The Paradox of Progress: Gender Disparity in Higher Education

Getting into university is an amazing milestone, but have you ever stopped to think about who is actually running the show once you get there?

There is a strange contradiction happening in higher education right now, and to see it in action, we only need to look as far as the traditional dissertation defence.

Imagine a female PhD student walking into a room to present her research. More often than not, the panel waiting to judge it is almost entirely male. She looks up, and the portraits on the wall tell the same story of a long, unbroken line of men who came before. She belongs to a student body where women are now the majority. Yet the people evaluating her work are drawn from a layer of academia that majority never reached.

While this is an individual scenario, it reflects a wider global problem.

In 2024, 114 women were enrolled in higher education for every 100 men, yet only a quarter of senior academic leadership roles were held by women.

More women are entering university than ever before, which is a massive global achievement, however, there is a core problem of underrepresentation remaining at senior levels.

The Global Picture

Gender disparity in higher education isn’t exclusive to senior leadership positions, as gender parity in enrollment rates varies greatly depending on what region we look at.

Some regions have moved fast. Central and South Asia have made strong progress in recent years, achieving gender parity in 2023. However, this has still not been reached in other areas of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa.

What you study matters too. The share of female STEM graduates has remained stagnant at 35% globally for the past decade, and women account for just 31% of the global research and development (R&D) workforce.

And even in the regions and fields where parity has been reached, a glass ceiling remains. In 2023, only 48 women served as presidents among the top 200 universities ranked by Times Higher Education, which is less than a quarter. In areas where gender parity hasn’t yet been reached at undergraduate level, this difference worsens, for example, in Africa fewer than three female presidents were elected among around 100 universities.

This leaves us questioning why women are underrepresented at senior levels, and how we can fix it.

Why ‘Just Waiting’ Won’t Fix The Gap

It is easy to fall into the mindset of “Women only started outnumbering men recently, so isn’t higher enrollment a sign of victory? Won’t they just work their way up over time?”

It’s a comforting idea. It’s also a trap.

There is ample evidence to prove that fixing the education gap does not automatically fix the systemic gaps that women face in employment after graduation. For example, research by the OECD concluded that each dollar invested by governments in tertiary education generates a public benefit of 2.9 USD for males, but only 2 USD for females.

Read that again. So, even though women outnumber men in higher education at the undergraduate level, governments are still making 90 cents more on their investment in a man than a woman, serving as the ultimate proof that the systemic gap in the economy and workplace remains broken.

Dismantling Invisible Barriers

So, what causes this gap to happen?

Part of it is money, in plain sight. In Canada, female professors earn on average 10% less than men for the same work. In the US, full-time female professors earn just 82% of the salary of their male counterparts.

These more obvious financial gaps pair with other systemic barriers for women, such as workplace discrimination, a lack of mentorship and networking opportunities, and the fact that childcare and family planning years often clash with the most intense years of climbing the academic ladder.

What Project Access Can Do

Some countries have been working hard to try and eliminate the remaining gender disparities in higher education, however, only one third have implemented programmes to support underrepresented groups’ access to higher education.

Where countries are failing to support these groups, Project Access steps in, providing free mentorship programmes at both the undergraduate and graduate level to target these exact barriers. Our mentees are paired with a PA mentor, who is already studying at their dream university. These mentors can help a mentee with their initial application, offer guidance on navigating the interview process, and provide the vital network and insider knowledge that underrepresented students often lack.

We want to help women do more than get through the university gates. We want to equip them to keep climbing; to reach the doctoral desks, the faculty rooms, and the leadership tables where the future of higher education is actually decided.