A new study by Cambridge researchers has warned that poverty is a more significant factor than gender in creating educational inequalities in a global context.

The study, conducted by Dr Sonia Illie and Professor Pauline Rose from the Faculty of Education, sheds new light on the key factors influencing access to higher education, finding “the richest 20 per cent of young people [are] at least three times more likely than their poorest peers to be enrolled in higher education aged 19”.

After the United Nations set itself targets, as part of its 2030 Sustainable Development goals, to improve access to higher education in the world’s poorest countries in 2016, there was an increased focus on providing “equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary education, including university”.

However, the study by the Cambridge academics provides new insight into why efforts to address global higher education inequalities may be failing.

Speaking to Times Higher Education, Dr Illie, Research Fellow at the Faculty of Education, said: “We need to keep on focusing on gender inequalities, but it is clear that the gaps in educational outcomes are far larger when you compare different income groups.”

The Cambridge academics used data from the ‘Young Lives’ project, a study run by the University of Oxford, which tracked young people in four different countries: Ethiopia, Peru, India and Vietnam. Data was collected from approximately 12,000 children for over 15 years across the four countries, recording data periodically at the ages of 8, 12, 15 and 19.

Income was found to have a greater impact on participation rates than gender in Ethiopia and Vietnam, where a higher percentage of the poorest 19-year-old women were participating in higher education than the poorest 19-year-old men.

In Ethiopia, 22 per cent of the richest 19-year-old men and 30 per cent of the richest 19-year-old women are at university. However only 2 per cent of Ethiopia’s poorest 19-year-old men are in higher education, compared with a slightly higher 9 per cent of the country’s poorest 19-year old females.

Similar trends were found in Vietnam, though with higher numbers of the population in tertiary education.

Dr Illie presented the findings at the Society for Research into Higher Education’s annual research conference last month, where she said: “Those educational inequalities are particularly apparent at primary school level, where income was far more important than gender in determining whether children went to school or not.”

The study calls for more to be done to look at the entire education journey in efforts to deal with higher educational inequalities.