Gendered occupational aspirations of boys and girls in Germany: the impact of local VET and labour markets

ABSTRACT

Gender segregation in vocational education and training (VET) in different occupations is observed in many European countries. This occupational gender segregation depends on – among other factors – the initial occupational aspirations of adolescents. While previous research has mainly focused on individual-level explanations and on the family context, this study investigates the influence of local VET – and labour markets – on adolescent boys’ and girls’ occupational aspirations. More precisely, we look at: (1) the occupational structure of local VET and labour markets and (2) competition for VET opportunities. Using data from the German National Educational Panel Study of youth in grade 9 (age 15/16), we find that boys’ aspirations are oriented towards occupational opportunities in the local labour market and that they vary with competition. Girls’ aspirations are less likely to be gender-typical – neither female nor male – if there is low competition. However, with higher competition, girls also orient their aspirations towards occupational opportunities. Even if effect sizes of local context are small, we do find empirical evidence that contexts matter.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender segregation
• occupational aspirations
• VET market
• contextual effects
• multi-level analysis
• Germany

Acknowledgments

This paper uses data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS): Starting Cohort Grade 9, doi:10.5157/NEPS:SC4:1.1.0 . From 2008 to 2013, NEPS data were collected as part of the Framework Program for the Promotion of Empirical Educational Research funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). As of 2014, NEPS is carried out by the Leibniz Institute for Educational Trajectories (LIfBi) at the University of Bamberg in cooperation with a nationwide network.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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Notes

1. Seeking full-time employment directly after leaving secondary school is not a feasible option for most students because participation in education is compulsory until age 18 in most German Länder.

2. In addition, the sector of prevocational training measures, called the ‘transitional system,’ provides training for those entering neither firm-based training nor school-based training. The various prevocational programmes are mainly designed to prepare for regular education, i.e. do not result in occupational credentials, and are often of rather short duration (1 year).

3. However, enrolment in higher education has been increasing considerable in recent decades accompanied by slightly decreasing participation VET (e.g. BIBB, Bundesinstitut f r Berufsbildung (Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training) 2018: 57).

4. With a stricter cutting point of, for example, 80 percent, there are too few cases, and with a lower cutting point, such as 60 percent, occupations that have a nearly balanced gender ratio are also defined as female/male.

5. The share refers to employees subject to social insurance contributions only, not including civil servants or self-employed.

6. The IILS distinguishes six (vocational) interests: realistic, investigative, artistic, social, enterprising and conventional, which are, in each case, measured via the mean of three items.

7. Mother’s and father’s occupation are clustered into female (≥70% of female employees), mixed (30% up to below 70% female employees) and male (less than 30% female employees) occupations. We also defined a category for ‘not employed’ and a missing category to avoid dropping too many observations and thus compromising the analysis of the contextual variables that are our main interest here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungs Gemeinschaft (DFG) Graduate School Soclife.