Female students may be put off applying to university because of the planned rise in tuition fees, it is feared.

Female graduates already take five years longer to pay off their student debt, than their male counterparts, and it is feared that a proposed doubling in tuition fees will stop some from applying altogether.  

Former higher education minister Bill Rammell said "We estimate that a male student who entered higher education in 2006-07 will take an average of 11 years to repay their student loan. We estimate that this will be 16 years for a female"

There still exists a 20 per cent pay gap between men and women, and the added time away from employment for maternity leave, or to care for children, also means that women may not be able to work as consistently as men, making it harder to get out mounting debts.

This astonishing prediction means that at a time when the UK economy will still be struggling to its feet, and jobs will be scarce female students may be think twice before going on to study at University.

While many campaigners against tuition fees, including the National Union of Students (NUS), have focused on the divide between rich and poor created by increasing the cost of university, a deeper, more entrenched injustice has gone largely unreported.

‘Broke & Broken’a report published by the NUS, said: “rather than act as an engine of social mobility, the current system’s ‘diversity’ acts to reinforce existing social inequality in both opportunity and outcome.”

When asked about the problem, NUS national president Wes Streeting said: “Top-up fees remain an appalling system, and NUS is going to work to bring them down. We now have the basis of a credible alternative to bring to the table: an alternative which means that we will not be sitting on the sidelines when the forthcoming review of fees is carried out.”

The NUS report also shows that in arts subjects, which are traditionally female dominated, the ‘graduate premium’ (the amount of money graduates earn above the average salary of someone with two A-levels) is as little as £5,000. They are proposing that both the government, and business who wish to benefit from graduate employees, must contribute more to their education.

   
 
Harriet Harman, equalities minister, in attempt to tackle the pay-gap issue, announced on Monday a new bill that will force businesses to publish details of how much they pay their employees by 2013.

She said: “You have got to believe that either women are 20% less intelligent, less hard-working, less committed to their job, less experienced, less qualified, or you have got to believe that there is structural pay discrimination. We believe there is structural pay discrimination"

Commenting on this in the Guardian, Ruth Sunderland said: “Finance is one of the last big taboos … We need to be more financially aware than men to overcome the inequalities we face and to address the fact that our working lives are likely to be more changeable and complex; and we need to be able to handle our finances, with or without a man in our life’