Is There a Heteroscedasticity due to Gender in the Adult Learning? A View from Europe

Abstract

1. Introduction In this article we check for unobserved heteroskedasticity due to gender in adult learning in Europe. It is largely accepted by the economic literature that human capital is a continuous process starting at school and keeping being diffused in the labour market through adult learning. Indeed, skills can be accumulated not only before getting a job, through pre-occupational education but also during working life by fostering continuous learning and/or training. Although the European Jobs Strategy's emphasizes adult education during working life, empirical literature, by focusing on the growth effects of the initial education, does not seem to take sufficiently into account the contribution of workforce adult learning as an additional source of human capital and growth. As for the determinants of adult learning, some empirical regularities have been found: young and better educated workers, involved in highly-skilled occupations and in large firms enjoy greater learning opportunity (2). These findings can be easily defined as stylized facts. However, there is no accepted evidence of which gender is more likely to receive any adult learning. When the training definition is considered, some papers (i.e. Bassanini et al. 2007) show that being female is associated with a higher probability of being involved in training. Arulampalam et al. (2004) find these results in 4 countries; conversely, in the other 6 countries there is not a significant difference between males and females. Oppositely, Pischke (2001) estimates that men in Germany are more likely to access to training. When considering a broader learning activity, Drewes (2008) finds that female are more likely to participate in educational programs, but less likely to take training courses. Thalassinos et al. (2009) have analysed gender inequalities in shipping. For the UK, in Jenkins et al. (2002) females are six percentages points more likely to undertake lifelong learning, while Sargant et al. (1997) show that men are more likely to be involved in training and education. Also Simonsen and Skipper (2008) find that men and women have different enrollment patterns: women are more likely to attend basic or postsecondary training courses, whereas men are more likely to get enrolled in vocational ones. Our results shows that in Europe there exists a significant unobserved hetetoskedasticity due to gender in the adult learning. In the empirical model we used the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), the new homogenized European panel survey. Since 2005 (3) EU-SILC has succeeded the European Community Household Panel (ECHP): there, the number of countries is increased, indicators are updated, and common guidelines, definitions, and procedures are used. This empirical paper is organized as follows. The next section describes the data. Section 3 reports the results of the empirical model. In the last section we present our main conclusions. 2. The Data Our data are from the 2005 first wave, of EU-SILC, the new homogenized panel survey that has replaced ECHP. Similarly to the ECHP, EU-SILC is an attractive source of information because it adopts the same community questionnaire used by the national data collection units in each included country, which obviously makes comparisons across nations easier. EU-SILC has three main advantages with respect to other similar datasets. Firstly, the set of economies is fully comparable. This desirable feature is obtained through the use of common guidelines, definitions and procedures. Secondly, all the old and the new European member states are surveyed, while the ECHP covered only 14 economies. The new dataset, thus gives information on many of the so-called new entrants. Finally it updates the whole of the indicators. Indeed, our comparison involves 21 European member states whose labor market institutions and adult learning systems are known to have different characteristics. …