The missing men: Iceland struggles with campus deficit

It may be a vision of the future of the university. At the University of Iceland’s campus in central Reykjavik, every male student has on average two female coursemates. At the master’s level, the ratio is nearer one to three.

“We are seeing this concern in many countries,” says Jón Atli Benediktsson, the university’s president and rector. But the campus gender imbalance has reached an extreme extent in Iceland, a country that tops global lists for gender equality.

In Iceland as a whole, 64 per cent of tertiary education students are women, according to European Union statistics. This is more than any EU country, but across the bloc, women make up 54 per cent of students. In only a handful do men remain the majority.

The gulf in Iceland is now so wide that Professor Benediktsson would like to see special initiatives to get boys interested in higher education, with universities working alongside other parts of the education system such as high schools.

“We would like to have it closer to 50:50 all over,” he said, “in order to be more representative of the society as a whole.”

But the root causes of the imbalance are hard to tackle. And a focus on male disadvantage is not uncontroversial in a country where men still earn far more than women and the professoriate remains overwhelmingly male.

Iceland, surrounded by fisheries, has long offered plentiful stereotypically male work opportunities that do not require high levels of education. “Young men have better job prospects without university education than the young women,” explained Thamar Heijstra, an associate professor of sociology at the university. Men can earn more out on a fishing boat than women can in female-dominated areas such as caring and teaching, she explained, so women gravitate towards universities to boost their earning prospects.

Female-heavy campuses are also the result of pent-up demand, explained Katrín Ólafsdóttir, an assistant professor at Reykjavík University, who has written about gender inequality. Women in their forties and fifties are studying for degrees for the first time, she said, having grown up when it was far less common for women to go to university.

“Some boys may not see the value in going to college,” said Professor Benediktsson, and they drop out in far greater numbers at high school, moving on to places such as trade schools. Some researchers are investigating whether the dearth of men on campus has roots beyond the economic, and boys have become disillusioned with the idea of higher education, he warned. Certainly, they need more role models in areas such as teaching and nursing, he added.

Iceland’s male graduate deficit has not yet become a political or media flashpoint, Dr Ólafsdóttir said. “It hasn’t been politically correct to say: ‘we need to do something for the boys,’” she said. But she warned: “We should be more worried than we are.”

Courses with scarcely any men, such as playschool teacher education and social service counselling, have started to award male-only scholarships to redress the balance, explained Dr Heijstra. “However, the effect is minimal, with only few of these scholarships being available,” she said. Legal prohibitions also make positive discrimination by universities difficult, said Professor Benediktsson.

The nursing profession has disseminated on social media images of and interviews with male nurses, she added. But at the University of Iceland’s nursing faculty, women outnumber men 31 to one.

There is, however, still one part of the university where men are very much in the majority. In a mirror image of the student body, just under a third of full professors are women, according to the most recent statistics, from 2017.

This has improved by three percentage points since 2013, and in the same period, associate professors have become majority female. “There has been a change, but it’s been very gradual,” said Professor Benediktsson.

Critics say Iceland basks in an “aura of gender equality”, said Dr Heijstra, despite the persistence of inequality below the surface. “Many people in Iceland are somewhat tired of the discussion on gender equality, as it is assumed to be water under the bridge,” she said. Instead, the discussion has moved on to ask: “How about the men?” she lamented.

According to the EU, in 2017 Icelandic men still earned 15.5 per cent more per hour than women. Despite female preponderance in the lecture hall, the promise of equal wages has yet to materialise, pointed out Dr Ólafsdóttir.

david.matthews@timeshighereducation.com