Gender bias in the Erasmus network of universities

Abstract

The Erasmus Program (EuRopean community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students), the most important student exchange program in the world, financed by the European Union and started in 1987, is characterized by a strong gender bias. Female students participate to the program more than male students. This work quantifies the gender bias in the Erasmus program between 2008 and 2013, using novel data at the university level. It describes the structure of the program in great detail, carrying out the analysis across fields of study, and identifies key universities as senders and receivers. In addition, it tests the difference in the degree distribution of the Erasmus network along time and between genders, giving evidence of a greater density in the female Erasmus network with respect to the one of the male Erasmus network.

Inclusive universities: evidence from the Erasmus program

“…All this shows that the network is somehow randomly formed without any systematic attempt to coordinate an international university policy to favor the international mobility of HE students with disabilities. Looking at differences by gender, in line with findings from Bottcher et al (2016) and De Benedictis and Leoni (2020), the female Erasmus network of students with disabilities is more connected than the male network, with a ratio between L F 2008 and L M 2008 equal to 1.525 and between L F 2013 and L M 2013 equal to 1.624. The bias in favor of women persists and increases over time, contrary to the mild tendency to a reduction shown by the overall network.…”

“…The network approach is not new to the study of international student mobility (Shields 2013) and Erasmus in particular (Restaino et al 2020;Breznik and Skrbinjek 2020;Breznik 2017;Breznik and Djaković 2016;Derzsi et al 2011;Breznik and Ragozini 2015). Prior research mostly conducted analysis at country level rather than university level, with the exception of De Benedictis and Leoni (2020) who focused on differences by gender and Derzsi et al (2011) who studied the topology of the Erasmus student mobility network in 2003, revealing an exponential degree distribution and a small-word type random network with a giant component. Research has provided an overview of the most active sending and receiving countries (Breznik and Skrbinjek 2020;Restaino et al 2020), by considering the network of all participants, without specific concern for students with disabilities.…”

“…Notwithstanding Erasmus' long history, they consist of a limited number of datasets corresponding to different academic years and containing information for each participant to the mobility. We limit our analysis to the 6 years between 2008 and 2013, for a homogeneous comparison with the network examined in De Benedictis and Leoni (2020) and we rely on data for 2008-2018 only for aggregate figures. The information provided includes the type of mobility (study or placement), the home country and the host country, the home university and the host university, the field of study, the participant's gender, and whether the participant received additional funding for special needs, coded as a binary variable or reporting the amount of extra funding, depending on the dataset.…”

“…Following De Benedictis and Leoni (2020), we explore and visualize the network of universities taking part in the exchange program of students with disabilities. This represents a subnetwork of the network analyzed in De Benedictis and Leoni (2020). To allow for a comparison we maintain the focus on the years 2008 and 2013 and separate the analysis by gender.…”

“…Second, adopting the tools of Social Network Analysis, we analyze the network of universities participating in the Erasmus mobility of students with special needs and compare it with the network of universities related to the overall participation of Erasmus students, explored in prior research (De Benedictis and Leoni 2020). We explore the topology of the network and verify whether the bias in favor of women which characterizes the overall network (Maiworm 2001;Bottcher et al 2016;De Benedictis and Leoni 2020) is also present in the subnetwork of participants with special needs. This subnetwork appears much sparser than the overall network.…”