The Teacher Gender Split In Higher Education [Interactive Infographic]

Nicola Mills https://uk.rs-online.com 1m 289 #gendersplit

The views of this article are the perspective of the author and may not be reflective of Confessions of the Professions.

Comparison of Universities and Subjects

There is an ongoing debate on the gender pay gap and women’s access to senior roles – but how well are female professors represented in the teaching profession in higher education?

RS Components have analysed the teaching staff at the UK’s top universities for a number of core subjects to discover the male-to-female ratio and in what may come as no surprise to some, females are largely outnumbered by males.

You can take a look at the full findings in this interactive piece here.

• English is the only subject with more female lecturers than male ones

• The split is most skewed in maths with an average of just 16% on lecturers being female.

• Maths is closely followed by science and computer science as the subject with the fewest female lecturers, with both subjects having an average of only 17% female teaching staff

• In law 44% of lecturers are female

The research confirms that STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects have the largest gender split: women make up only 16% of maths professors, 17% of computer science professors, and 17% of science professors

Moving away from STEM subjects and towards what some may argue are more female dominated subjects, only 29% of music professors are women and only 33% of geography professors are women.

However, not all university subjects are as unequally split, with an average of 53% of English professors being female, making an almost even split. Similarly, 48% of Psychology tutors are female, and 44% of both Art and Design, and Law professors are female.

This is evidence that women are slowly breaking their way through gender splits in industry, making for more equal representation of both male and female academics and role models in higher education. View the interactive infographic.

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