At 64%, country has most women students in Europe

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 course mates. At the masters level, the ratio is nearer to one to three, writes David Matthews for Times Higher Education.

“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% of tertiary education students are women, according to European Union statistics. This is more than any other EU country, but across the bloc, women make up 54% of students. In only a handful do men remain the majority.

But the root causes of the imbalance are hard to tackle. And a focus on male disadvantage is controversial in a country where men still earn far more than women and the professoriate remains overwhelmingly male.
Full report on the Inside Higher Ed site