What does the university gender gap mean for the future of our society?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/18/gender-gap-women-men-university-tuition-fees

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As any university lecturer can attest, the £9,000 fee regime has had a series of negative impacts on student, institution and teacher alike. Students, particularly outside the Russell Group universities, are often exhausted or absent from class owing to the multiple jobs they have to take on in order to pay rent and buy food.

Anxiety about their future, exacerbated by the tens of thousand pounds of debt they have taken on, starts to filter through to classroom discussions and group comportment. Students are less the demanding “clients” the government and management like to imagine they are, and more just scholars flailing to reach the library from somewhere in the middle of an ocean of worry.

Related: Gender gap in university admissions rises to record level

Perhaps surprisingly, one consequence of the fee increase is the impact on gender. As the gap between men and women going to university grows to its highest level in modern times, we should ask ourselves what this means for the future of higher education, work and gender relations.

Despite the government’s prioritising and subsidising of Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering, mathematics), where men still dominate, over arts and humanities, where women do, we are entering a situation in which more women, including working-class women (who attend university at a rate twice that of their male peers), are calculating that university debt is worth it.

Some are tempted to reach for stereotyped explanations – modular GCSEs and A-levels “favouring” girls, who generally prefer methodical hard work to last-minute cramming. But this doesn’t explain the contemporary female dominance of typically “male” subjects such as medicine and law at university level.

Has the long-term destruction of large-scale industry and the concomitant “feminisation” of work created a situation where young men, particularly working-class men, feel alienated from both education and work? Are young women more confident about their academic abilities than before?

Our lives are mostly determined by people who have no idea what it is like to be poor, female and marginalised

While numbers of mature and part-time students have declined rapidly, have younger women decided that paying off debt until their 40s will give them a better chance at getting a job? Or are they realistically calculating that the gender pay gap will mean they will be less likely to have to pay off any loans (for those who started university on or after September 2012, you need to be earning £21,000 before you start to pay anything back)?

Those with degrees in nursing and education, where women again dominate, may rationally figure that low starting salaries will mean minimal repayment, particularly when working part time. Others – men and women alike – are deciding that university simply isn’t worth it and that apprenticeships are the way to go. The government boasted in March that the number of women starting apprenticeships has also outstripped men, by more than 130,000 since 2010.

We by no means live in a female-dominated society, regardless of recent university trends. Finance, government and the judiciary, where decisions that adversely affect multiple lives are made, are all still heavily white and male. Our lives are mostly determined by people who have no idea what it is like to be poor, female and marginalised – and, increasingly, demonised too, whether via ethnicity, ability and/or religion. We should be interested by shifts in university attendance, and by what they tell us about shifting patterns of gender relations and employment.

Despite this, we should remember that the decisions young people are making about their futures take place against an increasingly difficult financial backdrop, where the desire to study a subject has to be weighed up against the real and long-term imposition of multiple forms of debt.

It is hard to engage in intense, mind-opening debate when you are constantly worried about money. A country that cared about the equal opportunities of its young men and women would start by investing in their futures, whether that includes university or otherwise.

Scrap tuition fees and bring back grants by raising the higher rate of national insurance and increasing corporation taxes, and then we might be able to see what a more egalitarian higher education system might look like for everyone.