Women, Men and The Changing Shape of Higher Education

​Opinion

I’ve been playing around with some data, trying to understand what’s going on with male participation in higher education. I’ve been doing this because it has become increasingly prominent in political and sector commentary and I wanted to get a better handle on it.

Shadow Education Minister Julian Leeser is among the more recent voices to raise concerns about the growing gender divide in education, particularly the declining participation of young men in higher education.[i] He points to differences that begin at school and continue through university participation and attainment. Western Sydney University Vice-Chancellor George Williams has raised similar concerns, focusing particularly on young men from lower-income backgrounds and government schools who may be missing out on further education and the opportunities it brings.[ii]

For once, my timing is good. The OECD has just published its annual Education at a Glance.[iii] It seemed a good opportunity to look more closely at what is happening, bringing its latest comparative data together with Australian data and the existing research to see what picture emerges.

The concerns Leeser and Williams raise are worth exploring. Neither presents women’s educational success as the problem. Leeser describes the growth in women’s educational attainment as an important public-policy achievement and explicitly rejects the idea that this is a zero-sum game. Williams similarly celebrates the gains women have made, while asking what it means for equality of opportunity when some groups of young men appear increasingly likely to miss out on further education. Their shared concern is that, alongside the remarkable advance in women’s education, a substantial gender gap has emerged across schooling and higher education.

The OECD data help us understand what is going on, although at first sight they appear to complicate the picture. Among Australians aged 25 to 34, tertiary attainment among men has risen from 42 per cent in 2015 to 50 per cent in 2025. For women it has risen faster, from 54 to 66 per cent.[iv]

Set against that, the Australian Government’s higher education statistics appear to point in a different direction. Between 2015 and 2024, the number of domestic male commencements fell from 168,029 to 158,103, a decline of 5.9 per cent. Female commencements increased from 235,339 to 252,590, or 7.3 per cent. Women consequently increased from 58 to 62 per cent of commencing domestic students.[v] The Department notes that the change has occurred gradually over the decade, with no obvious single turning point.

So, how can male participation in higher education be falling while the proportion of young men with tertiary qualifications is rising? The answer lies partly in what the two sets of numbers measure. The Australian Government’s commencement figures tell us about the flow of students into higher education. Whereas, the OECD figures tell us about the stock of educational attainment in the population. Changes in one take time to work their way into the other; and tertiary attainment also encompasses more than university bachelor’s degrees.

So, both things are true. Fewer Australian men are commencing higher education than a decade ago. At the same time, a larger proportion of young Australian men now hold tertiary qualifications. At around 50 per cent, their level of tertiary attainment is high by OECD standards. In other words, young Australian men are more highly educated than they were a decade ago; and young Australian women have moved further and faster.

I think this distinction matters because it moves us away from an argument about whether boys are somehow “failing”, or whether women’s success has created a problem, towards a more interesting question about the meaning of the divergent educational trajectories of women and men.

Australia is not alone

The next thing I wanted to understand was whether this was a peculiarly Australian phenomenon. Turns out it isn’t. The OECD data allow us to compare the change over the past decade across the major English-speaking OECD countries. Consider the table below:

Source: OECD, Education at a Glance 2026, Table A1.2.

Australia is not an outlier in the existence of a gender gap. Canada looks remarkably similar: 76 per cent of young women have tertiary qualifications compared with 60 per cent of men — also a 16 percentage-point difference. The gap is smaller in New Zealand and the United States, and smaller again in the United Kingdom and Ireland. Across the OECD as a whole, tertiary attainment among young men rose from 34 to 41 per cent over the decade, while among women it rose from 46 to 54 per cent.

Two things strike me about this comparison. First, the direction of travel is remarkably consistent. Across these countries, young men and young women are generally becoming more highly educated, while women have higher tertiary attainment than men. Australia is therefore part of a much wider shift, rather than experiencing something unique.

Second, the size of the gap varies considerably. Australia and Canada have arrived at a 16-point difference; Ireland and the United Kingdom at seven. Female educational advancement does not, in itself, produce any particular gender gap. National education systems, labour markets, and the choices people make within them still matter.

This trend is not new. Scholars have been documenting the reversal of the educational gender gap for some time.[vi] What is striking in the latest data is how thoroughly the old pattern has changed. The historical disadvantage experienced by women in formal educational attainment has not merely diminished. Among younger generations it has reversed even while men’s own educational attainment has continued to rise.

