Why some degrees only attract women — and others only men

Mads Outzen Foghsgaard was excited to start on the education studies programme in the summer of 2024. He had applied for admission via the alternative quota 2 admissions process, and this had given him the opportunity to examine in detail what the degree programme was actually about.

It sounded »super exciting« and just right for him, he says, having previously wavered a bit between sociology, anthropology, and education studies. It definitely had to be something involving people and culture.

Mads Outzen Foghsgaard had read that there was a large majority of women in the programme, and he had prepared himself for not having many male fellow students. But that was okay.

He had just returned from a stay in a Danish folk high school, where the gender distribution had also been skewed, and that hadn’t been a problem — so it didn’t scare him.

»My dad and I had sat down and done a bit of math to figure out how many boys and girls would be in the programme based on the percentage numbers we had found online. We concluded that there would probably be a small handful of guys,« he says, and continues:

»But when I showed up on the first day of class, I found out that there were only three guys in a group of about 50. It was a bit overwhelming to realise that we were so few,« laughs Mads Outzen Foghsgaard, who is now in his second semester with one other male fellow student — the third has dropped out.

Minority gender drops out

Education is that degree programme at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) with the greatest gender imbalance. In 2024, 95 per cent of admitted students were women. Men made up only five per cent.

But Mads Outzen Foghsgaard is no anomaly. When you zoom out and look at the university as a whole, the trend is clear: Women are taking up more space, and men less.

In 2024, 61 per cent of all new students at UCPH were women, and 39 per cent were men — a distribution that has remained fairly stable over the past five to ten years, according to figures obtained by the University Post from the University of Copenhagen’s education and students unit.

There are a few places at UCPH however, where the men dominate. This can be seen especially at the Faculty of Science, particularly on the degree programmes Machine Learning and Data Science (where in 2024, 13 per cent of those admitted were women) and on Computer Science (14 per cent women).

Studies over the years have pointed to a range of challenges associated with gender-imbalanced degree programmes.

The think tank DEA, for example, recently concluded that the risk of drop out is higher if you are a gender minority on a higher education programme with a skewed gender distribution (defined in the study as less than 25 per cent of one gender among the students).

»We looked into what it means for an individual student to be in a programme where they are clearly in the minority. And it seems that the more clearly you are a minority, the greater the chance you will regret your choice of study and drop out,« says Kristian Thor Jakobsen, chief economist and deputy director at DEA.

The analysis does not offer any clear-cut answers as to why this is the case, but one suggestion might be that students simply lack peers they can relate to, according to the deputy director.

»Students tell us that communities are important, so if we want to explain the correlation with dropout rates, it could suggest that they miss communities that in some way are shaped by gender,« says Kristian Thor Jakobsen.

One-sided discussions

For education student Mads Outzen Foghsgaard it is a new experience to be in a community where there are so few men, he says.

»I’ve mostly been used to being in all-male groups, so this is quite new for me. But I can definitely feel that the other guy and I have naturally sought each other out — and we’ve become quite close, so that’s a positive,« he says.

If he had been the only man on the programme, continuing the next two years would probably have been tough, he says. Because even though the study environment is open and inclusive, not all conversations are ones that Mads Outzen Foghsgaard and his fellow male student can naturally take part in, he says:

»It’s a bit hard to explain, but sometimes it does happen that people talk over our heads a bit, or that things come up that we can’t really take part in,« he says, quickly adding that he has made good friends on the programme and is happy to be there.

»But sometimes the discussions do get a bit one-sided. For example, we’ve had several conversations about the difficult aspects of being a female educator, and I think the difficult aspects of being a male educator have been left out,« he says.

It both frustrates and puzzles him that more men aren’t applying for education studies, because if you ask him, the subject has the potential to interest everyone regardless of gender.

»I know that education studies as a university subject is dominated by women, but I don’t think there is anything academic that justifies the idea that the programme should be more for women than for men.«

Education is not a care profession

At UCPH, there are major differences in how the individual programmes work with study environment, recruitment and retention in relation to gender. And even though Education is the most gender-imbalanced programme at UCPH, it is not something that is given particular attention by university management, according to Gerd Christensen, who is head of the Education programme.

