Nowadays, the presence of women in the university is the majority. The question is whether indicators of university results used in university rankings are linked to this presence. The aim of the article is to identify indicators considering different dimensions like teaching or volume of scientific production, analysing in what way the presence of women can be explained. The study involves six international academic rankings. The results showed that certain indicators, such as internationalization or industry income, were those that helped most to discriminate the unequal presence of women among university students. Universities should establish measures for the international recruitment of students and teaching staff, as well as designing measures that favour international collaboration. Likewise, the higher the income, the lower the presence of women, which highlights the scant presence of women following technical and technological courses, which are precisely those sorts of qualifications that capture more resources from industry.
TopIntroduction
At the beginning of the 20th c., women at university represented even less than 1% of all enrolments (Giménez-Salinas, 2005). Today, although the proportion of female students at university is in the majority in many cases (53% between Bachelor and Master according to UNESCO, 2021), the issue of gender inequality in Higher Education (HE) remains a matter of global concern. According to UNESCO report, higher levels of education correspond to lower proportions of women, as reaffirmed by Khan et al. (2019). Despite this, the factors that have made this increase possible may be summarized in the ‘liberation’ of the workforce from domestic service (Martínez-García, 2007; Carmona-Valdés, 2015); in the expansion of the services sector of the economy (Shavit & Blossfeld, 1996); and in the growing need for a second income to sustain a family (Alba, 2000).
In the field of higher education and research, little attention has been devoted to the issue of gender inequality, which has characterised most societies over the centuries (August & Waltman, 2004; Odhiambo, 2011).
Although there are signs of an increased presence of women in higher education (UNESCO, 2021), investigation is needed to better understand and to verify whether that is so, and were it so, what the causes and what the consequences might be.
This context leads to the question of whether the gender composition of the student body at universities anything has to do with, or is associated with, certain HE-related indicators such as the volume of scientific output, quality indicators (citations, awards, number of top publications), university reputation or level of internationalisation of universities. If this is the case, it is worth asking which of these indicators help to discriminate the presence of female students in universities and to identify types of universities according to their gender composition. No research has been detected in the literature that directly addresses this task, which is why this research is of a seminal nature. Specifically, the objectives of this study are:
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In relation to the presence of female students at university, the decisive indicators are identified, in order to understand the differences associated with the presence or not of female students at universities, considering different dimensions (teaching, volume and quality of scientific production, degree of internationalisation, massification of the university and relations with industry).
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Analysis and characterisation of the types of university systems/countries, in particular, segmentation of the world's universities according to the presence of women in the student body with special reference to GDP per capita, population and region.
Answering these questions helps to identify university systems characterised by a higher presence of female students, apart from the results they present, i.e., the performance of the different university systems.
Finally, the impact of the socio-economic context on the presence of female students is revealed, so that recommendations can be formulated to advance the goal of desirable equity. All this should be approached from a social marketing perspective.