The future is female, reveals Lee Elliot Major. In just four years, women have turned from a minority in higher education to a comfortable majority

Are women developing into the educational elite, at every level? For years, primary school teachers have known that girls outperform boys in the early years; in the days of the 11-plus, girls were marked down to prevent a huge sexual imbalance in the grammar schools. More recently, they have been beating boys at GCSE and, more recently still, at A-level. Now, to an extraordinary extent, they are starting to dominate the universities, too.

Earlier this month, the universities admissions service revealed an increase in the numbers of full-time undergraduates starting degree courses, allaying concerns that the introduction of tuition fees would trigger a fall. Yet the increase was entirely among women. There are fewer male students starting university this year than last.

In just four years, the proportion of women among university enrolments (now totalling 750,000) has soared from 49 per cent to 55 per cent. The latter figure is even more remarkable than it looks because there are fewer young women than young men in the population as a whole.

Already, women make up more than three in every five new students at such universities as Keele, East Anglia, Sussex, Thames Valley, Leicester and Anglia Polytechnic. Further, the first official figures for student drop-out rates, due to be published later this year, will show that women are less likely than men to leave university before graduating.

If present trends were to continue, it is calculated, universities, the almost exclusive domain of white, middle- and upper-class males as little as 40 years ago, would be entirely female by the 2030s. Needless to say, that won't come to pass, but the extrapolation illustrates the scale of what's happening. Nor is the phenomenon confined to Britain: women are also now outdoing men in universities across the United States and Australia.

What accounts for this astonishing transformation? The answer depends on your academic subject, as well as on your political prejudices. Economists, as you'd expect, have a dry, economic explanation: women have more to gain financially from degrees because, among non-graduates, female earnings lag further behind male earnings than they do among graduates.

Scientists (some of them, at any rate) have genetic explanations to hand. Women, they say, are blessed with genes that make them more sociable at an early age, and better communicators than men. These traits stand them in good stead in educational competition. Further, the scientists say, women are more risk-averse than men. So while men continue to get more first-class degrees but often fall flat on their faces and drop out or get thirds, the women go for the safe second-class degree. Sociologists accept these ideas up to a point, but argue that the behaviour of the two sexes is largely culturally rather than biologically determined.

Politicians and teachers have been worried for years about the growing gap between boys' and girls' achievements at school. Nobody has really come up with a satisfactory explanation. The best guess is that a combination of schools leaning over backwards to give girls equal opportunities, the paucity of male teachers in primary schools and the general laddishness of contemporary culture leads boys to think education is for sissies.

Whatever the truth, the implications for future job markets are huge. The advantages of being a graduate are greater than ever today: they secure better jobs and earn more money than those without degrees. But in 1994 women still earned on average 20 per cent less than men. And a recent study of graduates 18 months after they had left university revealed that more of the men were in professional occupations than the women. Female graduates still tend to fill the lower-paid and lower-status clerical and secretarial roles at work.

We must expect this to change, however. Women are pouring into some of what used to be regarded as male domains: many medical courses, supplying the next generation of GPs and surgeons, now have clear female majorities. Just as women have benefited over the past few decades from the increasing availability of part-time jobs and the move away from manufacturing to service industries, so the emerging highly educated females of tomorrow could flourish in the new knowledge-intensive companies of the future. Certainly the kind of collaborative, teamwork-based company advocated by the Prime Minister's favourite guru, Charles Leadbeater, in his book Living on Thin Air, would seem ideally suited to women. Traditional male hierarchies are out; new-style female networks are in.

So the future will be female. It will be a world where most doctors, lawyers, lecturers, perhaps even chief executives and cabinet ministers, are women. "The pace of change is so rapid," says one government official, "that some time in the next century people will look back on us as we look back on the Victorians and think, gosh, they really did things strangely then."

The writer is deputy editor of "Research Fortnight"

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