The table below compares the students in Australian university in terms of six departments – namely English, Modern languages, History, Physics, Math and Chemistry – in 2009.
Overall, it is clear that in language departments, especially in English faculty proportion of females are the highest, while students whose first language is not English. Similarly, the proportion of scholars born outside Australia is the highest in the department of modern languages.
Initially, the percentage of females in language departments – English and Modern languages – consists of huge part of all students in these departments with 67% and 63% respectively. While 37% of all scholars in physics field were female, this trend for math is 42%. In contrast to 58% of History faculty students were females , the figure for chemistry was half History’s distribution.
When it comes to students whose first language was not English, the students of Modern languages dominated in 2009, this was followed by Physics, Math and Chemistry departments with 38%, 36% and 32% correspondingly. The 16% of students in English department were not native in English, while this proportion was 10% in History.
The proportion of scholars born outside Australia was 44% in Physics, 43% in Math. Unlike these departments, international students provided 47% of all students in branch of Chemistry. Compared to 54% of Modern languages students born abroad, it was half and one third of History faculty’s proportion for English and History in order.