Factors at age 15 account for more women at universities, StatsCan says

(CBC) - The academic advantages girls have at age 15 largely explain why they outnumber males in university classes, two Statistics Canada researchers say.

Marc Frenette and Klarka Zeman set out to examine why men, who represented the majority of university graduates in 1971, became a minority in 1991 and were outnumbered by women 3-to-2 in 2006.

"The results of their analysis suggest that more than three-quarters (76.8 per cent) of the gender gap in the university participation rate can be accounted for by differences in observable characteristics between boys and girls" at age 15, Statistics Canada said Tuesday.

The main factors, in order of importance, are:

- Differences in school marks.
- Standardized reading test scores.
- Time spent on homework.
- Parental expectations.

Fewer than a third of boys report marks of at least 80 per cent, the report said, compared with almost half of girls. And 8.5 per cent of boys said they spent no time doing homework, compared with 2.5 per cent of girls.

Parents with higher education are more likely to have children - boys and girls - who go to university, but "parental income ... is very weakly associated with university participation, once other socio-economic characteristics are taken into account," the Statistics Canada release said.

But there is a slight gender difference: parental income is completely irrelevant in determining if a boy will go to university, while for girls, higher parental income is associated with a greater probability of attending university.

Likewise, parental expectations have a stronger effect on girls than on boys. Despite parental worries about peer pressure, "there is no significant statistical relationship between the future plans of peers and the probability of attending university."

Boys and girls with two parents at home were more likely to attend university than those who grew up with a single parent.

The release said there has been a "dramatic reversal" in the balance of sexes on Canadian university campuses. In the 1971 census, 68 per cent of 25- to 29-year-old university graduates were male.

By 1991, women were a slight majority, and by 2006 they accounted for 60 per cent of graduates.

In another measure, by 2003 nearly 40 per cent of 19-year-old women had attended university, compared with just over 25 per cent of men.