A recent report of University Grant Commission (UGC) says that at the tertiary level of education, particularly at the public universities, the nation is close to reaching gender parity. For out of over 4.4 million students now enrolled in the public universities, 2.3 million plus are boys, while around 2.11 million are girls. In percentage, 52 per cent of the university students are boys and the remaining 48 per cent are girls.
In fact, it is not only at the university level, girls are consistently doing better than boys at both secondary and higher secondary levels. This is undoubtedly good news for the nation that girls are ahead of boys in education. However, to some, the fact that boys are falling behind the girls in schools and universities is not normal. So, they are after going to the root cause of this phenomenon. No doubt there should be studies to find out why the boys are not performing well. Maybe they are less attentive to their studies and, as a result, dropping out at a faster rate than girls from schools and colleges. Or, it may also be that what is happening is normal because, unlike in the past, there has been a radical shift in modern parents' outlook on the education of their girl children. Which is why, the dropout rate of girl students from all levels of education has been falling with the result that we now see more female students in the universities than before. Whatever the case may be, the question is, what are these highly educated women going to do after graduation? According to Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS), by the end of 2022, there were around 800,000 unemployed graduates in the country, of whom 19 per cent were women. And the Labour Force Survey (LFS) 2022, published in October last year (2023), reported that the unemployment rate of youths who completed graduation from university was 12 per cent which was the highest among all levels of educated youths. Compared with the results of similar survey done among youths having higher education in 2016-17, the rate of unemployment at 11.2 per cent was less than 2022's by 0.8 percentage points. That means unemployment among the graduate youths has been showing a rising trend over the past five years before 2022. The survey results further showed that the unemployment was rather low among persons who had little or no education.
Why do the youths with tertiary level of education have fewer jobs in the country is a much discussed subject. Many consider our seats of higher learning as a factory to produce clerks. Except the graduates from a few university faculties where they learn some special skills to land jobs in the industries, the majority of university degree holders are generalists who have fewer openings for employment. And the number of government jobs, which they prefer, is limited. Teaching jobs in the privately-run educational institutions are often not rewarding. So, the question that naturally arises is how are these talented girls with higher education going to contribute to the nation's economic growth if their employment opportunities are shrinking rather than increasing? True, for the last three decades we have female heads of government. But women sitting at the decision-making positions at the ministerial level are few (only 10 per cent).The picture is no better when it comes to parliamentary positions. According to a report published last year, the percentage of female officials in the public administration was 19.62 per cent, while that at the field level administration was 22.64 per cent. A study done in 2022 on government employees says that out of 1.4 million government employees, about 0.4 million were female and the remaining 1 million were male. So, despite the achievement of near- gender parity in the institutions of higher learning, gender gap at workplaces remains as wide as before.
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