Why are women being left behind in VET?  – comment by CEO Craig Robertson

Women constituted 60 per cent of bachelor level enrolments in 2019 and the vast majority are full‑time. For VET, women constituted 47% of enrolments and those studying full-time accounted for just 6 per cent. That’s right 6 per cent!

International Women’s Day was established in 1911 in Copenhagen but reflected growing unrest among women across the globe. Some 15,000 women marched through New York City in 1908 demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights.

International Women’s Day was also honoured the first time in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland on 19 March. More than one million women and men attended rallies campaigning for women’s rights to work, vote, be trained, to hold public office and end discrimination.

Justification was reinforced less than a week later on March 25 in the tragic ‘Triangle Fire’ in New York City which took the lives of more than 140 working women, most of them Italian and Jewish immigrants. This disastrous event drew significant attention to working conditions and labour legislation in the United States that became a focus of subsequent International Women’s Day events.

The struggle continues as we have been reminded these past few weeks.

Higher Education is a story of progress, though.

The ABS Social Trends in 1994 reported that in 1992, 55 per cent of undergraduate students were women but the proportion reduced to 42 per cent for higher degrees. “There appear to be two major obstacles to achieving greater equality in the proportions of men and women studying at higher levels, the ABS reported, “the lack of proportional equality at lower levels in non-traditional fields of study for each sex; and the strong vocational nature of many courses traditionally undertaken by women for which a higher degree is not necessarily the most useful career move.”

No doubt the performance has improved. In 2019 females represented 55.6 per cent of enrolments across the profile of higher education.

The real issue is the performance of the VET sector.

The full-time opportunity for females is extraordinarily low.

Whether these rates are by policy design, personal choice or individual circumstance, surely some attention is warranted.

If education and training is one of the avenues for advancement and the tool to break down gender-based bias then surely the VET sector must be seen in the same light. However, where we have VET qualifications that chameleon the labour market there is little hope while the labour market still struggles with pay and status parity.

Remedies are even more urgent given COVID has displaced so many women from work because the roles they fill have been the ones that have been forced to close.

The ABS continued in 1994 that the lower proportions of women studying at post-graduate level have at least two implications for policy makers: the impact on women’s employment opportunities and realisable income levels. How true for VET in 2021.

Take the time though to read about International Women’s Day through our TAFEs.