The Decibel - Should we worry about the gender gap at university?

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

When 1.5 million university students return to campus this month, men will be noticeably underrepresented in the student body. In 2025, the ratio is about 60 per cent women to 40 per cent men. The gender gap has existed for more than 20 years, and universities are well aware of the discrepancy. But it doesn’t appear they’re doing much to address it.Joe Friesen is the Globe’s postsecondary reporter. He’s on the show to talk about where that discrepancy comes from, why it seems like fewer men are pursuing higher education, and how the growing gender gap is playing out on and off campus.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

If you've walked around a university campus lately, you might have noticed a lot more women than men. And you would have seen that last year and the year before that, too. Data going back more than 40 years shows that women have been attending post-secondary school at a higher rate than men. And that doesn't seem to be changing anytime soon. Today, Joe Friesen, the Globe's post-secondary reporter, joins us. He'll explain what's behind those numbers, why it seems like fewer men are pursuing higher education, and how the widening gender gap is playing out on and off campus. I'm Ali Graham, guest hosting the decibel from the Globe and Mail.

Joe, thanks for joining us. having me. So when we look at the ratio of women to men in post-secondary school, we're seeing more and more women in university classrooms. So at this point, it's about a 60-40 split across the country. Does that mean women are displacing men or what's happening here? No, it's not the case that women are displacing men. It's not as though everyone's applying and only the women are getting in. What's happened, basically, is that women are just showing a lot more interest in going to post-secondary, particularly universities. And the number of men that are going, although it has increased, just hasn't increased

at the same rate. So more women are going as higher education expands. For example, McGill studied this about 20 years ago and found that in the early 1980s, the number of men and women at the university was about equal. Over the next 20 years, the number of women grew by about 4,000. And the number of men stayed exactly the same. And the outcome was that, you know, 20 years later, later, McGill had a 60-40 ratio, roughly where I think it remains today.

So that's kind of what you're seeing on a bigger scale across the country. The men are growing but more slowly, and the women have really grown much more quickly to the point that they outnumber men about 60-40. And do we know why we saw a stagnation while women's numbers grew so much? Like what was happening around the 80s that drove that? Well, that's sort of what interested me in the story. I wanted to know what's going on here. And there's a few things happening.

But it seems to be that women developed a greater interest in ambition in going to post-secondary, going to university. There was one study that looked at women's aspirations in the 80s, and it found that there was about a doubling of the number who saw themselves going into careers that would require a graduate degree. So not just an undergraduate, but a graduate degree. And at the same time, women's grades seemed to improve that jumped above the boys, leaving the boys behind. And, you know, several generations later, and this is what we see. It would be just more women going. Okay. And I'll just note here that the data we're going to be looking at and talking about only accounts for men and women.

And so we don't have a sense of how many non-binary students are enrolled across the country or how that population is grown at this time. So I'll just note that. So, Joe, are there departments where that ratio, that 60-40 split, looks different or is it 60-40 across schools? No, it looks quite different from faculty to faculty. So there are some concentrations where men seem to cluster. business, engineering, STEM fields. You'll see mathematics, for example, sometimes the number will get as high as 75% male in those groups. But then in many others, sort of social sciences, humanities, the ratio will flip and you'll get 75% women or even higher.

So I would say looking at all the faculties, more often than not, you'll find more women than men. But in certain areas, men are really clustered. And I imagine maybe some of those departments where more men are, we're also maybe seeing higher earning careers, result in those. Yeah, that's true. It is consistent that you'll see, you know, STEM, obviously, hiring, computer science, business. Those are all fields where you earn a lot of money straight out of university. And so men seem to be flocking to those. Okay. And what about other post-secondary institutions like colleges? Are we seeing the same gap there as well? Yeah. Interestingly, even at colleges, the gap is still in favor of women. It's still, you know, closer to that 55 percent

or slightly higher, 58 percent, I think, women across the country. Okay. And there are some variations with domestic Canadian students and international students. International students have been a big group that have come to Canadian universities and colleges over the last little while. And their ratios actually flip, more likely to find men in the international student population than women. So their interaction with the population has sort of even things out a little bit more. But looking at just Canadian students, yeah, definitely larger numbers of women in colleges than men. Okay.

