Higher education reporter Joe Friesen spoke with The Decibel podcast about the factors driving the gender gap in higher education. Columnist Marsha Lederman also weighed in on what is lost when fewer men go to university.
As classes begin for students at Canadian universities this month, one group will stand out for its relative underrepresentation: young men.
Even before enrolment data is available, it’s safe to predict that for every 100 Canadian students on campus this fall, nearly 60 will be women and only about 40 will be men.
This gender gap has existed for more than two decades, and universities are well aware of it – but they haven’t done much to address it. Discussion of the subject is not quite taboo, but it’s uncomfortable.
That’s likely because out in the working world, men are doing just fine. The data show that men still earn more than women. They also tend to hold more positions of power, including at universities.
But the implications of the enrolment gap are about more than just money. Education is also about citizenship. It’s about understanding a world beyond one’s narrow experience, learning to work with people from a range of places and backgrounds, and engaging with science and research. Those who go to university are more likely to report good health. And they’re more likely to vote.
And yet, boys and men are not choosing further education. Once that decision is made, the path back isn’t easy.
Consider the experience of Ethan Dias Safaei. When the end of high school arrived for him 10 years ago, he didn’t even consider applying to university. After years of academic frustration, he was through with the education system.
Teachers always told him that he had potential. But, growing up in Toronto’s public schools, he was argumentative and stubborn, and seemed to lack the patience for academic work. His disruptive behaviour would get him sent to the office, he’d be disciplined and his grades would suffer. “I did not care at all about school. I was so bored all the time. I loved mischief,” he said in an interview.
Even if he wanted to pursue further study, his grades, typically in the C or D range, weren’t good enough, he said. After leaving school in 2015, he got deeply into video gaming and paid the bills with dishwashing jobs.
After several years he realized this wasn’t the life he wanted. He went in search of a way back to education, unsure whether it would be possible.
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Ethan Safaei remembers high-school teachers telling him he had potential, but disciplinary problems helped turn him away from postsecondary studies. Men aged 20 to 24 are more likely to be in the work force, as he was at that age, than university, where women predominate.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
At a time when many young men are perceived to be struggling or adrift, they’ve also become entrenched in a status quo of lower educational attainment. For years, scholars and policy makers have warned that the jobs of the future will require education, flexibility and the kind of soft skills that postsecondary institutions can confer, an argument made more urgent by the arrival of artificial intelligence and a surge in youth unemployment.
There’s a range of reasons men aren’t flocking to campuses. Fewer men than women have the necessary qualifications coming out of high school, and they are more likely to have their studies interrupted by suspensions or behavioural problems. Polling in the U.S., where the gender gap is similar, shows a significant portion of men say they don’t see the value in a university education or don’t think it’s necessary for the kind of work they want to do.
What are they doing instead? Last year 46 per cent of men aged 20-24 in Canada were working, 39 per cent were in education or training of some kind and 15 per cent were “Not in Education or Training,” compared to 11 per cent among women.
Although the causes are multifaceted, the upshot is that many young men and women are now heading into adulthood with diverging influences and experiences, a gap that could have long-term implications.
At Simon Fraser University in B.C., women made up about 54 per cent of the full-time student body in 2022, not far from the national average. When Simon Fraser was founded on Burnaby Mountain in 1965, less than a third of Canadian postsecondary students were women.
Isabella Falsetti/The Globe and Mail
Universities are the very places where disparities in wealth, health, academic attainment and employment are studied, understood and targeted. As institutions, they’ve often made strides in tackling such issues internally – creating incentives and supports for students from underrepresented groups, for example.
Universities have not, however, made much of a public fuss about the trend to a majority female student body. In 2021, the University of Montreal published an item on its website when its enrolment hit nearly 70 per cent female, but that was a rare exception.
It may be that people who work at universities focus on their particular departments, rather than the university as a whole. And at the departmental level, the picture is more complicated.
The data show that young men tend to cluster in certain disciplines. In math and engineering programs, for example, three in four students are male, while the arts and humanities and social and behavioural sciences are closer to two-thirds female.
