According to the Institute of International Education’s latest annual Open Doors report, which provides detailed information on foreign students who come to U.S. colleges and universities and U.S. students who study abroad, women continue to make up a large percentage of U.S. college and university students who choose to study abroad.
In the 2018-19 academic year, more than 347,000 students from the United States studied abroad. More than 67 percent of these students were women. The next year, large numbers of students studied abroad during the fall semester. Then the COVID-19 pandemic caused a major decline in study abroad students for the spring semester. While the total number of students who studied abroad in the 2020-21 academic dropped by more than 90 percent, women were nearly 66 percent of those who studied abroad.
The latest data for the 2022-23 academic year shows that women made up 67.2 percent of all American students who studied abroad, down from 68.7 percent in the previous year.