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Across the EU, women are leading the charge in higher education. In 2022, they made up almost 60% of all master’s students and nearly half of all PhD candidates. This shows that women are increasingly breaking down barriers and pursuing advanced studies.

Digging deeper into the numbers, out of the 1.5 million master’s students in the EU, a whopping 905,678 were women. That’s 58.6%. For PhDs, the number was a bit lower; women made up 48.5% of the 99,204 doctoral students. Still, this near-equal representation at the PhD level is a positive sign.

Looking at individual countries, women were the majority of master’s students in every EU country except Luxembourg, where it was pretty much a 50/50 split. The countries with the highest proportion of female master’s students were Cyprus, Poland, and Lithuania. This could be due to a mix of good education policies, cultural factors, and more encouragement for women to go to university.

For PhD students, the percentage of women varied a lot depending on the country. In some places like Luxembourg, Austria, and the Czech Republic, it was below 45%. But in Lithuania, Cyprus, and Latvia, women made up well over 55% of PhD students. In Poland, the number of female and male doctoral students was almost equal. The reasons for these differences could be things like societal expectations, career breaks, or gender bias in academia.

Interestingly, between 2013 and 2022, the percentage of women in master’s programs dropped a tiny bit, but the number of women in PhD programs actually went up slightly. This shows that more women are overcoming challenges and going for those top academic qualifications!

More female doctoral students in medicine and social sciences

In 2022, way more women chose education-related master’s and doctoral programs than men, at 75.6% and 66.9%, respectively. This isn’t surprising, given that teaching and childcare jobs have traditionally been seen as “women’s work.”

Other popular areas for women at the master’s level were general studies (73.7%), arts and humanities (69.5%), and social sciences, journalism, and information (68.7%). These fields are often seen as more “feminine” and focus on communication, creativity, and social skills.

At the PhD level, women were also more common in health and social care (60.9%), which makes sense given how many women work in healthcare and caregiving. They also dominated agricultural, forestry, fisheries, and veterinary sciences (57.5%), maybe because more women are interested in sustainability and the environment these days.

Social sciences, journalism, and information studies (57.3%) and arts and humanities (53.3%) also had more female PhD students, similar to what we saw at the master’s level.

But, women were still less likely to study certain things. In both master’s and doctoral programs, they were a minority in information and communication technologies (26.2% and 22.6%) and engineering, manufacturing, and construction (33.4% and 32.7%).

This shows that there’s still a gender gap in STEM fields, probably due to stereotypes, not enough female role models, and workplace issues. To address this problem, scholarships, mentorship, and policy changes are needed to get more women into these areas and create a better balance in both academia and industry.

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