Women and Higher Education

The number of women attending institutions of higher education has expanded markedly since World War II. In North America and Europe women historically constituted an invisible minority; usually they were shunted off to teacher preparation and other "female"-appropriate parts of the university or cloistered off in special women's colleges or colleges for teacher education outside the university setting. ¹ In the rest of the world, few, if any, women were allowed into the university. The universities Britain and France belatedly established in Africa and in Asia were for men. Private initiative, as in India, led to the limited development of women's colleges. The government's institutions, however, often excluded women. In French West Africa, as elsewhere in the third world, even had university doors been open to women, the lack of female primary and secondary education meant that few. if any, women possessed the educational background to pursue university-level training. Only after independence in the 1960s did higher education become available to women. ² In Africa and Asia the number of women attending university has grown even more dramatically than it has in North America and Europe. However, even with such gains women remain underrepresented in higher education. In North America and Europe, women's numbers may be growing in higher education, but in many countries in other regions the proportion of female relative to male students has been declining in the 1980s.