Australian vocational education and training (VET) data looks at enrolment and completion numbers by gender and field of education.
This includes STEM courses in:
Compare VET enrolment and completion numbers for women and men in STEM fields, non-STEM fields and health fields. Non-binary and gender diverse people are included in the calculation of proportions and are included in the commentary.
The number of women enrolled in STEM vocational education and training has been steadily increasing since 2018.
The proportion of women VET STEM enrolments remained at 17% in 2022.
The number of men and women who have completed VET STEM qualifications decreased in 2022.
The proportion of women completing VET STEM qualifications decreased to 19% in 2022 after a peak of 20% in 2021.
Agriculture, environmental and related studies was the only VET STEM field where the proportion of women enrolments rose consistently from 2015 to 2022.
Natural and physical sciences remained the VET STEM field with the greatest proportion of women enrolments (66%) and completions (68%) in 2022. These proportions have remained between 61% and 71% every year from 2015 to 2022, showing strong and consistent representation for women in natural and physical sciences at VET level.
Engineering and related technologies makes up the majority of total VET STEM enrolments for both men and women. However, it remained the VET STEM field with the lowest proportion of enrolments from women in 2022. Women have made up 11% or less of enrolments in this field since 2015.
In diversity groups, women tended to show higher proportions of VET STEM enrolments in 2022:
Among the metropolitan location group in 2022, women made up 17% of VET STEM enrolments. This was similar to the proportion of enrolments from women in the regional or remote location group at 16%.
The dataset shows that for VET enrolments, STEM is less popular among non-binary and gender diverse people, who comparatively favour non-STEM fields. In 2022, 19% of enrolments from non-binary and gender diverse people were in STEM fields, compared to 24% of enrolments from all other students.
| Non-binary and gender diverse people | All other students* | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Field type | no. | % | no. | % |
| STEM | 645 | 19% | 533,860 | 24% |
| Health | 175 | 5% | 141,045 | 6% |
| Non-STEM | 2,595 | 76% | 1,574,315 | 70% |
| Total | 3,415 | 100% | 2,249,220 | 100% |
| * All other students includes women, men and people who did not report their gender | ||||
Data is for Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) level courses only. Most VET qualifications in this data range from Certificate I to Advanced Diploma, with a small number of Diploma and Graduate Certificate qualifications also included.
Enrolment and completion counts in the visualisation show the number of women and men enrolling in and completing qualifications in a particular calendar year. They only cover domestic students in onshore locations. This includes Australian citizens, New Zealand citizens, Australian permanent residents and Australian humanitarian visa holders.
Enrolment and completion numbers across years do not represent longitudinal data. You should not use them to calculate attrition rates.
Non-binary and gender diverse people are included in the calculation of proportions in the visualisation and are included in the commentary. This group includes students who report a gender other than male or female.
The calculation of proportions also includes people who do not report a gender on their enrolment form, however there is no further analysis on this group.
More information on diversity and location groups is available from the National Centre for Vocational Education Research (NCVER) website.
Read more about our methodology and this data.
