Mary Wells is the dean of engineering at the University of Waterloo, one of the handful of Canadian universities where the gender balance tips slightly more male than female.Alicia Wynter/The Globe and Mail
Mary Wells, the dean of engineering at the University of Waterloo, has worked for years to understand and address the gender gap in her field.
She has focused on boosting the number of women in engineering, one of the academic disciplines where men still consistently outnumber women by about three to one.
But over the past decade or so, she has observed two new and important trends.
First, women are gaining ground on men at university and in high school when it comes to enrolment in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and math.
Second, as the number of women studying biology in high school has increased substantially, the number of men has dropped. That could have implications for future research, she said.
Prof. Wells said that, as an educator, what she’s seeing broadly in male enrolment data at university concerns her. Canada can’t afford to leave human potential on the table, she added.
“I want to make sure that every child in this country feels not only that they can meet their full potential, but that there’s a place for them,” Prof. Wells said.
“I worry that at a relatively young age, boys are self-selecting out, or saying ‘that’s not for me.’ I want to understand why.”
Recently, The Globe and Mail reported on the gender gap at universities. The ratio among Canadian students is usually about 60 per cent female to 40 per cent male. Whether it’s at the bachelor’s, master’s or PhD level, law school or medical school, university or college, the pattern is fairly similar.
The trend to a majority female postsecondary system began decades ago.
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It’s not as though men are being displaced, and there’s no evidence that they’re being discriminated against. It’s that women, given the opportunity, have embraced higher education, spurred in part by the better jobs available to them with a degree. Men still earn more on average, even at younger age groups where the educational disparity is significant.
Prof. Wells works at one of the handful of Canadian universities where the gender balance tips slightly more male than female. She’s also an engineer, a field with enrolments close to 75-per-cent male.
Prof. Wells and two colleagues produced a detailed study of enrolment in university-entry STEM courses at Ontario’s public high schools over 11 years from 2007 to 2018.
“The impetus for the study was really to look at the longer-term trends around women enrolling in STEM courses,” Prof. Wells said. “But then we were really surprised to see what was happening with men over time.”
In their paper, Prof. Wells, Eamonn Corrigan and Martin Williams say that years of attention to the gender gap in STEM has contributed to progress toward gender parity. In 2020-21, 48 per cent of STEM majors at Ontario universities were women.
Prof. Wells and two colleagues studied enrolment in university-entry STEM courses at Ontario’s public high schools over 11 years, which found that men’s enrolment numbers in biology are diminishing.Alicia Wynter/The Globe and Mail
But they tend to be clustered in certain subjects. Women have relatively low numbers in computer science and mathematics, for example. And in the sub-fields of engineering, there is near parity in biomedical and environmental engineering, but large gaps in mechanical, electrical and computer engineering, where fewer than 20 per cent of students are women.
There’s a variety of reasons behind these gaps, including gender stereotypes. Prof. Wells and her colleagues focus on one significant factor, which is the number of students eliminated from these fields in high school because they don’t take the courses required for university enrolment.
They found that female participation is up in nearly all high-school STEM courses and that their growth rates outpace those of men. This means young women are increasingly likely to continue with biology, chemistry and calculus through the end of Grade 12. The exception was physics, where women continue to be underrepresented.
“The women are starting to outpace the men. We see bigger increases in continuation rates for women than men,” Prof. Wells said. “I guess you could argue that if the women were lower anyway, then maybe that makes sense, but it kind of confirmed other disturbing trends we were seeing around men dropping out, and losing hope and optimism.”
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The two subjects where the contrast was most evident were biology and physics. The study found that 81 per cent of female students who take Grade 10 science will not go on to complete Grade 12 physics, compared to 66 per cent of male students. And in biology, 71 per cent of men don’t continue to Grade 12, compared with 55 per cent of women.
Prof. Wells said the biology result for men is concerning, because it’s not just that women have increased their numbers, it’s that men’s numbers are actually diminishing. The paper called the drop in male students “precipitous.”
Although there remains much work to be done in boosting the proportion of women who take physics in Grade 12, Prof. Wells said it may be that a new gender gap is emerging in biology for men.
That can have an impact, she said, because the creativity that drives research and problem solving tends to be stronger when it’s drawn from a wide range of experience.
In order to tackle the gap, educators could take lessons from the work that has been done to boost female enrolment in STEM, Prof. Wells said. She suggested promoting role models, for example, and near-peer mentoring from slightly older students.
More generally, she said the door to higher education needs to be kept open for young men, as in some cases it seems time and maturity can contribute to a changed perspective on learning.
She said she often tells parents of teenage boys that a gap year after high school can be beneficial.
“I do think we need to look at other pathways, when men are a little bit older, to give them a way back in, so they can do university or college or whatever they want to do, and meet their full potential,” Prof. Wells said.
