The annual report from the University Careers Service, released last week, has revealed an increasing gender pay gap among recent Cambridge graduates.

According to the report, a woman graduating from Cambridge can expect a starting salary of £24,409 per annum, well above the national average of £21,000, but more than £5,000 less than their male peers, who average £29,858. This year’s gender pay gap, at 22 per cent, is a significant increase on last year’s figure of 17 per cent, and substantially higher than the national average for full-time employees.

The Careers Service report suggests that the salary discrepancy “can partly be attributed to the different career paths sought by our male and female students” – noting, in particular, high attendance from male students at events promoting highly paid employment sectors such as banking. One such event attracted an audience that was 72 per cent male, and high attendance from female students at events focused on lower paid sectors such as arts and heritage.

The Director of the Careers Service, Gordon Chesterman, told Varsity: "The female student has a greater interest in those career areas where salary numbers are not particularly high.”

Men make up 69 per cent of Cambridge graduates in the banking sector, and 78 per cent in the banking sector overall.

In part, this may be linked to high-paying employers heavily targeting subjects such as Mathematics, Natural Science, Engineering and Computer Science, subjects which are dominated by male students.

“The highly numerate subjects in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) areas which are sought-after by employers tend to have a predominantly male population among the student cohort,” Chesterman said.

“The gender disparities are self-selecting,” and the difference was “not through any sense of discrimination,” he added.

Chesterman noted that the figure may have been skewed somewhat by certain “outliers” within the graduate cohort, noting that one student had graduated into a starting salary of £240,000 a year as a self-employed financier.

The Careers Service has not observed a gender pay gap between graduates going into the same career types.

“I think alarm bells would start ringing in my mind – and they haven’t yet – if there was an a salary disparity in the same sector,” Chesterman said.

He added that another factor which could account for disparities might be an increased willingness among male job applicants to negotiate for salary. “I suspect the male applicant is more likely to negotiate salary,” he said, noting that he had heard similar reports from the LSE, about graduates entering the financial sector in particular.

The report, which breaks down data not only by gender but also by level of degree, also revealed significant changes in the job outcomes of recent Cambridge leavers.

While health remained the most common employment sector for undergraduates, accounting for some 13.6 per cent of recruitments, jobs in information technology are now the second most common on 10.2 per cent, an increase for the third consecutive year, and more than double the level of 2010.

Conversely, teaching careers enticed just 6.1 per cent of employed graduates from last year, slumping to a five-year low. Overall, 57 per cent of Cambridge students chose to go directly into the workplace, a slight drop on 2015, but still noticeably up on previous years, as the jobs market continues its recovery from the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crash. A further 33.5 per cent of students chose to enter further study, down half a percentage point on last year and almost five per cent down on five years ago.

“Fortunately,” said Chesterman, “Cambridge is targeted by those employers who offer very lucrative salaries, so the opportunity for both male and female student to earn way above the national salary is available to them.”

He said that most Cambridge students seek careers which offer “Intellectual challenge, contribution to society, a good peer group” and “work-life balance”, rather than being primarily motivated by salary.