Female Supremacy Articles - Page 25

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Brendan O'Keefe

July 04, 2007

WOMEN continue to outnumber men on Australia's university campuses, the 2006 census confirms.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics figures, released last week, show that female tertiary students outnumbered males by nearly 100,000.

There were 421,249 women to 324,209 men, making women about 57 per cent of the student population. The proportion of female students is higher than that in the general community of 100 women to 98 men.

Women's dominance of student numbers on campus has been growing since at least the early 1990s. In 1991 the proportion of female students was 52per cent; in 1996 it was 54 per cent; and in 2001, 55 per cent.

Demographer Ian Dobson said higher retention rates for girls to Year 12 would translate into a higher proportion at university.

Dr Dobson, honorary research fellow at Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research, also said that while women were under-represented in a limited number of programs (information technology and engineering, for example), they were over-represented in most other programs.

And male school-leavers were likelier to go to TAFE.

In the general population, university-age males (15 to 29) outnumber females by 45,275: 2,013,238 to 1,967,963.

Women's dominance is starker among the indigenous student body: more than twice as many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women were at a tertiary institutions than men, 4725 to 2331.