In 2021, around 1.2 million women were enrolled in postsecondary institutions in Canada. This is compared to about 931,220 men who were enrolled in postsecondary institutions in that same year.

The proportion of male and female postsecondary enrolments, by International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED), institution type, Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) 2021, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) and BHASE (business, humanities, health, arts, social science and education) groupings, status of student in Canada and age group.

This statistic shows the total number of students enrolled in postsecondary institutions in Canada in the academic year 2020/21, distinguished by gender and field of study. In 2020/21, around 150,000 women were enrolled in the field of Humanities in Canada.

This statistic shows the total number of students who graduated from postsecondary institutions in Canada from 2000 to 2020, distinguished by gender. In 2020, about 334,000 women received a certificate, diploma, or degree from a postsecondary institution in Canada.

In the academic year 2021/22, a total of 507,921 female students aged between 20 and 24 years were enrolled in postsecondary institutions in Canada. This is compared to 417,780 males in the same age group who were enrolled in that year.

The proportion of full-time teaching staff at Canadian universities by gender, academic rank and academic year.

This statistic shows the total number of students who graduated from postsecondary institutions in Canada in 2021, distinguished by gender and field of study. In 2021, a total of 27,690 women graduated with a degree in humanities in Canada.

In 2013, around 43 percent of university students in Canada who were men stated that they were concerned about sexually transmitted infections (STIs). By 2021, that figure had decreased to around 36 percent. This statistic illustrates the percentage of university students in Canada who were concerned about STIs in 2013, 2019, and 2021, by gender.

In Canada, while some post-secondary programs are relatively gender-balanced, such as business and administration, and trades services natural resources and conservation, others are much less so. Indeed, while the proportion of women enrolled in post-secondary programs in engineering or mathematics and computer science has increased over the past decade, it remains far lower than that of men. In the 2021-2022 academic year, only 22.9 percent of women were enrolled in engineering and engineering technology and only 28.4 percent in mathematics and computer and information sciences.

Female PresentersAll presenters gender, site and type of round by year between 2011 and 2015

Between 2015 and 2018, the proportion of Canadians identifying as gay or lesbian between the ages of 25 and 64 with a postsecondary degree was slightly higher among men (78.1 percent) than among women (76.2 percent). Regardless of gender, lesbian and gay people tend to have higher levels of educational attainment than heterosexual people, and especially than bisexual people.

Methods

We compiled information on 1,244 faculty members at Canadian universities who were funded by a NSERC Discovery grant (Evolution and Ecology subcommittee) between 1991 and 2019. This information included assumed binary gender from first names and institutional website use of pronouns and photographs (coded men, women); we acknowledge that we may have mis-assigned gender or failed to notice non-binary, transitional or fluid gender identities. We also collected information on the researcher’s year of PhD and all institutions they were affiliated with during their research career. This information was obtained from public curriculum vitae, institutional websites, personally-maintained researcher websites, academic networking platforms (LinkedIn, Research Gate), Google Scholar, and other public sources such as obituaries. For each researcher, we reconstructed their H-index through time using (1) a compiled list of their peer-reviewed publications and (2) the citations for each publication, for each calender year from the date of publication until 2019. We compiled their publications using a recursive procedure, which started by first downloading all publications for individuals with the researcher’s first initial and last name from Web of Science Core Collection (hereafter, WOS) starting from 5 years prior to their PhD until 2019, and then filtering this list by cross-referencing with known variants in authorship names for the researcher (from online curriculum vitae or Google Scholar profile) as well as their institutional affiliations, fuzzy matching of publication titles from their curriculum vitae or Google Scholar profile where possible, and recursive identification of previously unidentified affiliations to fine-tune the cross-referencing procedure. Once we had cleaned the publication record, we then calculated cumulative citations over years for each publication from WOS yearly citation counts as a precursor to calculating the H-index.

We identified a potential pool of publications from working groups by (1) matching WOS titles with known working group publications funded by the 15 synthesis centers that comprise the International Synthesis Consortium, (2) by searching the funding and acknowledgment sections of publications for synthesis centre names or acronyms, or keywords commonly used to describe working groups (“working group”, “synthesis group”, “synthesis working group”, “synthesis committee”, “synthesis workshop”, “catalysis group”). All publications from steps 1 and 2 were then manually coded as primary research vs. synthesis research, and as working group method vs. non-working group method. We further categorized synthesis research publications into the following types: statistical synthesis (statistical analysis of previously published or archived data collected by multiple different researchers and/or studies), conceptual synthesis (qualitative review of the literature or proposal of new frameworks for scientific concepts or investigation), or mathematical synthesis (theoretical mathematical models or specific application of general models for the purpose of prediction). We scored non-working group publications using similar criteria. However, given the large number of publications involved, we changed methods to allow for programmatic approaches based on keywords indicative of the three types of synthesis science. This data is presented in aggregated and anonymized form as needed to prevent the identification of individuals.

We conducted an online survey of current ecology and evolution faculty in Canada from July to September 2019, recruited by email and supplemented by in-person recruitment at the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution annual conference (Fredericton NB Canada, August 18-21 2019). The 169 valid responses represent an effective questionnaire response rate of 14.7%. The questionnaire asked for information designed to confirm or complete the researcher database (e.g. academic history, gender) as well as information about why researchers participated or not in working groups, and the perceived costs and benefits of participation. This data is presented in condensed and anonymized form only to maintain the privacy of personal information.

We used survival analysis to test if gender or pace of career progression (H-index adjusted for time since PhD) predicts the hazard rate of participation in working groups. We included an interaction between gender and H-index to assess whether potential selection effects tied to research record captured by the H-index are the same for women and men. We estimated hazard ratios for attending WGs using Cox proportional hazard models.

For the 183 researchers who participated in working groups, we used a fixed effects model with a linear spline to investigate the effects of working group participation and gender on researchers’ trajectory of H-indices over time. This model compares the trajectory of researchers’ H-indices in years before (0-5 years before) and after (1-5 years after, and >6 years after) participating in working groups, and then averaging those differences across researchers. To account for autocorrelation within individuals and heteroscedasticity across individuals, we clustered on individuals. We used a 0.67 power transformation on the “time” variable to linearize the H-index ~ time relationship. We code the spline specification in marginal form, which makes interpretation simple: coefficients of the second and third intervals capture changes in H-index growth rates from their prior intervals.

The effects of research type (synthesis vs primary) and method (working group vs traditional) on publication citation rates were evaluated with a zero-inflated generalized linear model based on a negative binomial error distribution with a log link (R package glmmTMB).

The survey results were evaluated with simple Chi-square tests of association.

College football takes place in organized leagues between teams of students from different universities in the U.S. and Canada. The leagues are organized by the NCAA, which is the sports association that organizes a wide range of sports for colleges and students. In a survey conducted in April 2023, around 36 percent of male respondents stated that they were avid fans of college football in the United States.