»We actually don’t see it as a problem. In all of our student well-being surveys, it appears that both male and female students are thriving, and we haven’t experienced it as being an issue in the classroom either,« she says, adding that there are no special initiatives for either recruiting or retaining male students.

Management does however pay attention to ensuring that there are both male and female lecturers, so that there are role models who can inspire different students.

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»It would definitely be an advantage to have more male students, and I also can’t explain why the gender distribution is so skewed,« she says, emphasising like Mads Outzen Foghsgaard that she does not consider Education to be in the same category as the traditional care professions.

»The programme deals with education in a broad sense — everything from early childhood to school, working life and prisons. I believe many people, regardless of gender, could find something within the field that they find interesting,« she says.

More non-males in computer science

Things look quite different at the Department of Computer Science (DIKU), which over the past ten years has actively worked to recruit more female students. This is according to Ken Friis Larsen, who is normally deputy head of department for teaching, but is currently acting head of DIKU, which oversees nearly 15 degree programmes — including both Machine Learning and Data Science, as well as Computer Science.

»The gender imbalance in Computer Science — and to some extent in the technical and scientific STEM subjects more generally — is not a UCPH problem. It’s not even a Danish problem. It’s an international issue that is culturally conditioned and very hard to counter,« says Ken Friis Larsen, adding that the department has for many years actively worked to recruit and retain more women.

This includes the Femtech initiative, which organises tech workshops aimed at female upper secondary students. And at open house events they highlight the diversity of topics that you can work with in the STEM fields.

On the degree programmes, student groups are also organised according to a principle that ensures a certain number of gender minorities on each team. And when prospective students check out the different programmes on the UCPH website, they are met with images showing a »diverse group of students«.

»It’s extremely important that there are role models people can identify with. Statistically, we probably have more images of women on the website than are actually represented in the student populace. And that’s not to deceive anyone, but to emphasise that computer scientists can look different,« says Ken Friis Larsen.

But — he adds — at the department, they’re not really keen on talking about gender imbalance in terms of ‘men and women’. They would rather work with representation in a broader sense.

»We prefer to say that we have too few non-men on the programmes, and that’s actually how we address the problem in practice,« he says.

And their various initiatives appear to be working:

»We’re seeing that the balance is slowly beginning to shift. At one point, we had more students named [the Danish boys name. ed.] Rasmus in Computer Science than we had women. But now we’re approaching 20 per cent women, and of course our goal is to exceed the magical 25 per cent,« he says, noting that being part of a gender minority is less overwhelming when that minority exceeds 25 per cent.

He also emphasises that the gender imbalance at Computer Science for the 2024 cohort was particularly pronounced. In previous years, the intake of women has been around 20 per cent.

Men are going nowhere

While local UCPH initiatives are working to attract more women to STEM subjects, the Danish Chamber of Commerce (Dansk Erhverv) has a slightly different focus. The trend of men disappearing from longer duration higher education programmes.

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A recent projection from the Ministry of Children and Education showed that in the future, there will be significantly fewer academics on the Danish labour market — and that a vanishingly small proportion of that academic workforce will be male.

In 2013, most expected that up to 30 per cent of a youth cohort would get a university degree. The current estimate has dropped to 24 per cent: 28 per cent women (down from 32 per cent) and just 19 per cent men (down from 27 per cent).

These figures concern Mads Eriksen Storm, head of education and research policy at the Danish Chamber of Commerce:

»The difference between men and women has become very large. And this means that we will see a similarly large gender imbalance in the academic labour market in the future,« he says.

The imbalance is already clear in today’s labour market, says Mads Eriksen Storm, especially in the healthcare sector:

»There has been a shift over the years. In the past, the classic image of a doctor was a man — in the future, it will increasingly be a woman. The same goes for law, which has also largely become a women-dominated field,« says Mads Eriksen Storm.

Asked what the actual problem is with this trend, he says:

»If you assume that men and women are equally talented, then in the future we will see a waste of this talent, simply because we have failed to educate men to fulfil their potential.«

It comes as no surprise to Mads Eriksen Storm, that initiatives have been launched to attract and recruit more women to male-dominated fields — but not to the same extent the other way around.

