Australian vocational education and training (VET) data looks at enrolments and completions for women and men by 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.
The number of women enrolled in STEM vocational education and training has been steadily increasing since 2018.
The proportion of women VET STEM enrolments increased to 17% in 2021.
The total number of completions in VET STEM qualifications increased in 2021. This was mostly due to more women completing qualifications, which offset a slight decrease in completions by men.
The proportion of women completing VET STEM qualifications increased to 20% in 2021. This has risen by 4 percentage points since 2015.
In 2021, 22,070 women enrolled in VET agriculture, environmental and related studies. Women made up 33% of all students in the field, up 8 percentage points from 2015. The proportion of women completing courses in this field also increased by 7 percentage points from 2015 to 2021.
This was the only VET STEM field where the proportion of women enrolments rose consistently from 2015 to 2021. There were no notable changes in the other STEM fields.
Natural and physical sciences remained the VET STEM field with the greatest proportion of women enrolments (66%) and completions (70%) in 2021. These proportions have remained between 61% and 73% every year from 2015 to 2021.
Engineering remained the least popular VET STEM field for women in 2021. Women have made up 11% or less of enrolments in this field since 2015.
Data is for Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) level courses only. The majority of VET qualifications in this data range from Certificate I to Advanced Diploma, with a very small number of Diploma and Graduate Certificate qualifications also included.
Enrolment and completion numbers refer to women and men enrolling in and completing qualifications in a particular calendar year. They only cover domestic students: 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 determine attrition rates.
A small number of students report a gender other than male or female or do not report a gender on their enrolment form. The proportion calculations on this page only include students who reported their gender as male or female.
Read more about our methodology and this data.
