Extent of under-performance by male students in higher education revealed for the first time in new research from leading higher education think tank

Research to be published today (7 June 2009) by the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) shows the extent of the out performance of males by females in higher education. The higher education participation rate for women is now 49.2% whereas it is just 37.8% for men. Women have nearly reached the government's 50% target while men have a long way to go.

Commenting on the research findings, HEPI's Director, Bahram Bekhradnia, said: "Some may regard that as an inconvenient fact, and dismiss it by saying that the better performance of women is illusory because, they say, women attend less prestigious institutions, attend part-time rather than full-time, and get less good degrees. Our research shows that all of these assertions are untrue."

HEPI's research reveals that:

• Women have the same participation as men for Oxford and Cambridge
• They also have higher participation rates than men for the Russell group and for other old universities, as well as for new universities, for other higher education institutions and for further education colleges too.
• There are more full-time women as well as part-time; and both young and older women have higher participation rates than men.
• There are differences in subject patterns, but in most subjects women outnumber men.
• There are some subjects where men are more numerous - for example in computer science, engineering and the physical sciences - but women outnumber men in popular high status subjects like law and medicine.
• And the relatively poor performance of men occurs throughout society - it's true of middle class as well as of working class males, and it occurs in all ethnic groups.
• Once at university women continue to outperform men. They are more likely to obtain good degrees whilst men are more likely to drop out. If they do graduate, men are more likely to be unemployed or in non-graduate jobs. However if they are employed male graduates are, on average, better paid.

What is astonishing is that this is a phenomenon common to most of the developed world and beyond. The OECD publish data that compare participation rates in higher education: the English (and UK) experience is repeated in almost all other OECD member countries and beyond - it is, for example, a fact in the Arab world no less than it is in the West.

Within England the nature of the GCSE exam and the teaching that is associated with it seem to be part of the reason for the difference in performance at school, and so eventually into and through university, and the report discusses the evidence for this.

Bahram Bekhradnia continues: "The under-performance of males in HE matters: graduates after all tend to form the elites of society. As women have come to dominate in higher education, we should expect these elites to change gender over time too. That itself is no bad thing. What is intolerable is that significant numbers of young (and not so young) people are excluding themselves - or perhaps being excluded because of aspects of our school system - from joining these elites."