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Share of academic staff in tertiary education who are women

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Global Education

What you should know about this indicator

  • Women are underrepresented in many academic and research fields — this indicator shows what share of the teaching workforce in tertiary education is made up of women.
  • It captures the percentage of teachers in tertiary education who are female, calculated by dividing the number of female teachers by the total number of teachers (male and female) at the tertiary level and multiplying by 100.
  • A value close to 50% reflects gender parity, while lower values highlight gaps in representation that may be shaped by structural, cultural, or institutional barriers to women’s academic careers.
  • The data come from administrative sources, including higher education institutions and national education databases, which report teaching staff numbers by sex and International Standard Classification of Education ) level.
  • This indicator is useful for tracking gender equality in academic employment, particularly in faculty and teaching roles across universities and other post-secondary institutions.
  • It is disaggregated by level of education, and where available, may be further broken down by type of institution, field of study, or academic rank.
  • Full-time equivalent (FTE) adjustments should be made where part-time teachers are present to ensure consistency in comparison across countries and systems.
  • This indicator reflects gender distribution, not the quality of teaching, academic rank, or research output — additional indicators are needed to assess these dimensions.
  • Limitations include variation in how countries classify tertiary teachers, whether data include private institutions, and whether gender is reported for all categories of teaching staff.
  • Still, the percentage of female teachers in tertiary education remains a critical measure of gender balance in higher education and helps inform policies to support equal representation at all levels of academia.

Number of female teachers at the tertiary level expressed as a percentage of the total number of teachers (male and female) at the tertiary level in a given school year. Teachers are persons employed full time or part time in an official capacity to guide and direct the learning experience of pupils and students, irrespective of their qualifications or the delivery mechanism, i.e. face-to-face and/or at a distance. This definition excludes educational personnel who have no active teaching duties (e.g. headmasters, headmistresses or principals who do not teach) and persons who work occasionally or in a voluntary capacity in educational institutions.

Share of academic staff in tertiary education who are women
Percentage of female academic staff among all academic staff at the education level during a given school year.
Source
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2025) – processed by Our World in Data
Last updated
May 1, 2025
Next expected update
May 2026
Date range
1970–2024
Unit
%

Explore charts that include this data

Share of teachers who are female in primary vs. tertiary education

Sources and processing

This data is based on the following sources

The UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) is the official and trusted source of internationally-comparable data on education, science, culture and communication. As the official statistical agency of UNESCO, the UIS produces a wide range of state-of-the-art databases to fuel the policies and investments needed to transform lives and propel the world towards its development goals. The UIS provides free access to data for all UNESCO countries and regional groupings from 1970 to the most recent year available.

Retrieved on
May 1, 2025
Retrieved from
https://databrowser.uis.unesco.org/resources/bulk
Citation
This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data. To cite data downloaded from this page, please use the suggested citation given in Reuse This Work below.
UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), Education, https://uis.unesco.org/bdds, 2025

How we process data at Our World in Data

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

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Citations

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Share of academic staff in tertiary education who are women”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Veronika Samborska, Natasha Ahuja, Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, and Max Roser (2023) - “Global Education”. Data adapted from UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Retrieved from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-teachers-in-tertiary-education-who-are-female [online resource]
How to cite this data

In-line citationIf you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2025) – processed by Our World in Data

Full citation

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2025) – processed by Our World in Data. “Share of academic staff in tertiary education who are women” [dataset]. UNESCO Institute for Statistics, “UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) - Education” [original data]. Retrieved May 22, 2025 from https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-teachers-in-tertiary-education-who-are-female