»It comes down to the fact that there have been many foundation grants for recruitment work in male-dominated fields. And a lot of evidence suggests that, in many places, this has been increasingly successful in attracting women. But the men — they’re not budging,« says Mads Eriksen Storm.

The market adapts to women

Claus Holm is Head of Department at the Danish School of Education (DPU) at Aarhus University. Last year, he led an expert group under the Ministry of Children and Education that examined the role of gender in daycare, primary schools and upper secondary education.

He says there is a clear trend across the entire education system: Girls outperform boys, and this is especially apparent in longer duration higher education programmes.

The big question is: Why?

»There are several theories, but no definitive answer,« begins Claus Holm.

According to him, the most interesting theory is that there is both an expectation effect and an ambition effect at play among women.

The first refers to the way boys and girls are met with different expectations throughout the education system. Typically, boys tend to face limited expectations, while girls are encouraged to excel — and that has an impact on how they perform, explains Claus Holm.

»The ambition effect, on the other hand, has to do with the fact that over the past 100 years, women have fought to make themselves visible — not least in the education system. Recent generations of women have seen their mothers and grandmothers achieve gender equality through education,« he says, and continues:

»This can help us understand why women today perform better than men in the education system.«

Claus Holm also finds it interesting to consider what effect this will have on women’s position, performance and pay in the labour market. He points out that many workplaces today place a strong emphasis on creating good conditions for parental leave and flexible work opportunities.

»Led by the Danish Chamber of Commerce, many companies have recognised that women are the most important human resource of the future in terms of education. That’s why the business sector is particularly keen to ensure that women do not become less career-oriented, for example when they have a child,« he says.

Diverse environments

So what is the University of Copenhagen management’s overall ambition when it comes to gender imbalance in the degree programmes? This was answered by the Dean of the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences and the UCPH strategic sponsor for diversity, Bente Stallknecht:

»We want diversity across our degree programmes more generally. This is partly because it affects the study environment, and partly because it’s important that we end up with a diverse labour market. For example, it’s important that patients have the option of seeing either a male or a female doctor,« says Bente Stallknecht.

At UCPH, there are no overarching guidelines for how to work with gender-imbalanced programmes — because this is work best carried out locally, she says:

»At the Faculty of Health and Medicince, where I’m based, we have a large overrepresentation of women on several programmes — for instance, veterinary medicine and public health science,« says Bente Stallknecht, and continues:

»At open house events, we make sure male students are present to represent the programmes. We also work with the promotional imagery for the programmes to ensure the student population looks diverse. And I know that some degree programmes have experimented with setting up men’s groups, so male students can build social communities across year cohorts,« she says.

But even though degree programmes can do a lot to recruit gender minorities, there are other factors at play that make it difficult to change the composition, the dean emphasises:

»We can try to influence those who apply, but we can’t influence the actual admissions. The majority of our students are admitted via quota 1, where it’s simply the grade point average that determines the outcome. And in quota 2, we can’t actively sort by gender — that would be discrimination.«

Asked whether it is just as important at UCPH to recruit men into women-dominated subjects as it is to recruit women into male-dominated ones, Bente Stallknecht replies:

»The short answer is yes. For many, many years there has been a strong focus on getting women into STEM fields, and to some extent that has been successful. And I think it’s fair to say that we are now running some of the same kinds of initiatives in the women-dominated fields.«

Bente Stallknecht says studies show that both female- and male-dominated programmes pose challenges for gender minorities and increase dropout rates. However, it is particularly in male-dominated programmes that female students’ well-being is impacted.

That said, this is not something that affects the Faculty of Science — the faculty with the most male-dominated programmes:

»It’s actually not something we see in our own well-being surveys or in the faculty’s dropout statistics. One exception is Computer Science, where the dropout rate is equal for both genders, which they attribute to a strong study environment,« she says.

We can only guess what the 19th century first Danish women medical students Nielsine Nielsen and Marie Gleerup thought of the study environment when they began their studies 150 years ago. But if the current trend continues unchanged, male doctors will be increasingly rare in the future. In 2024, 68 per cent of students admitted to medicine were women.