er of female primary teachers went up between 1988 and 1998 from 71.7 per cent to 77.5 per cent. The number of female secondary teachers went up from 48.3 per cent to 53.5 per cent, and the number of women teaching in higher education went up from 27.3 per cent to 35.1 per cent.
In 1996 227,000 people had bachelor degrees or higher in business and administration, 35.7 per cent of them were women; 213,600 had university degrees in health, 66.2 per cent of them were women; 357,800 had university degrees in the delightful ABS classification called "society and culture ", defined as" economics, law, behaviour, welfare, languages, religion and philosophy, librarianship, visual and performing arts, geography, communication, recreation and leisure, and policing ", 54.8 per cent of them were women. In engineering, however, with 120,100, only 8.4 per cent were women.
The great numerical explosion of people with university degrees was a product of the Whitlam period educational reforms. The extremely useful book, Australian Social Trends 1999, has a detailed breakdown of the age composition of people with university degrees. Part of this table is reproduced here.
PROPORTIONS WITH DEGREES, 1996
Bachelor degreeAssociate or
Age (years) or higherundergraduate diploma
Males
15-244.2 per cent2.4 per cent
25-3414.6 per cent5.9 per cent
35-4416.2 per cent6.9 per cent
45-5413.5 per cent7.0 per cent
55 +6.6 per cent4.4 per cent
Total10.8 per cent5.2 per cent
Females
15-246.8 per cent4.6 per cent
25-3416.6 per cent8.5 per cent
35-4515.3 per cent9.5 per cent
45-5410.7 per cent8.6 per cent
55 +3.6 per cent4.5 per cent
Total10.1 per cent6.9 per cent
The extraordinary increase in both men and women with degrees in the age group 25 to 54 clearly illustrates the magnitude of the explosion of tertiary education from about 1974 onwards. This forcefully underlines the very important point that this was the period when women soared from being a very small portion of the people with university degrees to rough numerical equality with men. It is fascinating to note the rage of conservative misogynists like Michael Thompson against the Whitlam period of free education. Possibly the rough equality in educational achievement gained by women in this period is one of the features that infuriates them.
What emerges most strikingly from these statistics is the enormous growth in the proportion of the whole adult population with university degrees. The very size and diversity of this group makes nonsense of the conservative rhetoric that they comprise, as a whole, an elite "new class ".
It is important to bring to bear other available statistical information to get a picture of what is really the Australian class formation at the moment and how this vastly increased group of university graduates fits into it. This is where an investigation of the information contained in the Social Atlas comes in, particularly if you superimpose on this information the fairly elementary and obvious information provided by the statistics of electoral behaviour in federal and state elections.
The Social Atlas tells you that people with degrees are heavily concentrated in Sydney on the North Shore, most of the Eastern suburbs, and in a belt in the inner Western suburbs. There are smaller concentrations in the Sutherland shire, the Georges River area and the Blue Mountains. If you go, however, to the useful separate category that was provided in the 1991 Social Atlas, called "managers and administrators", you find that this coincides almost exactly with the map of "high income earners".
Both these maps, however, coincide only in part with the map of people with university qualifications. Most of the people in the southern part of the Eastern suburbs and in the Inner Western suburbs, with university degrees, are thus neither "managers or administrators" or "high-income earners "as defined by the ABS. I submit that, quite obviously, these graduates are by and large the ones working in teaching, health, social work, etc.
Coincidentally, the divide in political voting behaviour is on almost exactly the same geographical lines among graduates as the apparent geographical divide between "high income earners" and "managers and administrators "and the rest of the population. The southern-eastern suburbs and the Inner West vote overwhelmingly Labor or Green etc. The North Shore, Wentworth, the Georges River area, etc, all vote solidly Liberal. Any serious investigation of all these statistical tools shows that a real economic, political, and class division exists within the ranks of university graduates, not between graduates and the rest of the population.
Census information, combined with election...
