UK: The gender gap at universities: where are all the men?

Submitted by Mastodon on Wed, 2013-01-30 00:20

Article here. Excerpt:

'If you're a male student on campus at Liverpool Hope, Bath Spa or Cumbria University, you may be feeling a little outnumbered. These are some of the 20 institutions where there are twice as many female fulltime undergraduates as there are male, according to Higher Education Statistics Authority (Hesa) data.

In 2010-11, there were more female (55%) than male fulltime undergraduates (45%) enrolled at university – a trend which shows no sign of shrinking. The latest statistics released by the University and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) revealed a 22,000 drop in the number of male students enrolling at university. This meant that last autumn women were a third more likely to start a degree than their male counterparts, despite the fact that there are actually more young men than women in the UK.'

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These outcomes were predicted twenty years ago when western education systems and curriculum delivery were altered to suit girls' preferred learning styles. We were told that our systems were "unfriendly to girls" based on very dubious idealogically based research. The potential impact of these changes on boys' outcomes was not a consideration at all. In the mid nineties there were special programs for girls in every school in my state and nothing for boys anywhere.

The simple, plain truth is that nobody really cares how boys are doing anyway. The primarily female P-12 teaching sector discriminates against boys in it's marking as demonstrated in several recent UK studies. The sex imbalance in post secondary education has a very obvious source that NOBODY is willing to confront.

Disadvantaging boys in education WAS policy two decades ago and nothing has changed. We have reaped what we sowed.

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Submitted by gwallan on Wed, 2013-01-30 06:47