According to Eurostat1, Germany and Greece are among the European countries with the lowest percentage of women enrolled at university level. In 2007, 49.7 percent of the students in Germany were female, in Greece 50.4 percent of women studied. The EU-27 average is 55.2 percent. The number of maths, science, and technology (MST) graduates increased continuously in both countries, as was reported by the European Commission (2008) on the basis of Eurostat data for the years 2000-2005. However, Germany, and Greece are not among the top performing countries, and the share of women in MST graduates was 24.4 percent in Germany and 40.9 percent in Greece (EU average is 31.2 percent, in 2006).
ICTstudies in Germany. According to data from the German Federal Statistics Office2 in the winter semester 07/08 1.941.405 students were enrolled at German universities (including universities of applied science and “Verwaltungsfachhoch — schulen”); 47 percent of them were female. The number of enrolments of male students exceeds that of females. Nevertheless, since 2006 this proportion has changed for the total number of passed examinations. Fifty-one percent of women were among the 286.391 students who passed examinations in 2007. However, this development refers to teacher training and diploma graduation level only; other examinations such as PhD, university of applied science or Bachelor and Master degrees are still passed by a majority of men.
The number of men and women who started their first year at German universities in the winter semester 07/08 was nearly 5 0 percent respectively. Nevertheless, women decided on subjects according to traditional stereotypes. They enrolled for linguistic and cultural sciences, social science, or teacher training. Women are clearly underrepresented in engineering sciences and choose primarily selected subjects such as biology, architecture, interior design, or health sciences.
A report by the BMBF (2008) presents similar results about the distribution ofmen and women on different subj ects at tertiary education level. Some subjects are clearly dominated by men, others by women (meaning that less than 30 percent of men or women study the subject). The following table (Table 4) displays the percentages of women beginning at university in STEM subjects for the year 2001 and 2002. We can see that the share of females in the selected subjects is clearly below the total of 50 percent reported for Mathematics, Information Technology, and Science.
The Hochschul Informations System (HIS) provides a study related to the whereabouts of Mathematics graduates, including mathematics teacher training, and compared to computer science and electrical engineering studies (Briedis et al., 2008). The data is based on analysis of official statistics from the Federal Statistical Office and on HIS surveys of enrolled students (for the years 1990, 1994, 1999, 2004, 2006), elementary students (for the years 1990/91, 1995/96, 2000/01, 2006/07, winter terms), graduates (for the years
 |
1993, 1997, 2001, 2005), and the 18th Sozialer — hebung ofthe Deutsche Studenten Werke (DSW).
Briedis et al. (2008) present data about the percentage of female students for the four subj ects of mathematics, computer science, electrical engineering, and mathematics teacher training. Their message is quite plain that compared to humanities, which has a percentage of female students of about 70 percent, a clear underrepresentation of women can be seen for computer science and electrical engineering, both below 20 percent. In mathematics (including teacher training), the number of women is close to the number of men as well as to the total percentage of women enrolled at University (about 50 percent).
Similar results exist for the percentage of women graduating in the subjects of mathematics (including teacher training, close to 60 percent), computer science (below 20 percent), and electrical engineering (around 10 percent). Again, the results in computer science and electrical engineering reflect the aforementioned underrepresentation offemale students in these subjects and their overrepresentation in humanities (Briedis et al., 2008).
IT studies in Greece. If one would like to describe the gender distribution in Greek universities in a single statement this would be “men are overrepresented in polytechnics departments and women in the humanities”. Nevertheless, the percentage of female students grows almost
every year, and their presence in the “technological” university departments remains among the highest in Europe. While in 1969-1970, women represented only 31.4 percent of the University student population, thirty years later they prevailed over men with 58.7 percent in 2000-2001 (Maratou-Alipranti, Dafna, Yannakopoulou, Kymperi, & Repa, 2002).
The Ministry of Education provides a large variety of data regarding the tertiary education population but no cumulative data on gender. For this reason, the data presented refer only to the academic year 2007-08. One can observe the low representation of women among the university students in ICT-related departments. 27 percent of the undergraduate in Informatics Departments are women compared to 23.4 percent to Informatics Engineering Departments (see Table 5). Mainly men pursue graduate studies and this differentiation is enhanced at PhD level. This holds even more for ICT-related departments. As can be seen from Table 5, among Master candidates of the Informatics Department (university) students, 34 percent are women compared to 28.2 percent for Informatics Engineering Departments (poly — technic).A major difference can be found between the PhD candidates: 25 percent ofthe Informatics Department students are women and only 15.3 percent in Polytechnics Informatics Engineering Departments.
 |
An overall picture for the distribution among gender in Greek tertiary education institutions (universities and polytechnics/technical universities) is: 60.3 percent ofthe undergraduate students, 56 percent of the Master students and 42 percent of the Ph. D. candidates are women — numbers much larger than those observed in ICT-related departments.
This picture is also reflected in specific surveys, e. g. performed by university departments. For example, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) relating gender to department enrolment, study and career orientation reports the following findings (АРИТОТЕЛЕЮ ПАЧЕПИТНМЮ ©ЕНАЛОМКИІ, 2008). In the period 1979 (year in which the department was established) to 2008, from a total of5,962 students that had been enrolled, only 1,123 are women (18.84 percent), and from the 2,978 students that graduated in the period 1988 to 2008, only 487 are women (16.35 percent). Moreover, the percentage of women graduates is lower than that of women enrolled. More women than men drop out during the course of their studies. In the same report it is stated that the percentage of female PhD candidates is almost the same as that of female graduates — of the 152 students that are PhD candidates 27 are women (18 percent). It is of interest that female PhD candidates need more time to obtain their degree than their male counterparts (and this is stable over the years). A possible explanation is that women work during their studies or have other family affairs to attend to. Besides, data
provided by the Secondary of Civil Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (2006) show that men outnumber women in terms of student enrolment and teaching personnel (just 19 percent are women; Mimikou, 2008).