Gender Imbalance Building In Otago Health Sciences

Have your say: is the New Zealand education system failing our young men? Read today's article and listen tomorrow to UC sociologist Mike Grimshaw's outlook on the country's universities.

Otago University, the pre-eminent provider of training future the country’s doctors, dentists, biomedical scientists and physiotherapists, is witnessing a widening gender gap.

“Differential rates of school achievement, with females more likely to achieve University Entrance than males, and also to achieve at a higher level in NCEA. In 2021, for example, roughly 48% of females that left school do so with UE, compared to just 34% of males. So, the pool of males qualified at the end of secondary school to come on to University study is much smaller than the pool of UE-qualified females.”

David Thomson, Director of Strategy, Analytics and Reporting of Otago University.

In 2022, female enrolments in the biomedical sciences are double their male counterparts; in dentistry, women accounted for 62 percent of the population. In both areas, male student numbers have witnessed a steady decline between 2020 and 2022.

In the field of medicine and surgery and physiotherapy, enrolments amongst both genders have remained steady over the 2020 to 2022 period, with women accounting for about 58 percent of the cohort.

David Thomson, Director of Strategy, Analytics and Reporting, says the university did not see a “major shift in trend for enrolments by gender in the past four years. However there has been a much longer-run and clear trend towards much higher proportions of women than men studying at University.”