Schools are hiring more women, and female students now outnumber male classmates, but higher education isn't a girl's world yet.
Nebraska's Coordinating Commission for Postsecondary Education released a report last month stating that last fall, 55.2 percent of Nebraska postsecondary students were female and 44.8 percent were male.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln lags a bit behind that figure in the female enrollment sweep. The UNL student body is 53.27 percent male and 46.7 percent female this semester, according to Institutional Research and Planning's latest Factbook.
"This isn't a zero-sum game," said Barbara McCuen, research coordinator for the commission. "Increasing numbers of both men and women are going to college, but women are going at a higher rate."
This is true across the nation, she added.
McCuen said male enrollment could be increasing at a slower pace because men are likely to find higher-paying jobs fresh out of high school than female classmates, such as jobs in construction. However, trades are increasingly requiring formal instruction, propelling more men to college.
It's also likely female enrollment is up because most women today simply expect to continue their education after high school, McCuen said, which was not the case in the past.
When McCuen graduated from Iowa State in 1967, she was one of two women in a graduating class of 400 business students. When McCuen later became the first female faculty member in Iowa State's business department, all of her students were male.
"After 40 years of looking at this, there is no one answer," she said, "but I can tell you we've gone through a profound cultural change."
Institutions are now employing slightly more female faculty each year, McCuen said. About 1 percent more of UNL faculty were female in 2007 than in 2006, according to those years' Institutional Research and Planning Factbooks.
In 2006, 32.9 percent of UNL faculty were female, and in 2007 34 percent were female, trailing behind the percentage of female students at the university.
The average female faculty salary in Nebraska is more than $10,000 behind the average male faculty salary, but this comparison does not take rank into account. The commission reported average male faculty salary in Nebraska was $67,537 in 2007, while average female faculty salary during the same year was $55,045.
Women faculty tend to be more recently hired and work in lower-ranking positions than some long-time, male faculty who rose to high positions in the past and haven't retired, causing the gap, McCuen said.
Institutional Research and Planning found no statistical difference in salary between male and female faculty at UNL within the same groups based on rank, number of years with the university and other variables, said Bill Nunez, director of Institutional Research and Planning.
"If you don't control for those things, you don't have apples for apples," he said.
rachelalbin@dailynebraskan.com
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