Analyzing the beginning of the career path of young professionals from a gender perspective

Abstract

Young graduates are confronted with rough conditions when they want to enter the labor market. They face higher unemployment rates and are more often engaged in precarious employment, like part-time and/ or temporary positions. Young women, especially, suffer from relatively more severe labor market outcomes and perform worse than their male peers. We aim to analyze how gender and field specialization differentials among young professionals lead to different labor market outcomes in the following dimensions: (i) probability of being employed, (ii) for employed graduates, the probability of being self-employed, (iii) for salaried workers, the probability of being a full-time worker and (iv) for salaried workers, the wage determinants and the association of wages and gender and field of study. We use a data set that provides relevant information about 6,981 students that graduated in 2015 from the University of the Basque Country and their labor market situation in 2018. We find no evidence for gender gaps in both the probability of being employed and the probability of being self-employed. However, women have fewer chances to find full-time employment and earn significantly less than men. The different fields of specialization have a substantial predictive power to explain these results. But, even after controlling for several further job-characteristics and firm-specific attributes, gender gaps that are yet unexplained still prevail.