Female College Students Massively Outnumber Males in Iceland

Female College Students Massively Outnumber Males in Iceland

This article notes that this is happening in many countries, yet we’re still told that there is a gender gap on campus.

Inside Higher Ed reports:

Iceland’s Missing Male Students

It may be a vision of the future of the university. At the University of Iceland’s campus in central Reykjavik, every male student has on average two female course mates. At the master’s level, the ratio is nearer to one to three.

“We are seeing this concern in many countries,” says Jón Atli Benediktsson, the university’s president and rector. But the campus gender imbalance has reached an extreme extent in Iceland, a country that tops global lists for gender equality.

In Iceland as a whole, 64 percent of tertiary education students are women, according to European Union statistics. This is more than any other E.U. country, but across the bloc, women make up 54 percent of students. In only a handful do men remain the majority.

The gulf in Iceland is now so wide that Benediktsson would like to see special initiatives to get boys interested in higher education, with universities working alongside other parts of the education system such as high schools.

“We would like to have it closer to 50-50 all over,” he said, “in order to be more representative of the society as a whole.”

But the root causes of the imbalance are hard to tackle. And a focus on male disadvantage is not uncontroversial in a country where men still earn far more than women and the professoriate remains overwhelmingly male.

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