n the more recent past, women have become very successful in the general educational system. In almost all modern societies, women surpassed men in terms of education attainment and gender inequalities have been reversed. This general trend of women being better educated than men across different countries has been accompanied by the process of post-industrial restructuring of labour markets. While economic sectors and occupations traditionally dominated by men have been put under pressure and have declined, service jobs, which have traditionally been filled by women, have experienced an increase.
A workshop organised by the ‘Education as a Lifelong Process – Comparing Educational Trajectories in Modern Societies’ (eduLIFE) project on 30 and 31 May analysed the consequences of women being more successful than men in the educational process.
Presentations at the workshop addressed the main characteristics of the school-to-work transition in thirteen countries and important previous research findings related to the research questions of eduLIFE such as specific problems of longitudinal data and group selection. The group of eduLIFE collaborators also examined the most common educational pathways taken, the distribution of men and women in these pathways and defined the ‘first significant job’.
In this context, the aim of the second phase of the eduLIFE project, financed by the European Research Council (ERC), was to analyse from a comparative perspective the different opportunities available to men and women at labour market entry.
Though various studies exist on the topic of occupational gender segregation, it is notable that it is still an open question if occupational gender segregation is already visible and determined at the time of labour market entry. In studying individuals’ transitions from education to employment, eduLIFE is able to see if the gender-specific division in labour markets emerges early in working life or only as a result of family formation.
The eduLIFE workshop, organised by Professor Hans-Peter Blossfeld, was part of a new series of events at the newly-created Comparative Life Course and Inequality Research Centre (CLIC).
Additionally, two other workshops were hosted by CLIC in May. A multilevel modelling workshop discussed how to manage multiple data sets, while a later workshop on longitudinal data of the National Education Panel Study (NEPS) in Germany introduced one of the largest studies of its kind in Europe.