Education and nursing faculties have been interested in boosting male recruitment for years, and engineering faculties have made major efforts to recruit more women. So while there have been initiatives to tackle the gender balance, they have tended to be more narrowly focused.
Nationally, the enrolment split among Canadian university undergraduates in 2022-23 was 58.3 per cent women and 41.7 per cent men, according to Statistics Canada. In graduate school the trend is just as pronounced. Among Canadian students in master’s programs, 63 per cent were women in 2022-23, and at the PhD level 57 per cent were women.
At Canadian medical schools, nearly 64 per cent of incoming students were female in 2022-23, the 25th consecutive year with a female majority. At law schools, women surpassed men in every incoming national cohort but one between 1996 and 2013.
At colleges, where students mainly pursue two-year vocational programs, 57.2 per cent of Canadian students were female and 42.8 per cent were male.
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Female majorities at universities were new in Canada in the 1980s, when these medical students graduated from McMaster. Today, health is one of the fields of study that men choose the least.Glenn Lowson/The Globe and Mail
The sea change to a female majority at university surfaced as early as the 1981 census, when the number of young women graduates surpassed their male counterparts for the first time. Women, who had been historically denied the opportunities available to men in higher education, quickly began to enroll in greater numbers.
More than four decades later, it’s clear society has undergone a major shift. Among Canadians aged 25 to 34, about 40 per cent of women have a university degree, compared to about 26 per cent of men, according to the 2021 census. That difference has grown since 2006, when the gap was just nine percentage points (30.2 per cent to 21.1 per cent).
It’s not that women have displaced men. There’s no indication that eligible male students are being turned away, and Canadian schools don’t typically even consider the gender of undergraduate applicants. Instead, as postsecondary education has expanded (from 1.3 million students in 1993 to 2.2 million in 2023), more women have enrolled. And the same trend exists in wealthy nations around the world.
Scholars who spoke with The Globe and Mail were cautious when opining about the significance of the shift. They point out that, as with most institutions, higher education has long been dominated by men; most university presidents are still male, for example, and male staff are more likely to earn promotions and higher pay.
Daniel Corral, an assistant professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, said it’s not quite a taboo topic, but it’s more complex than it seems.
“For sure, women are doing great in higher education, but they still face a significant disadvantage once they enter the labour market,” he said.
In fact, the economic data show that despite the large gap in university attainment among the 25-34 age group, the median income for men ($53,600) exceeds that for women ($46,100) by 16 per cent. Still, the impact of the enrolment gap is likely to grow the longer it continues.
A few explanations are commonly cited. For one, girls tend to do better academically than boys, particularly in middle school and the early years of high school, which sets them on a path to success. A Statistics Canada study from 2007 found girls at age 15 get better marks and score better on reading tests. It also found they’re much less likely to report that they spend no time on homework, a signal of conscientiousness.
Boys are more likely to take classes that aren’t accepted as university prerequisites and they’re more likely to have their education disrupted by behavioural issues, which can lead to suspensions and absences that hinder academic progress. Many are also motivated to find work, earn money and assert their independence, which can lead them away from schooling.
For Mr. Safaei, 28, when he looks back at his own educational path, he recalls being in trouble constantly at school. As a result, he became disengaged and even rejected the teachers that tried to encourage him, he said. He thought he didn’t fit the mould of a student who could succeed. Often, he would talk out of turn in class and get sent to the principal’s office.
“That’s their tool, they send you away. Whereas what I probably needed was attention,” Mr. Safaei said. “They lost me in grade school when they sent me to the office so many times.”
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As a young man out of high school, Ethan Safaei was immersed in online subcultures where skepticism of academia ran deep.Laura Proctor/The Globe and Mail
After grade 12 he worked on and off as a dishwasher and tried a few college courses, but his real passion was video gaming. He would disappear into a virtual world for days at a time – a world where he was considered among the top players on the continent.
“I was spending all my time on that,” he said. “It was a way to feel good about myself, because I was good at that and wasn’t good at anything else in the real world.”
The broader cultural climate around universities was shifting at this time, and the growing skepticism about the value of higher education was reflected in the mostly male online world he inhabited.
