Women have the educational edge

In 1970, one in four uni students were women. By 1987 the figure was 58 pc, a figure that has remained more or less stable for the past 30 years.

Researcher Ittima Cherastidthan. Picture: Stuart McEvoy.

In 1970, just one in four university students were women. By 1987 the figure was 58 per cent, a figure that has remained more or less stable for the past 30 years.

Not only do women do better at school and outnumber men at university, they do so in the majority of disciplines. There are more female undergraduates, more female postgraduates and more female staff and academics.

For every 100 women enrolled at university, there will be just 72 men. This is a good news story. Education has given women economic freedom. It has given them careers as politicians, lawyers, doctors, teachers, scientists, academics and every other profession under the sun.

The economic advantages of a holding a degree are plain to see. Various studies, including work by NATSEM at the University of Canberra, have shown the income premium from holding a bachelor degree is 40 per cent higher than having just done Year 12.

For those who do a diploma or advanced diploma, the premium is 17 per cent.

Johanna Wyn, a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor with the Youth Research Centre at the University of Melbourne, says women are much more likely to see “education as a strategy for economic security”.

“Women value education more highly than men and women and are more likely to go back into education after time out,” Wyn says.

“For years now, girls have been doing better at school; education is a good space for women. It’s not bad for men but it’s more valuable for women.”

Young women in particular need to be strategic in their decisions about their future careers, says Michelle Bruniges, secretary of the federal Department of Education and Training.

“Learning and relearning is paramount,” Bruniges says.

“We need to be passionate and well-informed about the choices we make with our education and that requires greater transparency about the outcomes of the studies we undertake.”

She points to government data that shows occupations in healthcare are anticipated to grow by 21 per cent by 2023 — a fact that will benefit women since they represent 75 per cent of all university enrolments in that field.

Given women’s predilection for education, the future looks bright.

According to a US study, out of the 11.6 million jobs created after the global financial crisis, 8.4 million required a bachelor’s degree.

The drivers behind the dramatic expansion of women in higher education are social, cultural and economic.

A potted history of the past five decades would reveal the rise of feminism and its attendant change in attitudes about women’s roles in the home and a rise in the average age of marriage.

Along came the contraceptive pill, which lessened the number of children women bore. Advances in technology freed women from hours of drudgery doing housework, thanks to the washing machine and dishwasher.

At the same time, structural changes in the economy during the 1980s saw a rapid decline in the number of jobs available to women. Secretaries and stenographers became a thing of the past.

While men still had trades to turn to, women had to look to higher education to deliver secure and well-paid employment.

Concurrently, there was a concerted push, driven by the women’s movement, to professionalise typically female careers, such as teaching and nursing.

Once the province of technical and teachers’ colleges by the 1990s, both these jobs — and many more — required a degree as a minimum qualification to entry.

But if we were to think that all of this would inevitably lead to some semblance of equality, we’d need to think again.

Recent research by Andrew Norton and Ittima Cherastidtham from the Grattan Institute found that, with more women in the workforce than ever before, the graduate gender earnings gap is narrowing — but only slightly.

While women’s earnings generally outpaced those of their male peers, the pay gap remains large and stubborn.

Just how large is shocking.

The Grattan Institute found female university graduates are now expected to earn 27 per cent less than men — or $750,000 less — over their career. Ten years earlier, the gap was 30 per cent.

The reasons behind the gender pay gap are complex but not unresolvable, says Rebecca Cassells, an associate professor from the Bankwest-Curtin Economics Centre at Curtin University.

Self-selecting segregation, in-built bias as to how we value certain careers, societal expectations around child rearing and old school tie networks are some of the parts of the complex puzzle.

Average full-time salaries for women are lower than for men in every occupation and industry in Australia, according to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, and female-dominated occupations earn less than male-dominated ones. Libby Lyons from the WGEA has previously noted that the gender pay gap is a “symptom of a broader cultural problem in our workplaces”.

“Conscious and unconscious bias in the workplace. If we can address that, we can address a lot of issues,” says Cassells.

“There is a very strong undercurrent of devaluing women in Australia that doesn’t exist in some other countries.

“The combination of bias, the tendency of women to go into feminised low-paid jobs and taking time out to have children means they never catch up economically.”

Professor Wyn agrees.

“Sexism is built into work practices and that is washing back into people’s lives,” she says.

