BY BRONWYN POWELL
While we might now make up half this country's university population, it's been a long, tough struggle for women to get decent access to tertiary education — and it still is.
There was first a battle, more than a century ago, to be allowed to enrol in university in the first place. Then there was a battle, since World War II, to expand access for women who were not rich. It wasn't until 1974, after the rise of the modern women's liberation movement and the (now long gone) introduction of free university education, that women achieved parity with men in enrolments.
Even this hasn't mean equality of access, though. Our education choices are still shaped by social definitions of what is, and isn't, "women's work". Women make up 80% of teaching graduates under 25, for example, and 91% of nursing graduates, but only 27% of computer science graduates.
The higher up the academic ladder you go, the fewer women: we make up only 15.5% of postgraduate students, for example, and even smaller proportions of senior lecturers and professors.
Our ability to finish our studies is also under constant threat, from family responsibilities or financial difficulties. Only 15% of women starting doctorates finish, compared to 85% of men, and one in four women will still be paying off a HECS debt at age 64.
The picture is getting worse, in large part due to deliberate federal government policy. In the last four years, $600 million has been cut from federal spending on tertiary education, from $4.8 billion in 1996 to $4.2 billion in 2000. The services first hit have in many cases been those relied upon by women: child-care and parenting facilities, counselling, campus security, careers advisors, women's units and departments. Outsourcing to private companies will also hurt, pushing service costs beyond many women's capacity to pay.
Government policy has not only been dollar-driven, it's also been politically targeted. In Western Australia, Coalition legislation aimed at hamstringing student organisations, so-called "voluntary student unionism", has been in force since 1995: among its first victims were student-run women's services and departments. The women's department at Curtin was closed, that at Murdoch lost 97% of its budget, that at the University of WA lost $12,000 from its budget and at Edith Cowan, the entire student guild was forced to close.
The federal government's own attempt to introduce similar legislation failed last year, but remains on the agenda.
The details change but the picture is the same all around the world: women's access to education is increasingly under threat.
Worst-hit, as with all social tragedies, are the poorest countries in the world. The United Nations' Human Development Report 1998 found that only 0.7% of the population of the Third World was enrolled for tertiary study, compared to 3.7% in the industrialised countries.
The gap between male and female access to education in these countries is widening as education expenditure is sacrificed to debt servicing. While 11% of countries have achieved gender equality in secondary education enrolment, there have been decreases in: 11 out of 33 countries in sub-Saharan Africa; seven out of 11 countries in Central and Western Asia; six out of 26 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean; and six out of nine countries in Eastern Europe.
A United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) report issued this year found that of the 15 countries that had a decline in girls' enrolment in secondary education, 12 also showed an increase in national debt.
So the struggle begun 100 years ago for equality and education is far from over in this country, or in any other. We have a duty to each other, wherever we are, to keep up the fight.
[This week, students around the country will participate in events to mark the achievements of the "blue stockings" — the feminists who, at the turn of last century, campaigned to win women's access to higher education.]