His fellow gamers would warn that going to university carried the threat of “woke indoctrination,” he said. The attitude was that you’d be a fool to spend money on it, and it would be better to learn a trade. But he never bought into that mindset.
Five years after leaving high school, feeling dissatisfied and unfulfilled, he went in search of a way back. He came across a bridging program at the University of Toronto’s Woodsworth College, which offers entry to students who wouldn’t otherwise qualify academically for university. The students take a few courses, learn skills in writing, research and critical thinking, and if they’re successful can enroll in the general student body.
He signed up and, although initially unsure of himself, he loved it.
For the thousands of young men being turned off education because of behavioural issues or poor grades, there are reasons to persevere.
Philip Oreopoulos, an economist at the University of Toronto, said the evidence is still clear that the financial return for obtaining postsecondary education is high for young men.
“My stance is that there’s at least some type of postsecondary that would be a better decision than to just stop at high school. When you stop at high school, you’re basically stuck with jobs that have dead ends.”
For women, the pay gap between those who go to university and those who do not is wider, which creates a stronger incentive to pursue higher education.
Christine Neill, an economist at Wilfrid Laurier University, sums up the situation like this: women recognized that if they went to university they could get a better job with better pay than they would with just a high school diploma. Their educational attainment jumped past that of their male classmates and they haven’t looked back. For men, the situation was and remains that there are career paths that are relatively well-paid, such as in the trades or manufacturing, that don’t require a university degree.
“It’s not surprising, in some ways, that women are more likely to go on to postsecondary because it just benefits them more,” Prof. Neill said.
She said some research has shown that boys from families with lower socio-economic status tend to fare worse academically than girls from similar backgrounds, which might shed light on part of the enrolment gap. Some experts, she said, have suggested that school systems are set up for girls rather than boys to succeed – often noting the dearth of male teachers, currently about 24 per cent of teaching staff in Canadian public schools. But she’s skeptical that that’s the case.
There’s no evidence that young men are suffering explicit discrimination, as women did when the enrolment gap was reversed, Prof. Neill said. Men are instead making choices based on their preferences, in a context shaped by societal norms.
“What economists tend to think is that as long as we’ve got a neutral set of institutions, if people choose differently, given those neutral institutions, then that’s a preference thing,” she said.
Prof. Oreopoulos points out that men who opt for certain types of skills training can in some cases fare better financially than those with a university degree in a discipline that’s not highly valued by the market.
Daniel Hutchinson, a 35-year-old plumber in Toronto, is a good example. Although he enjoyed the social aspect of high school, he did not like the classes. His two sisters went on to university and became teachers, but he went directly into the work world.
“I would hear people talking about going to university and college but I was like, ‘More of this?’ I just couldn’t. I was doing as much as I could just to get by,” he said.
He worked at nearly a dozen jobs, from roofing to lawn care, before trying a program called Hammer Heads, created by Central Ontario Building Trades and designed to get young people into the trades. He got paid while he trained, finished without debt and today has a satisfying career in plumbing for the Toronto public schools.
“People see my work and appreciate it,” he said.
Richerd Edwards – standing in front of one of York University’s main campus hubs, Vari Hall – transferred to the Toronto school after getting into Windsor on a football scholarship.
Duane Cole/The Globe and Mail
For Richerd Edwards, a path to university opened almost by accident. After completing high school in Brampton, Ont., in 2019, he was working at an Amazon warehouse, a job he described as “gruelling” and “no place for a kid.” He was also playing on a junior football team in his free time, even though he hadn’t played in high school. In his first competitive game, his six-foot-four height and quick feet caught the eye of a coach from the University of Windsor. He was offered a scholarship to the school, which changed the course of his life.
His parents, working-class immigrants from Jamaica, always hoped he would go on to postsecondary studies. The coach’s intervention gave them a plan.
A staff member at the university helped him choose courses he could re-take at the high school level, one in math and one in biology, to gain admission.
“I definitely had self-doubt, but what encouraged me was football – knowing that I could play the sport that I didn’t get to play in high school, and I would have a partial scholarship that would help in funding,” Mr. Edwards said. “The coaches were more than supportive to me, and they involved my parents in my academic pathways for the first time. That was a definitive moment.”
