ABSTRACT
Despite the increases in women's educational attainment in recent decades, female labor market participation and labor market returns are still lower than those of their male counterparts. Among the main factors explaining this persistence of economic inequality is the persistently gendered nature of occupational expectations, which results in gender segregation of labor. In this paper, we describe how gender-specific adolescents' occupational expectations change over time (2006-2018) and how women's empowerment and cultural norms might influence gender-specific occupational expectations. Against the backdrop of the research on the gender-equality paradox and from a comparative perspective, we focus on national and institutional characteristics to investigate how individual and national factors explain gendered occupational expectations. We answer our research questions by applying a two-step multilevel model with fixed effects. For this, we used PISA data and merged them with state-level information from 26 European countries. We add to existing research by making three contributions. First, we describe the changes in occupational expectations over time within European countries by looking at the gender composition of the desired occupation and distinguishing three categories (gender-typical, gender-balanced, and gender-atypical). Second, we investigate the relationship between national characteristics and the evolution of gendered occupational expectations separately by gender to reveal gender-specific mechanisms. Third, by using data from two-time points, we explore which national-level changes lead to changes in students' occupational expectations. Our first descriptive results show that the patterns of how students' occupational expectations change over time differ remarkably between countries. In 2018 in some countries, students' occupational expectations became more segregated while in others the number of students with gender-balanced or gender-atypical expectations increased. Our fixed effects models show that women's empowerment and self-expression value explained variance over time. For example, women's empowerment measured via an increase in women's employment and participation in parliament led to less gender-typical occupational expectations among girls and boys. Similarly, a rise in self-expression values led to less gender-typical occupational expectations, again for both boys and girls. Remarkably, our results do not verify the gender-equality paradox for occupational expectations, as is the case in previous cross-sectional analyses.
ABSTRACT
Gender segregation in higher education is considered one of the main drivers of persistent economic gender inequality. Yet, though there has been considerable research identifying and describing the underlying mechanisms that cause gendered educational choices in higher education, little is known about how gender segregation in higher education could be changed. Accordingly, this article aims to determine the potential of educational interventions during high school to foster gender desegregation in higher education. We focused on two different processes that contribute to gender segregation in majors among higher education graduates: first, the selection into specific majors and, second, the selection out of specific majors. We investigated whether an intensive counselling programme leads to more gender-atypical choices among high-school graduates and examined whether intensive counselling supports several indicators of students' persistence in gender-atypical majors. Based on data from an experimental study of a counselling programme for German high-school students (N = 625), we estimated the programme's effect with linear probability models and intention-to-treat analysis. Our results show that high-school graduates are more likely to choose a gender-atypical major if they have received intensive counselling. This applies more to men than to women. In addition, the programme improved some persistence indicators for students in gender-atypical majors. Although we found a significant programme effect only for perceived person-major fit and student satisfaction, the coefficients of all aspects of students' persistence show a trend indicating that the programme was beneficial for students in gender-atypical majors. As experimental studies can also be affected by various types of bias, we performed several robustness checks. All analyses indicated stable results. In conclusion, we suggest that intensive counselling programmes have the potential to reduce gender segregation in higher education. More students were motivated to choose a gender-atypical major, and different aspects of student persistence were supported by the programme for students in gender-atypical majors.
