Women and university students: history of a disagreement in the contemporary Spanish university

Abstract

In the last decades, the low rates of women that follow studies at the university level, as well as the fact that those rates are increasing, have been analyzed by researchers in Spain, as well as in Europe and in some other countries. In our analysis, we have seen that female students’ rates are increasing year after year but with significant differences between academic disciplines. For this reason, our purpose was to compile data from Spanish universities, in order to see the tendencies and their origins. Our study includes percentages of women enrolled in the diverse academic areas of studies at the Spanish universities, compared to the percentages in the whole Academia. It also includes some data on the percentages of women among PhD students, as well as among the teaching staff of the departments in the faculties, and we compare them by academic status. Finally, we present some conclusions on the barriers in the academic career for female professors in the Spanish universities between 1978-2008. These data reveal the increasing percentages of women that for the past last years have followed higher studies. They also show some differences among academic areas, and also that there is a significant gender bias in the access of graduated female students to the upper categories of teaching staff.