Abstract:
Data from the Survey of Consumer Finances and the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics indicate that more females than males have been attending Canadian universities over the past decade. This gender imbalance in the attendance rates of females and males increased substantially during the 1990s. Various decompositions are applied, using linear and nonlinear regression techniques, to investigate the factors that explain this imbalance. It is found that the higher university premium for females and its increase relative to that for males explains a large part of the imbalance in the university attendance.