Foreign Perspectives

Clearly there are topics that are largely of interest to males and those that are largely of interest to females but which is which isn’t always as clear ahead of signing up for a course as you might expect.

For instance, languages are usually very much seen as a female thing. However, the mix of the sexes on my courses was generally around 75/25 in favour of males. Even on the English language course that I did last year (generally taken as part of an English Language & Literature degree) there were quite a number of us guys on it.

Although the current Child Development course is basically filling in a slot of a psychology degree, considering children is generally seen as womens’ work (yeah, I know, a stereotypical sexist generalisation but still largely true these days), what really struck me was that it looks like it’s something like 90/10 in favour of females. To be fair a lot of them are coming to the course from the perspective of being teachers or otherwise looking after kids professionally but if anything it’s a course that the guys could do with going on.