![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to contribute to our understanding of the gender influence on teaching choice. We analyze a large-scale national representative sample of Italian teachers. The choice to teach seems to be more a long-term pathway for women, following their personal values and interest in the intrinsic and altruistic values of teaching. Men, instead, show a more adaptable pattern of choice: chance and switching career played a relevant role in determining their ending up in teaching. ‘Males in a feminized environment’ present an intermediate profile, characterized by stronger constraints due to previous studies and consequent weak labor market opportunities. Our analyses support the idea that men found their pathways to gaining satisfaction from the occupation of teaching, thanks to its flexibility. This is an ambiguous result from a gender perspective: reassuring but also worrying, considering that the adaptation could contribute to the reproduction of gender inequalities within the teaching profession.
Notes
1. Sabbe and Aelterman (Citation2007) distinguish studies investigating ‘sex differences’ (essentialist perspectives) and studies investigating ‘gender dynamics’ (constructionist perspectives). This article belongs to the first group, although we will also use the word ‘gender’ in our analyses.
2. Paying the price of retrospective data, as we will discuss below.
3. In this article we ignore the vertical dimension of segregation in the educational system, for example the proportion of female school principals.
4. ‘Ciao Maestro’, la Repubblica, 4 September 2012.
5. Only for the last cohorts does this choice take place at the moment of university enrollment.
6. Using the same data set described below and investigated in this article.
7. It must be observed that, as Watt and Richardson (Citation2007) claim, the absence of a rigorous analytical and theoretical framework leads to weak definitions of intrinsic, extrinsic, and altruistic motivations. From our point of view, even the net distinction among those dimensions seems unrealistic.
8. The FIT-Choice scale identifies three value sub-components on this point: intrinsic values, personal utility (job security, time for family, and job transferability), and social utility (shaping the future of children/adolescents, enhancing social equity, making a social contribution, and working with children/adolescents).
9. This theme is only indirectly faced in contemporary literature about the choice to teach, especially by authors investigating career changers switching to teaching (Richardson and Watt Citation2005, Raggl and Troman Citation2008).
10. Probably due to the fact that teaching is not too demanding: good working hours (OECD Citation2012) and almost no form of teacher assessment or accountability (OECD Citation2009) offer teachers the possibility to work outside of school also.
11. The proportion of respondents suggesting ‘yes’ to the son and ‘no’ to the daughter is very low (3.3%) and has been classified in the third category. Sensitivity analyses on this choice have been run.
12. There are only 27 teachers in primary schools in our sample.
13. Not considering in this group males teaching technical subjects.
14. More precisely: Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regressions when modeling motivation indexes; ordinary logistic models when modeling single items about the choice to become a teacher; binary logistics when modeling dichotomized items, the propensity to recommend this career to male and female students, the probability of having had a previous job before teaching.
15. The coefficient tables of all models are available from the author on request.
16. All differences have been checked also with ordinal logistic regression models.
17. We show here predicted probabilities from a binary logistic models. Differences between both male subgroups and females are statistically significant. Excluding primary schools from analysis, males in a feminized environment and females are more similar (22% and 17%), and the other males more different (35%).
18. We report predicted probabilities from multivariate binary logistic regression. Differences between both male subgroups and females are statistically significant (p < 0.01).
19. We modeled these associations in a OLS regression controlling for the usual control variables plus the gender subgroups. Both associations between working experience and the motivational indexes are statistically significant (p < 0.01).
20. It could be argued that differential in attrition rates among subgroups could bias this result, but it must be considered that all analyses have been elaborated on the same sample of teachers. To estimate perfectly the influence of initial motivations on further behavior and attitudes to teaching, we would need longitudinal data.
21. Both differences are statistically significant in the ordinal logit model.