• Women are less likely than men to believe that they can get into university.
• This is despite the fact that women on average do better than men at attaining places at university.
• What are the causes of this lack of self-belief among university-entrance-aged women?

In 2011, only 15 FTSE 100 CEOs in the UK were women. In 2024, there are 21. This minimal leap is not the kind of progress celebrated today. Much more is expected in terms of tackling gender inequality, with parity being the expected ideal. Instead of there being parity between the genders in the C-suite, there are only ten companies helmed by female CEOs in the top 100 listed UK businesses.

There remain companies in the FTSE 350 that have all-male boards (9, down from 54 in 2017), despite Financial Conduct Authority rules stating that women should make up at least 40 percent of a company board. This despite all evidence pointing toward gender-balanced boardrooms outperforming single-gender boardrooms.

Where does this inequality begin? Well, a new study by the University of Cologne shows that a concern over chances in life begins at a young age, in an inequality in self-belief when young women are preparing for university.

Are women more likely to downgrade their aspirations for university?

Women in Germany are far more likely to doubt their chances of getting into university than men, research by Professor Marita Jacob, in collaboration with Melinda Erdmann and Marcel Helbig of the Berlin Social Science Center, revealed.

The researchers found that women are more pessimistic than men about achieving their aspirations of going into higher education, despite the fact they are equally interested in pursuing higher education as their male counterparts, with women even expressing higher aspirations for university enrolment than men.

This gloom, though, goes against the facts and the figures, which, contrary to the pessimism, show that more women now go to university than men. For some years now, women have been much more likely than men to go on to university. Something must be causing this demonstrable pessimism, though – what is it?

Why the pessimism?

The researchers argue that while factors such as probability of success and perceived cost impact both genders, young women are also affected by formal restrictions limiting entry to their preferred fields of study. For example, there are high entry requirements for medicine, psychology or law and many women often don’t believe they will achieve the correct grades to be accepted.

They say that “the finding that women do not realise their college aspirations is particularly noteworthy, as women on average achieve higher grades than men, giving them a considerable advantage in the competition for scarce study places. The first ‘leak’ in the pipeline for academic careers occurs even before actual enrolment.”

 Women are much more likely to go to university than men and have been for many years, finds Governmental research. They are also more likely to complete their studies and gain a first or upper second-class degree. Perhaps then it has more to do with the structures of society that exist outside of the small, short reprieve of life studying in the ivory tower. As, the research continues, “after graduation, men are more likely to be in ‘highly skilled employment or further study just after graduation.”

But the scales are tipping: more women than men are enrolled in law school and medical school, The Economist reports. “As such, among young couples,” the woman is “more likely to be going to be a lawyer or a doctor than he is.”

Why do women doubt their aspirations?

Culturalist theories of gender suggest that young women might have lower college aspirations than men, but the study found that their “empirical results showed that young women report higher college aspirations than their male counterparts.”

In Germany, where the research into aspiration was conducted, with the study analysing data from 1766 interviews across 42 schools, access to the fields which women tend to prefer, such as psychology, medicine, and law, is highly restricted, which might explain some of the expectation-pessimism.

There was a gap, however, between aspirations and expectations, and a pessimism among women about their expectations when it came to university entrance. The researchers “observed that women were likelier than men to hold higher aspirations than expectations (pessimistic college expectations), suggesting that women are more likely to downgrade their aspirations when considering potential barriers.”

They also found that “women are more likely to become ‘lost talent’ because they express higher educational aspirations than realistic expectations.”

The gender differences in the preferred field of study tended to lower women’s realistic expectations. So, it is sexism in the post-university job market that stymies women even before they enter university.

This is, the researchers go on to note, “particularly remarkable, as women attain higher grades than men on average, giving them a considerable advantage in the competition for scarce college places. Therefore, the first ‘leak’ in the academic career pipeline in Germany occurs before enrolment when women start considering their potential enrolment.”

The study closes with a pertinent policy implication: that the ‘lost talent’ phenomenon should be taken seriously by legislators, and initiatives to boost expectations among women should be implemented.

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