This story in Inside Higher Education gets beyond the coventional wisdom about why far more women than men elect to study abroad. It’s not just about majors. My favorite part: Men don’t learn as much as women abroad. Drinking opportunities?

During her junior year of college our youngest daughter opted to go to South Africa for a study abroad program. South Africa is not considered the safest of places to send a young woman, and yet nearly all the study-abroads there turned out to be female. If South Africa skews female, can you imagine the gender imbalances in the “safe” European countries?

Insidehighered does a great job here doing exactly that. Studying abroad, it turns out, has become a female thing to do. What’s most interesting is the puzzlement expressed by college officials. The conventional wisdom explanations — that men are more likely to take on math and science majors that make studying abroad a challenge — don’t hold up.

So what’s the answer? Not clear, but the impact is: At a time when the economy continues to turn in a global direction, guys are losing out on an important educational experience. From the article:

 In recent years, as study abroad has ballooned across the nation, fueled by growth in short-term programs and increasing diversity in participating students’ majors and destinations, a 2-to-1 female-to-male ratio has stayed remarkably stagnant. In 2006-7, the most recent year for which data are available, 65.1 percent of Americans studying abroad were women, and 34.9 percent men. A decade earlier - when the total number of study abroad students was less than half its current total - the breakdown was 64.9 percent female, 35.1 percent male, according to Institute of International Education Open Doors statistics.

“I wouldn’t put it up there among the top issues or problems in the field, but I think it’s a puzzlement, to use an old term, and it’s sort of a persistent consideration, a persistent sort of annoying feeling that there’s something not right about it,” said William Hoffa, an independent practitioner in study abroad, retired from Amherst College, who wrote a history of study abroad and is now editing a second volume.

“Initially the problem was perceived to be curricular, meaning the curriculum of study abroad was likely to be in the humanities, social sciences, with a strong language dimension. To the degree that women were more likely to study in those areas, and the curriculum of study abroad was in those areas, it meant men that were studying more in science and business and technologies didn’t have the curriculum overseas,” said Hoffa. He continued, however, that while there’s likely still a bias toward the humanities and social sciences in study abroad, “The curriculum of study abroad is actually pretty much across the spectrum these days.”