University Gender Imbalance
April 1, 2005 · By Tom Cerber
Lorne Gunter (subscription required) provides astonishing statistics on the imbalance between males and females in Canadian universities.
But wait, it’s not what you think (or what Status of Women Canada wants you to think):
If men outnumbered women 515,000 to 375,000 in colleges, there’d be an uproar
That’s right. Women outnumber men in Canadian universities and colleges by over a third.
Gunter observes the hypocrisy in there being no outrage over this, as there would be if the ratio were the reverse.
But one should also ask where are all those guys going, if not to university? If university education continues to be the primary ticket to a middle-class career and income, is our society putting large numbers of males at an economic disadvantage? Societies suffer when they contain a lot of disgruntled and envious males. Just consider the future of China, with its millions of single bored males who won’t be able to find mates because of the numbers of females aborted under China’s one-child policy.
Moreover, does it make a lot of sense to stream them into blue collar work, the traditional Canadian hewers of wood and drawers of water, when the world economy is going the other way - the information age?
Canadians have some serious thinking to do over how this gender imbalance.
I am not convinced that the gender imbalance at the university level has very much to do with government streaming. We know that the decision to attend post-secondary education is a multi-faceted matrix of factors that are both financial and non-financial in nature. For example, students from low-income families are half as likely to attend university as those from a high-income family. Proximity to a post-secondary education is also a very large barrier; people from low-income families who live greater than 80 km from a university are 5 times less likely to participate. Academic preparedness (i.e. poor grades in high school) is another barrier – this barrier tends to affect many of our Aboriginals and students living in inner cities.
The government’s responsibility is to ensure affordable and accessible post-secondary education (i.e. financial barriers). This is done through a number of means (i.e. subsidized tuition – students pay approximately 30% of the cost, while governments pay the rest, student financial assistance for those who cannot afford to pay up-front, tax credits for both students and parents, grants for graduate students, etc. etc. etc.).
We know that the single most important determinant of post-secondary participation is the education level of their parents. In other words, if mom and dad didn’t go to university, it is less likely that their children will. Governments can provide these children a financial incentive to participate (i.e. grants to reduce the net cost of participation) and also provide an incentive for their parents to save (i.e. newly introduced learning bond and recently passed improvements to the Canada Education Savings Grant).
However, what can governments do to decrease the gender gap at university? The only gender gap that the Government of Canada tried to reduce was of those of women at the Doctoral level in certain fields where they were under-represented (i.e. engineering, chemistry, math, etc.). They tried this through the Canada Study Grant, however, the uptake of this grant was minimal. Did the grant work to increase participation? Not really. More women in university did.
So why are men not going? Well, we do know that they do have lower grades in high school and lower literacy levels than girls do. And as entrance requirements increase at universities, less and less boys are eligible to participate. Why are boys’ grades lower? Well, experts are not 100% sure, but they do think it has something to do with the way boys and girls learn differently. They also think that it is because of the “information overload� they are experiencing from video games, the internet, and television.
Do governments have a role in this? Or is this up to parents? It seems to me that the government is taking care of the financial barriers, and parents/educators need to start working on some of the others. It is way too easy to point a finger at the government when a statistic is put on the table, maybe it is time for people to start peeling away some of the layers behind the numbers to see where the root of the problem really is.
My last thought on this posting is this. You cannot force people to go to university if they are not ready, not willing, or not able. They have choices and choose to attend university or choose not to. It is the government’s responsibility to make sure people have the choice to go to university, and the means to go there once they made that choice.
I think that both federal and provincial governments are doing a pretty good job in this regard (improvements can be made, but for the most part we are not doing bad); after all, Canada has the highest participation in post-secondary education than any other country in the world, so we must be doing something right.
Lyndon,
Thanks for this great post. I agree. I also agree with your observation that the roots of the gender imbalance reside in the public school system. There have been numerous studies (as we like to say, as a way of establishing our creds and our vanity) that point to various teaching methods and ideologies at work in the public system (and likely in private schools, though those aren’t as statistically relevant). One might also consider the gender imbalance of teachers in the public system, which is overwhelmingly female at lower levels where habits and behavior are arguably established. If we fail in encouraging males to become elementary school teachers, should we force school boards to hire more males through affirmative action programs? I oppose affirmative action programs of any kind, but this is a fair question to ask those who support them, to see how equitable their positions are.
I haven’t really kept up on what the studies on male performance in public schools have been finding, but will now.
Even so, by raising the role of public schools, you’ve also indicated some level of government culpability in the issue.
[...] to do. Well, a lot of this is common sense, as we’ve noted in previous posts (and here). I’d just add that the roots of the problem are likely to [...]