Women and men at the Permanent University. An analysis of the Spanish context.

Abstract

Living longer requires strengthening lifelong learning, and education for older people is the best tool for improving active ageing. The aim of this study is to analyse the presence of women and men in permanent universities in Spain. In this exploratory-explicative study, with a quantitative approach, a sample of six Spanish universities is used. The analysis of the data is based on enrolment statistics for the 2018-2019 academic year. The main findings show a balanced presence of men and women in two universities and a significantly greater presence of women in the rest of the universities. It is intuited that this may be due to women's desire and need to recover lost spaces to those who did not have the opportunity to arrive in earlier stages of their lives as a result of their scarce protagonism in education. Given the scarcity of research, it is concluded that there is a need to introduce the gender perspective in the education of the third age, not only because it is a transcendental moment in the life cycle of people, but also because the situation of women in this stage hides particular problems that they have to face when the disadvantages of gender and age are combined.