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Gender gap at University of Copenhagen
TheCopenhagenPost
August 2nd, 2015
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This article is more than 9 years old.
Male students dominate computer science, while more women study sociology and public health
More women than men will attend the University of Copenhagen this academic year.
The female-male gender ratio among students who have been accepted to study at the university this summer is 60-40.
Mind the gender gap?
According to the online magazine Uniavisen, male students on study courses such as dental hygiene, veterinary medicine, public health sciences and sociology will be in a significant minority.
However, with 35 women and only three men, the course with the highest gender gap is audiologopedics (language disorders and their remediation).
On the other hand, more men will attend courses like forestry and landscape (55 to 8) and computer science (148 to 21).
Women ‘rule’ in most faculties
Looking at the gender distribution at the university’s six faculties, women outnumber men at five of them. More male students will study only at the Nature and Life Sciences Faculty: 1,016 men and 966 women.
While the Faculty of Theology has managed to attract nearly equal numbers of female (67) and male (61) students.
READ MORE: Contending with the dreaded higher education rejection slip
Gender not taken into consideration
Pernille Kindtler, the area manager for guidance and university admissions, explained that the university does not aim to reach gender equality when accepting new students.
“When we choose who should be admitted to the university, we do not take gender into account. It would be illegal,” Kindtler noted.
“If you look back in time, there used to be preponderance of men at the university, and now there is a predominance of women.”
Record numbers of applicants
More than 17,000 applicants wanted to get into Denmark’s largest university, and only 7,641 of them were admitted. Last year, the number was 7,616.
Applicants were particularly interested in social sciences, for which the demand was so great that it pushed up the entry requirements for political science (10.7 to 10.8), anthropology (10.9 to 11) and social studies (8.7 to 9.9). The maximum score in the entrance exams is 12.
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