Gender Gaps in Higher Education Participation in England

Two new datasets were used to explore the relationship between prior attainment and higher education participation among young people in England. The analysis found no conclusive gender gap after controlling for prior attainment, but identified a higher likelihood of participation for ethnic minority backgrounds compared to White peers with the same attainment. The research was authored by Stijn Broecke.

Use Cases

• Analyze the effect of prior attainment on higher education participation rates based on the study's core finding.
• Model the relationship between socio-economic status (FSM eligibility) and participation based on the described gap.
• Investigate disparities in participation likelihood across ethnic groups based on the described comparison.
• Evaluate statistical models for explaining gender gaps in education based on the described methodology.

Strengths

• Focuses on a specific, policy-relevant question regarding higher education participation gaps.
• Analyzes multiple demographic dimensions: gender, socio-economic class (FSM), and ethnicity.
• Controls for a key variable (prior attainment) to isolate demographic effects.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to paperswithcode, being focused on England.

Provenance

Source

Stijn Broecke

Collection Method

Analysis of two new datasets, likely from administrative or survey sources.

Geography

England