lopsided as in Iceland, where there are now two women in college for
every man.
2 WHY ICELAND?
Though there are slightly more
men in Iceland than women, women earn more undergraduate and graduate degrees, including Phds. Male high school graduates have ample
opportunities in Iceland to take decent-paying jobs in major industries such as fishing and construction work, while female classmates choose professions, such as nursing, that require further education. This
division by gender in many professions is unusually pronounced in Iceland, known as a
society that values equality.
3 WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS?
The issue isn’t just that more women opt for college, it’s that fewer men do, affecting their opportunities and lifetime earnings. “It’s a crazy cycle,” said Adrian Huerta, an assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California. “We know that when you have a college education, there are good outcomes with health ... It matters for employment stability and civic engagement. You’re less likely
to rely on social services.”
4 HOW HAVE UNIVERSITIES AND STUDENTS REACTED?
Gender imbalance is not an issue only in Iceland. Women in China protested when universities made it harder for them to opt for certain majors in which they had begun to outnumber men. To eliminate what the government calls “extreme gender imbalance,” universities in Scotland are working toward a 2030 target to make
sure that no discipline has more than three-quarters of its
students of one gender.
5 CAN IT BE CHANGED?
Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, rector of the University of Akureyri in Iceland, believes there’s no one way to bring the ratio back into balance. “Some of it will be positive discrimination. Some
will simply be messaging. Some will be about thinking about jobs in a new way so both
genders will see it in a new way,” he said. “We’re still just trying to understand the solutions, and I guess that’s the same for the rest of the world.”