The distinction between progress and divergence seems to me important. Women’s educational success is not the problem we are trying to solve. The extraordinary expansion of educational opportunity for women over the past half-century is one of the great achievements of our time. Nor do the numbers describe a generation of Australian men becoming steadily less educated. Instead, they describe two groups moving in the same direction, but at different speeds. The question is what follows from that.

Higher education is, of course, only part of the story. Men and women continue to make different choices about what happens after school. Men remain much more strongly represented in apprenticeships and in parts of vocational education. The Department of Education notes that increasing male entry into VET may be one factor contributing to declining male higher-education commencements, alongside changes in secondary-school completion and retention.[vii] It does not, however, establish how much each of these factors contributes to the decline in male higher-education commencements.

For instance, a young man completing an apprenticeship rather than a bachelor’s degree has not necessarily become educationally disengaged. Nor should a good tertiary system aspire to push everybody through the same door. University participation matters, but it cannot sensibly be the whole measure of success. The better question it seems is whether young people are developing their capabilities and finding educational pathways that give them genuine opportunities across their lives.

Those of us working in universities also need to remember that the divergence does not begin with us. Girls tend to outperform boys in literacy at school, while boys tend to perform more strongly in numeracy.[viii] Differences are evident in school retention too. The latest ABS figures show that in 2025 the apparent Year 7/8 to Year 12 retention rate was 85.3 per cent for females and 77.6 per cent for males.[ix]

Leeser makes just this point. His argument ranges across literacy, retention, participation, and completion rather than treating university entry as an isolated event.[x] The OECD’s broader work on gender and education points in a similar direction: differences in skills, expectations and occupational aspirations emerge well before tertiary education.[xi]

For universities, this means that participation patterns at 18 are partly the accumulated product of what has happened before. By the time we encounter a prospective student, more than a decade of educational experience has already helped shape what they think they are good at, what they imagine themselves doing, and whether university looks like somewhere people like them belong. Recruiting more young men may therefore be part of the response. It cannot be all of it.

Education across a lifetime

This is where I think the numbers become really interesting. We tend to measure educational attainment near the beginning of adult life, even though its consequences unfold across the decades that follow.

The 25- to 34-year-olds in the OECD’s tables will take their education with them through perhaps another fifty years of work, family life, income, wealth accumulation, and retirement. What happens when one half of a generation becomes substantially more highly educated than the other?

Education certainly matters economically. Across Australia and the OECD, higher educational attainment is strongly associated with higher employment and earnings.[xii] It is one of the reasons governments and individuals invest so much in it. Yet qualifications do not operate in isolation. Their effects meet occupations, labour markets, parenthood, caring responsibilities, geography, socioeconomic circumstances, and the institutions through which people move across their lives. It is here that the Australian picture becomes particularly interesting.

If women are becoming so much more highly educated, we might expect their economic outcomes simply to overtake men’s. But they haven’t. The latest ABS Gender Indicators put the labour-force participation rate at 63.3 per cent for women and 70.8 per cent for men. Women usually work 31.6 hours a week compared with 38.4 for men. The ABS also continues to record gender differences in earnings across its various measures.[xiii]

Part of what happens between education and lifetime economic outcomes occurs around parenthood. Australian research on the motherhood earnings penalty shows substantial divergence in the working lives of men and women after children arrive, including differences in labour-force participation, hours worked and earnings.[xiv] This matters because it illustrates something that participation and attainment statistics cannot. A qualification acquired at 22 or 25 does not determine the economic life that follows. The returns are mediated by what happens thereafter.

There is another wrinkle. Men and women may increasingly have different levels of education, but they also continue to acquire different kinds of education. Jobs and Skills Australia finds that only 14 of 71 fields of education—that is, roughly one in five—have similar numbers of men and women completing programs.[xv] These educational divisions feed into a labour market that remains heavily segregated by occupation. Its analysis also finds that men generally achieve stronger economic outcomes across most qualifications, including female-dominated fields, while women earn less and are more likely to leave the workforce despite equal or higher qualifications.

Which leaves us with an uncomfortable tension. Educational inequality has reversed, but life is much longer than education. Young women can enter adult life with a substantial advantage in formal educational attainment, only to encounter persistent disadvantages in earnings and working patterns over the decades that follow. We need to be capable of holding both parts of this picture in view. Concern about men’s educational participation does not make enduring economic inequality between women and men less consequential. Equally, the persistence of that inequality should not make us indifferent to an emerging educational divergence among younger generations.