And Joe, you had also looked at where men are if they're not in school. Could you tell me about that? So, you know, of the men who are in that age group where you would expect to see people in school, about 40% I think it is, are in school. Okay. 46% are working and there's about another 15% who are what's called neat, not in education, employment, or training. And so we don't know too much about where those people are, but we know that they're not working and they're not studying. then that's a group that people tends to pay a lot of attention to because, you know, the outcomes can be a little worse. Sometimes, you know, you're just in a transition phase.

You're taking a break, gap year, et cetera. But sometimes you're, you know, you're heading down a path where you might be long-term unemployed or you don't find a career that you can get into. So that's a category that people look at carefully. Do we have a sense of what the outcomes are for people who don't attend any kind of post-secondary schooling or training? What are the downstream effects that we know about? So in the longer term, what you tend to see, and this isn't for everybody all the time, but generally incomes will not be as high. You won't build as much wealth over their lifetimes.

Health outcomes, interestingly, tend to be a little worse. They're less likely to report being in good or excellent health. And so education has proven itself to be a pretty good bet for most people most of the time. So there are reasons why we want to encourage people to go into post-secondary. You know, one economist told me the danger with just finishing your education at the high school level is a lot of the jobs that you will be eligible for are jobs that have dead ends that don't have a lot of progression built into them. So, again, not everybody all the time, but it can be a risk. Okay. And so I guess can you break down how this disparity has grown for men?

And why does it matter? Well, in the big picture, as a society, we should be concerned if there are disparities between one group and another. probably try to understand them. And this disparity has gone on quite a long time. So we look back five decades ago, for example, men would have been in a clear majority in universities. And that wasn't a great outcome either. So we had a lot of programs to encourage women to go to higher education, and those programs

seem to have worked really effectively. In fact, so effectively that, you know, they're taking it up in really large numbers. But there hasn't been as much focus on why men haven't continued to grow at universities at the same rate as women over the last couple decades. But, you know, I think it's important because, you know, for things like wealth, income, health, the long-term satisfaction that a person can have in their career, the growth that comes with education,

and even for a democracy, we want to have educated citizens. And that's one of the things that universities and colleges do really well is that they prepare you for being an effective citizen, someone who takes part in a democratic process. And at a time when democracies are threatened around the world, I think this is a crucial thing for us to be looking at. I guess I wonder how this would play out also on university campuses. You know, you talk about how this could make someone a better citizen.

Maybe they're more likely to vote because they've gone to college or university. They are. They are. Sounds like, yeah. And so I'm curious on campuses, I imagine that if most classes are predominantly women, or in some departments, as you've said, almost exclusively men, that it could change also the way people are having conversations, how they're learning, even what perspectives are getting shared.

And I think from the university's perspective, this is one of the first things they look at, is whether the educational experience is being affected by these imbalances. So if you have a biology class, for example, which tends to be largely a female discipline these days, how does that change the way the class is taught? or if you're in an English or history lecture also tending to be very female these days. How does it change the way that the course is taught and the experience that students get from it? One of the most important things that happens on a university campus is learning how to exchange ideas with people and listening to ideas that you don't agree with, but learning how persuasion and listening and consensus can be built.

That's really important. And so if you're not interacting with people from a wide and representative sample of society, education maybe isn't as effective. And what do we know about what's driving the lack of interests among boys and men when it comes to pursuing post-secondary education? Well, it's a really tough question to get at because you almost have to ask them all individually. Yeah. I've seen some polling on this and sometimes the biggest bulk of answers comes in along the lines of, well, I just didn't want to. So hard to, again, parse out what's going on there.

But from a lot of young men that I spoke to, the things that sent us. to me that were driving them where they perhaps wanted to go and start earning an income, that they felt a responsibility to get a job and start building some independence around the time that they were leaving high school. Others were just through with education. And that gets into a more complicated territory because why do they feel so through with education? Often it's because they didn't have a great experience. And that experience can start very young.

So even from grade four through the middle school years, some boys seem to be having more trouble than girls. They're more likely to be suspended, they're more likely to have behavioral issues. They tend to not score as well on some kinds of testing, particularly around reading. And especially in those middle school years, studies have found that those are crucial moments in a person's educational path. So if you're not well set up at about age 15, you're getting into the courses that are university prerequisite, for example, you can lose a bunch of students who are potential university students right there just because they didn't enroll in the right course. Now, I think the school systems are trying to move away from that now.

So that doesn't happen, but I think it did happen in years past. Away from streaming students. Away from streaming students, that's what I mean, yeah. And so there are many points in any life that are sort of delicate inflection points. And I think we're learning that those years in K-12 education, particularly around middle school, can have a big impact. And I think what's happening is that more boys are just being eliminated from the possibility of going to post-secondary. And sometimes they're not coming back in time. We'll be right back.

