Abstract
Previous comparative research has uncovered considerable cross-country differences in occupational gender segregation. There is, however, a lack of research on the role of educational systems in the creation of gender segregation and gendered school-to-work transitions. The aim of this study is to investigate the role of vocational education and the strength of the education–employment linkage in the transmission of horizontal gender segregation from education into the labour market. Transition system literature points to a stronger linkage between education and employment in countries where initial vocational education and training dominates the educational offers, and to a weaker linkage in countries with a stronger focus on general education. Moreover, research on gender segregation in education shows that segregation is especially pronounced in educational systems with a strong vocational education and training sector on the upper secondary level. Based on these insights, we hypothesize that gender segregation in education and its transmission to employment is more pronounced the more distinct a country’s initial vocational education and training system is. To test our assumption, we compare individual school-to-work transitions in Switzerland and Bulgaria, with the vocational principle being more prevalent in the structuring of Swiss educational offers. We use data from the Swiss Youth Panel Survey TREE (N = 3215) and the Bulgarian School Leaver Survey BSLS (N = 885). Following recent developments in multi-group segregation research, entropy-based measurements are calculated to study the school-to-work linkages and the transmission of gender segregation in the two select countries. The empirical results confirm a more pronounced educational gender segregation in Switzerland, which is transferred more strongly into the labour market due to the tighter linkage in that country between education and employment compared to Bulgaria.
Highlights
The educational chances of women have improved in most western countries due to educational expansion, to the extent that women hold higher educational levels compared to men in many places (DiPrete and Buchmann 2013)
5 Methods To test the first hypothesis, we calculated dissimilarity indices following Duncan and Duncan (1955)
When we compare gender segregation separately for the three educational sectors, the differences between Bulgaria and Switzerland become smaller. This is partly because a bigger share of students (34.2%) complete a general upper secondary school in Bulgaria without attending or completing tertiary education compared to Switzerland (6.3%; this educational group is not listed separately in Table 2, but it is included in the column ‘Education: Total’)
Summary
The educational chances of women have improved in most western countries due to educational expansion, to the extent that women hold higher educational levels compared to men in many places (DiPrete and Buchmann 2013). The primary and secondary sectors of the economy (with many male-typed jobs in agriculture and industry) are shrinking in many countries, while the service sector is growing (Hakim 1996) The latter has grown because traditionally female-typed domestic work like childcare has been outsourced to the labour market (Steinmetz 2012). The labour market chances of women have improved due to their raised human capital, and because of structural shifts in the economy (Charles 2003). Despite these factors, labour markets remain strongly horizontally segregated (Smyth and Steinmetz 2008). Horizontal gender segregation can be considered problematic with respect to unequal chances for men and women in the life course, and it deserves a more comprehensive understanding
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