What should we have in mind?

The objective, surely, is not numerical parity for its own sake. It is to make gender matter less in determining the educational opportunities people have and the choices they are able to make. Women’s extraordinary educational progress shows what becomes possible when barriers to participation are removed. The emerging divergence among young men should prompt us to ask whether barriers, disadvantage, different opportunities or changing aspirations are now shaping their educational pathways.

We should want to know why fewer young men are choosing higher education; whether they are choosing other good pathways instead; where literacy, school engagement, and aspiration enter the picture; and whether men who could benefit from university increasingly see it as somewhere other than for them.

There is a wider social question here too. Higher education is not simply a route to a better salary. At its best, it expands the choices people can make about their lives, exposes them to people and ideas beyond those they already know, and equips them to participate more fully in economic, social and civic life. We should therefore care if access to those opportunities is becoming increasingly differentiated by gender, just as we care when it is differentiated by income, postcode, disability or background.

Perhaps the most important question, then, is which men. Williams has already pointed us in this direction. His concern is not simply with the average participation rate of Australian men. He draws particular attention to socioeconomic background and schooling. In his analysis, only 18 per cent of young men who attended government schools in Queensland and Tasmania had attained a university degree, rising to 27 per cent in New South Wales. Among young women from NSW government schools, the corresponding figure was 40 per cent.[xvi]

These figures reinforce a more general point. Australian educational disadvantage is not evenly distributed. Young people’s likelihood of completing school, entering tertiary education, and obtaining a qualification varies with socioeconomic circumstances, geography, and prior attainment. These inequalities intersect, rather than operate independently. Gender can thus tell us that a difference exists without telling us very much about where disadvantage is concentrated or what is producing it.

It is also the case that national averages have a habit of hiding people. A young man from an affluent metropolitan family choosing a good apprenticeship over university presents a very different educational and public-policy question from a young man in a low-income household, a regional or remote community, or a school with low rates of tertiary progression whose choices have progressively narrowed long before he reaches 18. Both appear on one side of the same male participation statistic. Their circumstances, opportunities, and likely responses to policy may be completely different.

For instance, a fall in aggregate male participation could reflect changing choices among men who have strong alternatives; increasing disengagement among groups already experiencing disadvantage; differences in the fields and pathways men and women choose; or some combination of these. We should not assume which explanation dominates before doing the work. Understanding which men are becoming less likely to enter higher education, where they come from, what educational opportunities preceded that decision, and what they do instead may ultimately matter rather more than knowing the national male average.

There is a progressive principle here that is easily lost if the debate becomes a contest between women and men. Equality is not achieved simply when one aggregate number approaches another. What matters is whether people’s backgrounds and circumstances unnecessarily constrain the opportunities available to them. If some groups of young men are increasingly missing educational opportunities from which they could benefit, their gender does not make that inequality less worthy of attention.

The same principle applies to women. We should be asking why women’s extraordinary educational attainment still translates imperfectly into occupational opportunity and earnings. If Australia has succeeded in dismantling many of the barriers that once kept women out of higher education, while barriers elsewhere in working and family life continue to prevent that achievement translating fully into economic opportunity, we should not regard the job as done.

Indeed, there is something particularly striking about the coexistence of these two trends. Women have overturned a historic educational disadvantage and now substantially outperform men in formal educational attainment. Yet, economic inequality between women and men persists.

This is not an argument for worrying less about men. It is an argument for thinking more carefully about inequality. The objective should surely not be to transfer advantage from one gender to another. It should be to reduce the extent to which gender—interacting with class, geography and other circumstances—limits the choices people are able to make about their lives.

We should also be thinking about fields as well as levels. A tertiary system in which women substantially outnumber men overall can still contain engineering and technology fields dominated by men, just as education and health remain strongly female. Looking only at aggregate participation risks missing inequalities within the system even as we worry about inequality in access to it.

These are not competing agendas. They are different parts of the same question about how effectively and fairly Australia develops and uses the capabilities of its people. Perhaps this is the thing I have taken most from playing with the numbers.

So, for me, the interesting question isn’t whether Australia has too many women at university or too few men. Nor does every difference necessarily represent an injustice requiring policy intervention. People make different choices. Good tertiary systems ought to make different pathways possible.