You know, there's an interesting tension right now between education, supposedly, bringing prosperity to people, and then what people are actually experiencing economically after they've gone through university or college. You know, a lot of people are graduating with student debt. Not everyone's able to find jobs in their field, especially when they're going into departments or streams of education where they're like, I'm doing this right away to get into the workforce and then have. struggles with that. And I guess I just wonder what you heard from people or what you're hearing generally about that tension. There is some tension around that. And it's a tough moment right now because we are going through sort of a nation shifting cycle where not only do we have, you know, issues to do with trade with the United States that are going to cost people jobs, but we have the advent of AI. And I think a lot of hiring has slowed as people are trying to figure out what

AI is going to mean for how work gets done. And the people who suffer most are the recent graduates. So this is going to be, I think, a tough few years for those graduates. And their experience probably will knock on into the next group that's coming through university as they observe what's happening. And so it could, you know, lead people to trust a little less in education. Now, I think on the whole, over time, most research shows that a post-secondary degree is usually a good investment.

In fact, almost always, you will still earn more. you struggle a little bit getting into the labor market. You're more likely to get a job that's satisfying to you, and you're more likely to build the wealth and a happy life that comes with the satisfaction of a job that's interesting to you. But it's hard to say that at a time when people are going out into the labor market and finding it's really really hard to get a job. Okay, so as we've discussed, this is not a new disparity. Joe, what have you heard from scholars about when and where support is needed in order for more boys to feel ready or interested in further education.

That is difficult. So one of the things they've done is de-streaming. I think that will have an impact. So all students are at least kept in classes that would make them university eligible for a longer period of time. They've done that in Ontario. The thing with students who are starting to falter a little bit is usually it can be identified fairly early on.

Okay. But you have to be looking for it. and you have to be putting then supports in place to wrap around that student and to start combating the barriers that they're going to face. And it can be a very expensive proposition, but it can be done if an education system is determined enough. So one of the things that Canada lacks in so many ways is data. And we don't track the student data on an individual basis.

And so lots of the scholars I spoke to said if they could have anything, it would be more granular data to see what are the points where students are. are starting to turn off education or where the little falter moments happen that they could then intervene and get them back on track. But I suspect that, you know, typically the education system doesn't have enough resources at those key moments for the students that really need it. And the students that tend to need it more often are boys. And so in each of those little sections, we lose a few, we lose a few, we lose a few.

And over the years, it adds up to enough that your gap grows to, say, 6040 in the post-secondary system. Okay. And so a lot of this sounds like it's happening early on in high schools and even in elementary schools, actually, just at those fundamental ages. What did you hear from people you spoke to for this story? Well, it was really interesting to have these conversations with young men to get their perspective. One, I spoke to Ethan. His story was interesting because he was one who said he just decided early on that he didn't fit the mold of what someone going to university would be. And he got in trouble as a young student, got sent to the office a lot, had behavioral issues, and he got really discouraged. And teachers would say to him, hey, you've got a lot of potential. I think you could do a lot more than what you were doing. And he would just sort of reject what they were telling him.

And so when high school ended, you know, it couldn't end soon enough for him. He didn't get good grades. He wouldn't have been eligible to for university anyway in his view. So he started washing dishes and was just getting by. And tried some college courses, but it didn't stick. And got really into video gaming. And Ethan had a lot of success in it. And one of the things he said was, I was really good at this.

I'm paraphrasing here. And I didn't feel that I was good at anything else in the real world. And so, you know, he went on to become sort of a top player in North America in the game that he was playing and, you know, did this for years. But then after a while, looked around and realized everything he had built was in a virtual world. It didn't translate into the comforts in the real world. And he wanted something more. So what transformed his life was Googling and finding a bridging program for students at the University of Toronto. And these bridging programs are really interesting because they're for students who wouldn't otherwise be able to get into university.

