Vocational Training and Gender: Wages and Occupational Mobility Among Young Workers

By Bernd Fitzenberger, Astrid Kunze. Social Science Research Network, 2005

127 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper investigates the relationship between the gender wage gap, the choice of training occupation, and occupational mobility. We use longitudinal data for young workers with apprenticeship training in West Germany. Workers make occupational career choices early during their careers and women and men pursue very different occupational careers. We reconsider whether through occupational segregation women are locked in low wage careers (Kunze, 2005) or whether they can move up to higher wage paths through mobility. We furthermore investigate whether patterns have changed across cohorts during the period 1975 and 2001 and whether effects vary across the distribution. The main results are: First, while there exists a persistent gender wage gap over experience, the gap has decreased over time. Second, in the lower part of the wage distribution, the gap is highest and it increases with experience. Third, occupational mobility is lower for women than for men and the wage gains due to occupational mobility are higher for men than for women, especially in the lower part of the wage distribution. We conclude that occupational mobility has reduced the gender wage gap, but lock-in effects are still stronger for women compared to men.

Subfields: Demography, Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d09fde0e6a0d0d573768a4e04cc30de6662d8dce

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. T. Lange
2. Y. Georgellis

In Economics and Econometrics

1. T. Lange
2. Daniela Vuri
3. E. D. Bono
4. Y. Georgellis

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Daniela Vuri
2. E. D. Bono
3. T. Lange
4. Y. Georgellis
5. Michael A. Shields
6. Vasiliki Vamvaka
7. C. Botsaris

Citations in the corpus

• Participation in continuous, on-the-job training and the impact on job satisfaction: longitudinal evidence from the German labour market (2007, result): “This interpretation is consistent with recent findings by Fitzenberger and Kunze (2005) who show that despite a narrowing gender wage gap in Germany after completion of training, occupational mobility remains a barrier for women, largely due to Germany’s persistent and gender-enforced labour market…”
• The Career Costs of Children (2017, unknown): “See Fitzenberger and Kunze (2005) for details on the occupational choices of males and females. ent occupational choices lead to different costs of raising children and affect the timing of their birth.”
• General Education, Vocational Education, and Labor-Market Outcomes over the Lifecycle* (2011, unknown): “This is despite the fact that there is mobility across occupations among German apprenticeship graduates (Fitzenberger and Kunze 2005) and that there is considerable transferability of skills across occupations when applying a task-based approach (Gathmann and Schönberg 2010).”
• Job mobility and the gender wage gap in Italy (2008, background): “Fitzenberger and Kunze (2005) perform a similar analysis for Germany but they look at the gender gap in wage levels.”