Filenews 4 March 2025
Cyprus ranks first in the EU in terms of the percentage of women pursuing postgraduate studies, as in 2022, 74.2% of postgraduate students in the country were women.
Overall, of the 9,359 postgraduate students in Cyprus, 6,948 were women, a percentage that is the highest among EU Member States. It is followed by Poland with 67.3% and Lithuania with 66.1%.
At EU level, women make up 58.6% of the total number of postgraduate students, with 905,678 out of 1.5 million students. In most EU countries, women make up the majority among postgraduate students, except in Luxembourg, where the gender distribution is almost equal (49.8%).
In terms of doctoral studies, Cyprus ranks second in the EU for the percentage of women, with 58% of doctorates being women. This figure is just behind Latvia (59.6%) and follows Lithuania (57.4%). At EU level, the share of women in doctoral studies was 48.5%.
Between 2013 and 2022, the share of women in postgraduate studies in the EU decreased slightly by 0.4 percentage points. Cyprus, however, recorded an increase in women in doctoral studies by 8 percentage points over the same period, the highest increase in the EU.
In the field of studies, women were dominant in postgraduate and doctoral studies in education (75.6% and 66.9% respectively) and in health and welfare (60.9%) in doctoral studies. At the same time, women are under-represented in information and communication technologies (26.2% in postgraduate studies and 22.6% in doctorates) and engineering (33.4% and 32.7%, respectively).
CNA