But they can try a few courses through this program. And you'll find them at various campuses. There's one at University of Toronto, Mississauga, one at the St. George campus. Other universities have them. and he succeeded in his first couple of courses and that sort of wet his appetite and he wanted to do more and he went on to really excel as a student

despite having struggled for so long in middle school and high school and now he's planning to start law school so it's an amazing story and he's so grateful for the opportunity it has given him a little later in life and sometimes that's how it is you might just need a little more time

to come to education and for students that have to make decisions so early in life at 14, 15, they're choosing a path that might take them to university or might not. They don't always know what they want at that age, and that's totally reasonable. So it's good that there are opportunities where the door can stay open to them. Joe, I want to dig into some of the downstream effects of this disparity. As we continue to see more women than men in post-secondary education, are we also seeing

women catching up when it comes to wages? No, it's really curious. You would expect that that would be the case. You would think looking at these numbers that women would have far outstripped men in earning power at this point. And the numbers do not reflect that. And it's puzzling when you look at the numbers because you think this doesn't make sense. But it shows that there are some structural forces in our economy and society that are still very much tipped in men's favor. So men, even in the young group, people under the age of 34, 40% of women in that group have a university credential,

25% of men do. It's a pretty big gap. Wow. But men still out-earned women in that category by about 17% I believe. Wow. Yeah. And that tends to grow as we go through the ages. So those are people at age 34.

It'll be more at 45. It'll be more at 55. We may see a shift at some point. It would make sense to see a shift at some point considering the higher educational attainment of women. But we haven't seen it yet. And perhaps there's something stubborn and puzzling going on there. Joe, at the same time, you know, looking outside of just Canada here, we've been hearing about attacks on post-secondary institutions in the U.S., you know, places like Harvard have had federal funding threatened.

And in recent years, we've seen universities really become the site of a cultural fight for the political right, or at least an increasing target for them. Can you give us a sense of the political undertones at play when we look at this growing disparity? Yeah, it's hard to get at in some ways because what you're talking about is a bit of a zeitgeist question. So how do we feel? What kind of in cultural environment? What's the structure of feeling that surrounds us about universities? And I do think that there's something going on here to tip men away from universities. I think there's a lot of pressure to earn immediately.

So that takes you out of the university equation. And I think there's a sense that universities are becoming somewhat feminized in the eyes of these people who are or opposing universities, putting out the cultural products, TikTok videos, et cetera, that are turning men off of pursuing education. You know, Ethan, for example, to use one, but when he was deeply into the video game world, the video game world has lots of downtime

where people are just chatting to one another across, you know, different parts of the continent. They don't know each other necessarily in real life, but they're talking to one another. And he was saying that the attitude to education in those arenas is very skeptical. people would say, why would you waste money on an education? Maybe you go and get a trade because that's a manly thing to do.

But you don't go to university and get indoctrinated by the wokeism that is rampant in their view on university campuses. So that may be contributing to a little bit to a smaller number of men wanting to go on to university. That's hard to measure because you have to get into the cultural influences. But I think there is a little bit of that going on. So, Joe, just lastly here, you know, we've talked a lot about the effect on boys and men and a little bit about women as well. And I am curious about, I guess, the general impact or the broader impact here for women and men and just our society and how we, I guess, operate together and how we relate to each other because of this stagnant kind of 60, 40 divide. Do we have a sense of how this has looked outside of the universities and beyond? Like, how is this affecting us?

It's a really good question. And it's hard to, it's hard to really, you know, give you a definitive answer. It has been this way for a long time. So on the whole, we have been muddling through. But I do wonder, as the years go on and this divide continues and the gap in the number of women going to university and the number of men sort of persists, what impact is it going to have? I don't know. One thing that occurs to me is that there will be people with very different experiences of life. It'll have impacts for marriage, for example.

I think people tend to want to marry people who are similar to themselves, who have similar levels of income. That has been the case for the last several decades. That might get a little more complicated. And another point is that those who have gone to university have a different relationship with research, with the cut and thrust of debate than those perhaps who haven't. And, you know, as our society does tend to be drifting towards people living in information bubbles with different approaches to knowledge and science, I worry that we might start seeing a gender divide in how some of those questions are addressed. And that's concerning.

Universities are really good at addressing gaps. They're really good at studying gaps. And this is not a gap that seems to have got a lot of attention for whatever reason, and it has persisted for a long time. Now, it may be that it's totally benign. It may be that this is fine. Women are more keen on education. Men are keener to go to work, and there will be no long-term implications. We will continue to muddle through.

Or it may be that the longer this goes on, we will start seeing some effects. I don't know what those will be, but worth paying attention to. Joe, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. That was Joe Friesen, the Globe's Post-Secondary Reporter. That's it for today. I'm Ali Graham. I produced the show.

with Madeline White and Michal Stein. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening.