Female students domination in higher education institutions at Kota Samarahan / Jasmine Riang & Sharon Aileen Bidi

Today’s situation in higher education institutes is far away from an equal participation of both female and male students. It is well known that higher education plays a key role in shaping society and building active citizens. A lot of the people who will take powerful roles in a society have a background in higher education. This implies that a gender equal higher education has also a very huge long term impact on the gender equality within the society. The numbers of male students entering the institution of higher learning has been decreased every year. A statistic conducted by the Ministry of Higher Education showed that the total number of students register for 2010/2011 session is 105, 377 students. From the amount, 58.6% or 61750 students are female, while the remaining 41.4% or 43627 students are male, which is almost a 2:1 rate. The Vice Chancellor of Universiti Perguruan Sultan Idris (UPSI), Prof. Dr. Aminah Ayub said that unexpectedly in the technical field including engineering, it also has been dominated by the female students instead of male students in all the universities. For the education field, almost 70% was controlled by women students. The small numbers of male students do not only happened in UPSI and in education field only, but expand to the other universities in other fields such as technical and professionals.