Women need English degree to earn more than men

WOMEN should study English to earn more than men, a government study suggests, as it is the only subject where the salaries of female graduates exceed those of their male peers.

The average salary for a female English graduate five years after leaving university is £24,000, while for men the figure is £23,200.

But for every other subject, male graduates earn more than women five years after leaving most universities, a study by the Department for Education has found.

The figures also reveal the huge gulf in earnings between for the same subjects but at different universities. The average for a law graduate from Oxford five years after leaving is £61,400, against a salary of just £17,300 for a University of Bradford law graduate.

Dr Tim Bradshaw, the director of the Russell Group, which represents 24 leading higher education institutions, including Oxford and Cambridge, said the figures show employers are willing to pay a premium to hire graduates from top universities. He said Russell Group graduates benefit from high average incomes after they leave university in a wide range of subjects, including psychology, social sciences, law, computer sciences and engineering.

For the first time, the DFE has analysed graduate pay with breakdowns by gender, subject and university.

In all but one of the 23 categories of subject analysed by the DFE, male graduates were earning more than women within five years. The gulf is particularly pronounced in medicine and dentistry, where men from 94 per cent of universities earned more than women.

For architecture, building and planning graduates, men at 90 per cent of universities earned more than women, while men at 88 per cent of universities earned more for engineering and technology.

The only subject to buck the trend was English, where female graduates at 58 per cent of universities earned more than men.

Anna Vignoles, a professor of education at Cambridge University, said that English degrees had a gender bias towards women, which affected the graduate earning data.

“There will be a higher proportion of women taking English as a subject, and significant number of English graduates go into teaching, where the pay scale are relatively rigid,” she said. “That means the gaps you see emerging in the private sector may not emerge.”

In addition, Prof Vignoles said, English graduates had relatively low median earnings, so even if women were earning more than men, their actual salary remained fairly low.

She said: “Throughout education women outperform men: they get higher GCSES, they are more likely to go to university. But this is not true once you get into the labour market.”