Mr. Edwards said he has seen literature from the U.S. that suggests small schools with strong athletic programs tend to attract more male students. Although Canada is unlikely to have anything like the hoopla of U.S. college sports, and our universities are often large, he wonders if more emphasis on sporting opportunities might contribute to boosting male enrolment here, too.
“Sport has been the single greatest facilitator in my life, in the way that it has given me access to opportunity, access to a network,” he said.
Mr. Edwards subsequently returned to the Toronto area to study at York University, where he is a few credits away from an honours degree in human rights and equity studies. He said his life has been transformed by education.
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Mr. Edwards says he’s grateful that sport opened doors for him in postsecondary education.Duane Cole/The Globe and Mail
Carl James, the Jean Augustine chair in education, community and diaspora at York University, said he doesn’t know of any programs at Canadian universities designed specifically to encourage male enrolment. There are some in the U.S. that focus on boosting enrolment from certain underrepresented ethnic groups, such as Black and Latino men, he said. But in a society where most recognize the pernicious impact of sexism and patriarchy, a program aimed at men in general has been an unlikely proposition.
“We’re living in a system where maleness continues to be a privileged position,” he said. “You’re going to always get the question, how do we as a society want to move if you’re going to really address this imbalance.”
In 2003, a working group of the McGill University senate produced a study on the gender imbalance in its enrolment. It showed that, in 1980, male and female enrolment was about equal, but by 2003 it had tipped to 60-40 female. The school was enrolling almost precisely the same number of men as it had done 23 years before, while women had increased their numbers by about 4,000.
The report suggested the university could aim to recruit male students specifically, perhaps with direct advertising, or that it could consider admission targets for men in some programs – although it admitted this would be problematic.
It also suggested a more qualitative, less grade-driven admission process could boost the number of male students, but warned that such a measure could be viewed as “punitive for women.” The school’s decision-makers opted not to pursue any of those strategies.
At the time, a university publication, the McGill Reporter, described a “heated” debate in the university’s senate about even commissioning the study, which passed by a single vote.
“There were people that were against even looking into the issue. The argument was that the only place this could lead was differential admissions and affirmative action, and we don’t want to go there, so let’s not even ask the question,” the late Prof. Morton Mendelson, was quoted as saying. His view was the university should pay attention to the data and learn what it could.
In 1884, McGill became the first university in Quebec to admit women, a step only a handful of schools, mostly in the Maritimes, had taken before. Today, about 60 per cent of McGill students are women.
Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Getting men into university is one thing, but they also struggle more than women once their studies have begun. A 2023 report from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario found that men were significantly less likely than women to complete their postsecondary credential (both university and college) within six years of starting. More than 35 per cent of male students hadn’t completed their credential within that time period, the study found, compared to roughly 25 per cent of women.
Joe Henry, dean of students at King’s University College in London, Ont., said the HEQCO study highlights an important issue for universities, which is that a segment of their student body is not finding the support it needs.
Mr. Henry said the study confirmed what he’s noticed on his own campus – that it’s not uncommon to see some male students who are not as well equipped at the start of university and are less likely to seek out help when problems arise.
“Look, we have a problem here. We need to address it. My hope is that there are going to be some policy initiatives that help support that.”
Mr. Henry said universities could do a better job at early interventions with struggling students to keep them on track. And perhaps governments should consider financial incentives to increase male enrolment in certain areas, such as education, where it is low.
Mr. Henry said that when working with male students who’ve run into trouble and are on their way out of the university he tries to keep the door open for them, and hopes they find their way back.
For Mr. Safaei, finding a way back to school has been life altering. After joining the bridging program, he enrolled as a student in the University of Toronto’s faculty of arts and science. Perhaps it was the passage of time and the maturing he had done, or the sense that he didn’t want to squander an opportunity, but the academic struggles of his youth were a thing of the past.
He earned an honours degree in science. This year he plans to start law school.
“It changed my life completely. It’s mind boggling,” Mr. Safaei said. “The number one thing is I’ll be able to do something I like. That’s very satisfying to me.”
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Illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick
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