Enlarge image
Freshers in Cologne 2019: For years there have been more female than male students
Photo: Christoph Hardt / Future Image / IMAGO
With a share of 50.2 percent, there were more female than male students at German universities for the first time in the past winter semester 2021/22.
This is based on data from the Federal Statistical Office, which the CHE Center for Higher Education Development evaluated.
Overall, the proportion of women studying has increased over the past thirty years.
In the 1998/99 winter semester it was still 44.5 percent.
Since 2016, female first-year students have dominated.
When it comes to passing the final exams, female graduates are now the majority in a gender comparison at 52.9 percent.
According to the CHE, Thuringia has the highest proportion of female students at 59.5 percent.
However, this is due to the private international university IU with its headquarters in Erfurt, which has a high proportion of women at around 65 percent.
The four subjects with the highest proportion of women are among the subjects most in demand
German Studies/German
Educational Science/Pedagogy
Social work
Psychology.
Here, more than 70 percent of all students are female.
In an international comparison, more female students
The national results largely coincide with international trends.
The evaluation of more than 2200 departments in the U-Multirank Gender Monitor shows that 53.6 and 54.1 percent of bachelor’s and master’s students are women.
The highest quotas per subject of over 80 percent are in the fields of nursing science, educational science and social work.
The Gender Monitor, which was created for the second time, also examines gender relations at all career levels in the international university system.
"The famous glass ceiling for women in management positions can also be seen internationally at universities," says Gero Federkeil, head of international rankings at the CHE.
Here, too, the international trend can be found in the German data.
While the proportion of female professors at 27 percent is slightly below the international trend, the proportion of female university managers at a state university in Germany is currently 24.9 percent.
The gender term now also includes non-binary categories, which can also be specified when U-Multirank collects data.
However, due to the small number of cases, this could not yet be taken into account in the underlying data for the German and international evaluation and could only be evaluated according to the categories women and men, the CHE reports.
sun