The World Economic Forum has estimated that — based on current trends — the global gender pay gap will not close for 108 years.

However, Cherastidtham says the main dynamic behind that has been a significant increase in the number of women staying in the workforce once they have had children — thanks largely to progressive social policies such as paid maternity leave and subsidised childcare — and no doubt in many families because of economic necessity.

“The number of women with children staying in the workforce is up by nearly 10 percentage points among graduates aged 25-34 — and 5 percentage points among graduates aged 35-44,” Cherastidtham says.

The full impact of the loss of productivity in educated women due to childbirth and caring duties can be clearly seen if we look at people aged 35.

At that age, 80 per cent of men are in the workforce full-time compared to only 40 per cent of women, says Cherastidtham.

The McKinsey Global Institute has estimated the value of full participation by women could be as much as $28 billion to global GDP by 2025.

While male and females are on a similar earnings and work trajectory following graduation, after the age of 28 that trajectory takes a downward curve.

Women increasingly move to part-time work and it is not until their 50s that 50 per cent are back in the workforce on a full-time basis.

“We have a significant proportion of very well-educated women who are part-time, unemployed or underemployed,” says Professor Wyn.

“Because they make the “choice” to be the one in a partnership who is the one who will mostly find their “problem or privilege” to be the primary carer and they almost never make it up again if they go back into the workforce.”

“Men need the opportunities and confidence to use flexible working arrangements at the same rates as women,” says Bruniges.

“This must be part of a holistic approach to address the income gap and boost women’s participation, because it’s clear the economic and societal benefits are potentially enormous.”

The picture is even more complicated when we look at the careers women tend to go into.

In any given year, nearly 50 per cent of all females who enrol in university will do so in teaching, nursing and humanities degrees (not including law and economics). These feminised, caring roles offer secure employment and excellent early earnings compared to some other jobs, but career progression tends to plateau after 10 years, with men taking the lion’s share of senior managerial roles.

For men, enrolment patterns are very different, with about one third entering science and engineering degrees.

Interestingly, the third highest discipline is humanities with 13 per cent of all male enrolments — the same proportion as women.

This has created a huge disconnect between women’s investment in education and the relative returns.

As Cherastidtham notes, women tend to miss out on the crucial career progression years of their 30s and early 40s while their husbands and male counterparts progress to more senior positions, earning more in income, status and superannuation. Women are rarely ever able to assail the earnings and seniority gap established during those years.

The mixed bag of benefits and rewards from women undertaking higher education has to be viewed in light of the coming onslaught of automation, artificial intelligence, and digital disruption. How will women fare in the new world, often referred to as the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

While there are dire predictions that automation will wipe out 40 per cent of jobs within 10 to 15 years across the economy, others are less pessimistic. Demographer Bernard Salt has predicted around 700,000 new jobs have been created in Australia since 2000 and that for every job lost another 10 were created.

In a recent report called Future Skills, consultancy AlphaBeta said the jobs in Australia, as elsewhere in the developed world, were being reshaped by automation, globalisation and demographics.

At the same time people are getting older and will be in the workforce longer. Lifelong learning is not just a catchphrase anymore — it’s brutal reality.

“In the future, workers will not be able to rely solely on what they learned as a teenager,” the report says. “To remain employable, workers will need to make a habit of refreshing existing skills and adding new ones throughout their career.”

The World Economic Forum has pointed out that the industries most likely to be impacted by automation are male dominated — manufacturing, construction, transport and so on while typically female sectors such as healthcare, education and childcare will never be able to fully replace the human component — although the Japanese have developed Vevo, a robot with a bear-shaped head and humanoid body which can recognise and greet children as well as record their body temperatures using a thermograph.

The WEF asserts that by holding higher education credentials than men and having a suite of “soft skills” — such as collaboration, communication and creativity in their armoury, women will be much better prepared to negotiate the tumultuous disruption about to descend on the economy.

“Confidence is an integral part of success,” Njideka Harry, CEO of the Youth for Technology Foundation wrote last year.

“Research from Columbia University stresses that, while men tend to over-estimate their abilities by approximately 30 per cent, women tend to routinely underestimate their own skills. What we need to do is bring the perception of how good we are in line with how good we actually are.

“Most jobs created between now and 2020 will have a technology component, and it is important that women understand the skills they will need to excel in them. This is an opportunity for women to create new career paths and differentiate themselves.”