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More and more women – and fewer and fewer men – enroll in universities. In 1991, 57 per cent of the students at Universite Laval in Quebec City were female. By 1996, the proportion was up to 60 per cent; now it is 63 per.
This fall, the Universite de Montreal has twice as many female students as male. Women make up 80 per cent of the medical school's student body. The same imbalance can be found in most departments, including dental, veterinarian and law school. Most criminals are male, but when they're brought into court, they'll be surrounded by female lawyers and judges and observed by female criminologists and psychologists. The only areas where male students remain predominant are science, math and business; but Even there, the gap is shortening.
The good news is that women are becoming more educated. The bad news is that the proportion of men with university degrees is decreasing every year.
What is especially distressing is that the trend is even stronger in younger cohorts. In the CEGEPs (the community colleges that are compulsory for university entry), 57.5 per cent of the 64,000 newly enrolled students are female. The gap is especially wide in the programs that lead to university; there, women form a 60-per-cent majority. Even in the three-year technical programs with direct links to the job market, the student body is 56 per cent female.
And women are much more successful. Three out of four female students receive their college diploma, while almost 40 per cent of the male students drop out or fail the exams.
More than half of 17-year-old females – but only a third of male teenagers – enroll in a CEGEP. One reason is that boys drop out of high school. The phenomenon is not new, but it's getting more serious.
»So these 16-year-old boys leave school, find a small job and make enough money to buy a car,« says Denis Marceau, academic vice-president at the Universite de Sherbrooke. »For a while, they think life is great. It's only later that they realize that you can't do much without a degree.«
This is not the kind of world that '60s feminists dreamed of. The idea was to develop a balanced society, where men and women would equally share power and responsibilities, both at home and at work. Instead, what's developing looks like a complete reversal of the old order, with women gaining full power over men – something that only radical, man-hating feminists used to wish for.
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