Inhalt: This past September, U-Multirank launched the second edition of its analysis on gender balance in higher education. While gender inequality has been a major dimension of inequality in higher education, data from the latest U-Multirank edition confirm that still today there are strong gender imbalances among males and females in academic careers. While women in total count for more than half of bachelor’s (BA) and master’s (MA) students, their share is smaller among PhD students (48%), academic staff (45%) and professors (29%). The new edition analyses gender ratio among rectors/vice-presidents for the first time: Only one out of five leaders of higher education institutions are female. According to U-Multirank data this pattern is very much the same among EU and non-EU institutions.
Findings from the U-Multirank data show that women are particularly underrepresented in research intense universities. Only 24% of professors are women in institutions with high or very high percentages of expenditures on research – compared to 36% in institutions with a low share of research expenditures. In addition, our data show a strong effect regarding the subject focus of institutions: At institutions with a majority of graduates in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM fields), women are underrepresented both at the student level and among academic staff.
Still worlds apart: Gender balance by subjects
Furthermore, data from the U-Multirank subject rankings suggest that differences between study subjects still follow traditional patterns of ‘male and female study subjects’. While women are still a minority in most of the science and engineering subjects, both among students and academic staff, subjects like nursing, social work, education and psychology are still strongly dominated by women. In these subjects, the majority of both students and academic staff are female. In social work for example, U-Multirank found only 17 out of almost 200 departments where men make up for more than half of the students. Furthermore, at four out of five departments the majority of academic staff is female. Comparing science and engineering data from the rankings 2019 and 2022, we see that gender patterns did not change overall within these three years.
Among the subjects with the most balanced gender ratio are business studies, economics, political science, agriculture, history and – as the only science subject, chemistry. Here the percentage of males and females among both students and academic staff are between 40% and 60%. In many other study subjects, there are only a few, or even no departments with a balanced gender ratio (see appendix 3).
Hilligje Van’t Land, Secretary General of the International Association of Universities (IAU) comments on the monitor: “I highly recommend this second U-Multirank Gender Monitor. To assess the current state of play and to inform future decision making to address the existing issues, U-Multirank’s analysis shows how women and men are generally distributed at universities, and whether the well-known ‘male and female subjects’ still exist at higher education institutions.”
U-Multirank’s latest results not only give insights on balance among males and females in higher education, but as a multi-dimensional global ranking it makes transparent the detailed performance of universities. In doing so, students can make better informed choices about what, or where to study based on what matters most to them - including the gender balance of a study programme. Universities can use U-Multirank data to assess their strengths and weaknesses and find ways to create or strengthen their strategic plans, including aspects of gender balance.
Although a modern notion of gender requires more than a binary classification of female and male, the current data available for such an analysis is limited. Therefore, this analysis concentrates on gender in a binary system, but will be improved upon in future years. As a first step in 2020, U-Multirank introduced the category ’non-binary/diverse’ into its student survey. Additionally, U-Multirank will continue to extend its definition of gender in ongoing and upcoming data collections, including surveys at the institutional and department levels, which are the basis for the U-Multirank gender monitor.
Schlagwörter:academic staff; department; fachspezifische Situation; gender monitoring; Geschlechterverteilung; Hochschule; Monitoring; publication; Publikation; student; Studierende
CEWS Kategorie:Statistik und statistische Daten, Geschlechterverhältnis
Dokumenttyp:Graue Literatur, Bericht
