June 29,2013

(Educators)High school training courses help men find good-paying jobs, but limit the labor force options for women, new study shows.

EFFORTS ABOUND AT THE federal, state and local levels to renew interest in vocational education and apprenticeship programs as a way to help fill the skills gap.

However, new researchout of Cornell University shows that such programs, while connecting employers with the skilled employees they need, are largely leaving women out of the picture.

Vocational high school training in working class communities reduced both men’s and women’s odds of enrolling in a four-year college, researchers found. And to be sure, the aim of such career and technical programs is to get students the skills they need to enter the workforce to fill in-demand jobs as quickly as possible -- many students who take such courses either go straight into the workforce or enroll in an apprenticeship or some type of professional certificate program.

But career and technical high school courses, they discovered, led to different outcomes for men and women when they looked for jobs.

Women who attended high school in working class communities were less likely to be employed at all and less likely to work in professional occupations when they were employed. They also earned far less than their female counterparts from non-blue-collar communities.

“This curricular trade off did not penalize men in the labor market, at least in early adulthood, but it restricted women’s opportunities to get good jobs,” said April Sutton, a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University’s Population Center and lead author of the study.

Moreover, even the women who did obtain high-skilled jobs often found themselves still unable to nab the good paying positions. Among high school graduates ages 25-28 in such jobs, the hourly gender wage gap was 22 percent, with women making 78 cents for every dollar men make.

“The disparity is striking for a millennial cohort of women for whom the pay gap has substantially narrowed on average,” Sutton said.

The researchers used data from a longitudinal education studyfrom 2002 designed by the National Center for Education Statistics that included a nationally representative study of high school sophomores. The cohort was tracked through early adulthood with follow-up surveys conducted in 2004, 2006 and 2012.