The impact of guidance counselling on gender segregation: Major choice and persistence in higher education. An experimental study.

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.

Parenthood and dynamics of life satisfaction in times of COVID-19.

We analyze data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, including a pre-pandemic baseline and seven survey waves between May 2020 and September 2021. Fixed effects panel regression models are run over more than 11,000 individuals, distinguishing among women and men with young children (<5 years), older children (5-15 years), or no children in the household. We hypothesize that declines in life satisfaction during the first lockdown are sharper among parents, whose domestic demands increase, than among the childless. We develop competing hypotheses that parents might be resilient and have higher life satisfaction during the later phases of the pandemic (Adaptation Hypothesis) or that the pandemic stressors accumulate, leading to even lower satisfaction over time (Accumulation Hypothesis). The results only support the Accumulation Hypothesis among mothers. Whereas mothers fared comparatively well during the first lockdown, further pandemic stressors have seemingly exhausted their resilience, leading to stronger declines during the winter 2020/2021 lockdown. Among men with older children and without children, life satisfaction decreased during the first and subsequent lockdowns. Men with young children were the only group with almost unchanged life satisfaction throughout the pandemic.

Interdependencies in Mothers' and Daughters' Work-Family Life Course Trajectories: Similar but Different?

Women's life courses underwent substantial changes in the family and work domains in the second half of the twentieth century. The associated fundamental changes in opportunity structures and values challenged the importance of families of origin for individual life courses, but two research strands suggest enduring within-family reproduction of women's family behavior and work outcomes. We revisit this issue by studying two complementary types of intergenerational associations in women's combined work-family trajectories. On the one hand, we examine similarities across mothers' and daughters' work-family trajectories to address the direct within-family reproduction of female life courses (intergenerational persistence). On the other hand, we examine systematic associations between work-family trajectories that are typical in each generation to address intergenerational interdependencies beyond direct reproduction that account for individual and societal constrains and opportunities that each generation faced (intergenerational correspondence). We use a within-dyad approach to sequence analysis and examine combined work-family trajectories between ages 18 and 35 of two generations of women, born in 1930-1949 and in 1958-1981, within the same family drawn from the German Socio-Economic Panel. Overall, we find evidence of small but nontrivial persistence in work-family trajectories across generations that is partly attributed to within-family mechanisms of reproduction. In addition, we find correspondence across typical trajectory patterns of each generation, without daughters necessarily resembling their mothers' trajectories. The strength of the intergenerational associations varies by social background. Our research improves and broadens our understanding of the reproduction of female life courses across generations.

Social origin, field of study and graduates' career progression: does social inequality vary across fields?

Research on stratification and mobility has consistently shown that in the UK there is a direct impact of social origin on occupational destination net of educational attainment even for degree-holders. However, only a few studies applied a longitudinal and dynamic perspective on how intergenerational mobility shapes graduates' working careers. Using multilevel growth curve modelling and data from the 1970 British cohort study (BCS70), we contribute to this research by looking at the emergence of social inequalities during the first ten years since labour market entry. We further distinguish between graduates of different fields of study as we expect social disparities to develop differently due to differences in initial occupational placement and upward mobility processes. We find that parental class does not affect occupational prestige over and above prior achievement. Separate analyses by the field of study show that initial differences in occupational prestige and career progression do not differ between graduates from different classes of origin in STEM fields, and arts and humanities. It is only in the social sciences that working-class graduates start with lower occupational prestige but soon catch up with their peers from higher classes. Overall, our results indicate no direct effect of social origin on occupational attainment for degree-holders once we broaden our focus to a dynamic life course perspective.

Long-term Health Consequences of Adverse Labor Market Conditions at Time of Leaving Education: Evidence from West German Panel Data.

Using longitudinal survey data from the Socio-Economic Panel Study ( N = 3,003 respondents with 22,165 individual-year observations) and exploiting temporal and regional variation in state-level unemployment rates in West Germany, we explore differences in trajectories of individuals' self-rated health over a period of up to 23 years after leaving education under different regional labor market conditions. We find evidence for immediate positive effects of contextual unemployment when leaving education on individuals' health. We find no evidence for generally accelerated or decelerated health deterioration when leaving education in high-unemployment contexts. We find, however, that individual unemployment experience when leaving education is associated with worse health and with more accelerated health deterioration in high-unemployment contexts. The cumulative experience of unemployment after leaving education does not mediate the influence of early labor market experiences for long-term health outcomes. In addition, our analyses indicate no gender differences in these results.