The distinction that matters is between difference and constrained choice. If young men and women make different educational choices from a genuinely broad range of possibilities, we should be cautious about treating unequal outcomes as a problem to be engineered away. If gender, socioeconomic circumstances, geography or prior educational experience are progressively narrowing those possibilities, we should care very much indeed.

Persistent differences this large deserve our attention. The young Australian men in the OECD data are not an educationally unsuccessful group. Half now have tertiary qualifications, a higher proportion than a decade ago, and are high by international standards. The important change is relative: young Australian women have moved considerably further.

These young Australians will become the middle-aged Australia of the 2040s and 2050s. Their educational experiences will propel them into occupations, parenthood, incomes, wealth, and eventually retirement. If today’s differences persist, the pool from which many of our future professionals, managers, and institutional leaders are drawn will contain substantially more tertiary-educated women than men.

Yet, those same women will move through a labour market and a society in which older gender inequalities have not disappeared. We should not be comfortable with either outcome. We should not be comfortable if gender increasingly predicts whether a young person participates in higher education. And we should certainly not be comfortable that women can achieve an unprecedented advantage in educational attainment and still encounter persistent disadvantage in earnings and working life.

Perhaps, then, male participation in higher education is best understood not as an isolated problem to be solved, but as one part of a larger unfinished project. We have made enormous progress in breaking the connection between gender and educational opportunity. The new data suggest that the connection has not disappeared so much as changed shape. Our task should not be to recreate an old equilibrium or engineer a new one. It should be to make gender matter less in determining the opportunities people have and the lives they are able to lead.

None of these data tells us precisely what to do next. Taken together, they point us towards a clearer agenda. We need to understand why some young men are missing out on educational opportunities from which they could benefit, and what might be done to widen those opportunities. Equally, we need to confront the persistent inequalities that prevent women's remarkable educational achievements from translating into equivalent economic opportunities and rewards. These are not competing problems, and progress on one should not be conditional on progress on the other. Both deserve our attention, and both demand action. We should be ambitious enough to pursue them simultaneously.

Professor Rorden Wilkinson is Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Macquarie University

[i] See, for instance, Julian Lesser, Address to the ACSES Policy Symposium: The evolving student in higher education, 8th September 2026, Brisbane, Australia.

[ii] George Williams, “Another generation of men will be left behind as Australia creates a generation of lost boys”, The Australian, 14th April 2026. Also available here.

[iii] OECD, Education at a Glance 2026: OECD Indicators, (Paris: OECD Publications, 2026).

[iv] OECD, Education at a Glance 2026: OECD Indicators, Table A1.2.

[v] Australian Government Department of Education, Key findings from the 2024 Higher Education Student Statistics, 2025, Figure 3: “Commencing domestic students by gender, 2015–2024”.

[vi] See, for example, J. Van Bavel, C. R. Schwartz, and A. Esteve (2018), “The Reversal of the Gender Gap in Education and Its Consequences for Family Life”, Annual Review of Sociology, 44 (2018), 341–360. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-soc-073117-041215.

[vii] Australian Government Department of Education, Key findings from the 2024 Higher Education Student Statistics, 2025, section “Males are less likely to commence higher education than 10 years ago”.

[viii] Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), NAPLAN 2025 National Results, (Sydney: ACARA, 2025).

[ix] Australian Bureau of Statistics, Schools, 2025, Table 64a, “Capped apparent retention rates (ARR), 2011–2025”, (Canberra: ABS, 2026).

[x] See Lesser, Address to the ACSES Policy Symposium: The evolving student in higher education

[xi] M. Encinas-Martín and M. Cherian (2023), Gender, Education and Skills: The Persistence of Gender Gaps in Education and Skills, OECD Skills Studies, (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2023)

[xii] OECD, Education at a Glance 2026: OECD Indicators, Chapters A3 and A4.

[xiii] Australian Bureau of Statistics (2026), Gender Indicators, (Canberra: ABS, 13 August 2026).

[xiv] E. Bahar, N. Bradshaw, N. Deutscher and M. Montaigne, “Children and the Gender Earnings Gap: Evidence for Australia”, Economic Record, 101 (2025), DOI: 10.1111/1475-4932.12834.

[xv] Jobs and Skills Australia, Education and Training Divides: Gendered Skills Pathways and Outcomes, Gender Economic Equality Study, Paper 2, Australian Government, Canberra, 2025.

[xvi] Williams, “Another generation of men will be left behind as Australia creates a generation of lost boys