Who is really ‘left behind’? Half a century of gender differences in the school-to-work transitions of low-educated youth

ABSTRACT

At a time of growing expectations about educational attainment, young people who did not complete upper-secondary schooling can easily be ‘left behind’ to face risks of social exclusion. Being able to make a rapid and successful transition into a first significant job is crucial for long-term labor-market attachment. We approach the question of continuity or change in school-to-work transitions by comparing the experiences of four birth cohorts of early school leavers in Italy, where they still constitute a sizeable group as of today. Italy makes for an interesting case study due to the length of school-to-work transitions and the extent of gender differences in this phase. In an era of educational expansion and increased female activation, studying changes in low-educated women’s labor-market access brings into focus the question of who is really left behind. Using data from the 2009 ‘Multi-purpose Survey on Household and Social Subjects,’ we use discrete time logistic regression models to estimate the probability of transitioning to the first significant job for early school leavers born between 1954 and 1993. We find that gender differences are strikingly persistent across birth cohorts, even after controlling for sociodemographic variables as well as for time-varying fertility and partnership histories.

KEYWORDS:

• Early school leaving
• school-to-work transition
• gender
• vulnerable youth
• Italy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 According to official estimations, the informal economy accounts for 12% of the national employment rate (ISTAT, http://dati.istat.it/Index.aspx, accessed October 11, 2019).

2 Although the empirical analyses refer to the period preceding the economic crisis, this section presents stylized facts about the period up until the most recent available data. We elaborate on potential implications of the findings for the period after the crisis in the conclusions.

3 With respect to inactivity, it is necessary to refer to this age bracket as inactivity is less likely to be education related for this group than for the 15–24 group.

4 In 2009, the share of part-time workers aged 15–34 who wished to work full time was 56%. All data from ISTAT, http://dat.istat.it/Index.aspx, accessed October 11, 2019.

5 The six-month threshold has been set according to the literature on school-to-work transitions (e.g., see Iannelli and Smyth 2008). Given the specificity of early school leavers in terms of their labor-market opportunity structure, we replicated all models using a less restrictive three-month threshold as a robustness check. The directions of the effects were fully consistent with those presented here.

6 The data-collection process for the “Multi-purpose Survey on Household and Social Subjects” is based on household-level sampling. Therefore, interviews are conducted with all household members, who are, by definition, nested in households. As a robustness check, we ran all models clustering the standard errors within households. The results were highly consistent with those presented here: The size of the standard errors slightly changed but the significance of the coefficients were not affected.