Nova Scotia Advisory Council 
on the Status of Women

The Nova Scotia Advisory Council on the Status of Women is releasing the 4^th in its statistical series on women in Nova Scotia. This issue, entitled Learners and Teachers: Women's Education and Training, provides current statistical information on the educational situation of women in the province as well as statistics on how women in the province are faring as educators. Below is a summary of the findings from the report. The full report is available on the Internet at:

www.gov.ns.ca/staw/pubs2002-03/learners2002.pdf

Summary: 

Women as Learners 

In the last twenty-five years, women in Nova Scotia have made tremendous progress with respect to their educational attainment and participation in post-secondary education:
 

• Between 1976 and 1996, the proportion of Nova Scotian women with university degrees more than doubled (from 5% to 12%) while the proportion of women with less than grade 9 decreased by more than half (from 21% to 10%).

 
• Unlike in the past, the educational attainment of young Nova Scotian women (25-29 year-olds) now exceeds that of young men. 64% of young women in Nova Scotia compared to 58% of young men are post-secondary graduates.

 
• Women now comprise the majority (58%) of full-time university undergraduates in the province and half of full-time graduate-level students.

 
• In 1998/99, women received 60 percent of the Bachelor degrees, 55 percent of the Master's degrees and 38 percent of Ph.D. degrees granted in the province.

 
• Women's enrolment in law and medicine has doubled since 1976. Women now outnumber or equal the number of men in undergraduate programs in science, medicine, law, and commerce/business administration.

Women remain under-represented in certain programs:
 

• Despite considerable advancement since the mid-seventies, women remain under-represented in engineering and applied science in Nova Scotian universities, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. In 1999, women comprised only 23% of undergraduates and 20% of graduate students in engineering and applied sciences.

 
• Women are also under-represented in graduate-level programs in math and physical sciences and in community college information technology and technology and trades programs. In 2001-02, women made up only 10% of trades and technology students at the Nova Scotia Community College.

 
• Given today's increasingly knowledge-based economy, measures must be taken to encourage women's enrolment in these fields of study.

 
• Women are also extremely under-represented in Nova Scotia's apprenticeship training programs. Only 5 percent of active apprentices in the province are women and only 2.4 percent of apprenticeship certificates issued in the past five years have been issued to women.

 

• Certain groups of women remain marginalized with respect to education and general equality. Most notably, Black women, Aboriginal women living on-reserve, and women with disabilities have substantially lower educational attainment than Nova Scotian women as a whole. Only 4% of women with disabilities have a university degree compared to 13% of women who do not have a disability.

 
• Female lone-parents are also educationally disadvantaged in comparison to married mothers. 42% of single mothers in Nova Scotia have not completed high school compared to 27% of married mothers.

 
• Movement towards general equality must address the specific educational needs and work towards removing barriers to education for these groups of women. Improved access to education is required by all of these groups.
 

Women as Educators
 

Compared to women's advancement as learners, women's advancement as educators, though evident, is not nearly as dramatic.
 

• In the year 2000, women comprised more than two-thirds of Nova Scotia's primary and secondary teachers but just over one-third of vice-principals and principals. These figures present very little change from 1975.

 
• Women have made some gains as public school system administrators in Nova Scotia. Women now comprise the majority (57%) of system consultants and slightly more than a third of supervisors. Despite considerable gains in the last decade, women are still very much under-represented in higher-level administrative positions. In the year 2000, women made up only one quarter of assistant superintendents and only 17 percent of superintendents in Nova Scotia's public education system.

 
• Women now comprise approximately one third of educators/faculty at both the Nova Scotia community college and universities in the province.

 
• Female faculty in Nova Scotia are much less likely to be full professors than male faculty (16% verus 44%) and are much more likely to be ranked lower than associate professors than male faculty (47% versus 19%).

 

Women must achieve much higher educational attainment to earn a living wage than do men.
 

• Employment rates increase with educational attainment for both women and men. Women and men with university degrees have very high employment rates (84% and 90%, respectively).

 
• Women with low levels of education, on the other hand, are much less likely to be employed than men with low levels of education. In 2001, only 29 percent of women with less than grade 9 were employed compared to 54 percent of men with less than grade 9.

 
• Similarly, women's economic security appears to be tied to educational attainment more so than it is for men. Across all educational groups, females earn less than their male counterparts. On average, women must have a university certificate or diploma (below bachelor level) before their earnings surpass those of men who have less than a high school education.

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